ALBERT

Description: Presents the information on the 2016 Richard E. Merwin Distinguished Service Award.

Description: As part of the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE) initiative, researchers compared problems that companies in Brazil and Germany encountered during requirements engineering (RE). The key takeaway was that in RE, human interaction is necessary for eliciting and specifying high-quality requirements, regardless of country, project type, or company size.

Description: A swift execution from idea to market has become a key competitive advantage for software companies to enable them to survive and grow in turbulent business environments. To combat this challenge, companies are using hackathons. A hackathon is a highly engaging, continuous event in which people in small groups produce working software prototypes in a limited amount of time. F-Secure, a software product company, views hackathons as a possible solution to the fundamental business problem of how to make revenue from an idea, spanning the phases from creating the idea to producing a software prototype. However, hackathons pose the challenge of how to transform those promising prototypes into finalized products that create revenue and real business value.

Description: "The Karlskrona Manifesto on Sustainability Design" is a call for discussion and action on the challenge of sustainability and its relation to software engineering. The manifesto aims to create common ground and develop a reference point for the global community of research and practice in software and sustainability. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/PXhFgswJPco is an audio podcast in which author Birgit Penzenstadler provides an audio recording of this column.

Description: Software adaptation has become prominent owing to the proliferation of software in everyday devices. In particular, computing with the Internet of Things requires adaptability. Traditional software maintenance, which involves long, energy-consuming cycles, is no longer satisfactory. Adaptation is a lightweight software evolution that provides more transparent maintenance for users. This article classifies types of adaptation and describes an implementation of it.

Description: There's much discussion about being open, with topics such as open source software, open innovation, open research, and open education. Will the whole world be open, and, if so, what was all closed in the past? The authors analyze the similarities and differences between the open movements they've been part of and come up with expectations for software's future.

Description: Although head-mounted displays (HMDs) are ideal devices for personal viewing of immersive stereoscopic content, exposure to VR applications on them results in significant discomfort for the majority of people, with symptoms including eye fatigue, headaches, nausea, and sweating. A conflict between accommodation and vergence depth cues on stereoscopic displays is a significant cause of visual discomfort. This article describes the results of an evaluation used to judge the effectiveness of dynamic depth-of-field (DoF) blur in an effort to reduce discomfort caused by exposure to stereoscopic content on HMDs. Using a commercial game engine implementation, study participants report a reduction of visual discomfort on a simulator sickness questionnaire when DoF blurring is enabled. The study participants reported a decrease in symptom severity caused by HMD exposure, indicating that dynamic DoF can effectively reduce visual discomfort.

Description: Audra Geras combines a long-term love for the intricate complexities of nature and artistic passion in her biomedical art business. Her clients range from advertising agencies to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Depicting a bioscape or environment, such as microscopic organisms or synaptic networks that few have seen or imagined, provides tremendous potential for creativity.

Description: The authors take a closer look at how the visualization community has discussed visual storytelling and present a visual data storytelling process, incorporating steps involved in finding insights (explore data), turning these insights into a narrative (make a story), and communicating this narrative to an audience (tell a story). They also discuss opportunities for future research in visualization as a storytelling medium in the light of this broader process.

Description: An experimental model animates contiguous computer cartograms by distorting the topological lengths of their edges. Using traffic information for the city of Lisbon, the authors distort a road map to depict traffic velocities. Areas of the city distend when velocities are low and compress when velocities are high. This model is applied to two visualizations: a trajectory visualization of vehicles, creating a temperature map for traffic velocities, and a figurative visualization that portrays Lisbon as a system of pulsing blood vessels. The proposed model can efficiently generate and animate edge-based cartograms with low representation errors.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Description: Marker tracking is used in numerous applications. Depending on the context and its constraints, tracking accuracy can be a crucial component of the application. This article first explains that the tracking accuracy depends on the illumination, which is not controlled in most applications. In particular, the authors show how corner detection can shift several pixels when lighting or background context change, even if the camera and the marker are static. Based on cross-ratio invariance, the proposed method helps reestimate the corner extraction so that the marker model's cross ratio corresponds to the one computed from the extracted corners in the image. The authors show on real data that their approach improves tracking accuracy, particularly along the camera depth axis, up to several millimeters, depending on the marker depth.

Description: Thumb-to-finger tap interaction can be employed to perform eyes-free, discrete, symbolic input in virtual and augmented reality environments. The DigiTap device is worn on the wrist to keep the hand free from any instrumentation so as not to impair tactile sense and dexterity. DigiTap senses the jerk that is caused by a tap and takes an image sequence to detect the tap location. The device can recognize taps at 12 different locations on the fingers, and at some positions, it can even distinguish between different tap strengths. The authors conducted an extended user study to evaluate users' abilities to interact with the device and perform symbolic input.

Description: Shape articulation transforms a lifeless geometric object into a vibrant character. Computers enrich artists' toolsets dramatically. They not only endow artists with the power to manipulate virtual 2D and 3D scenes, but they also eliminate tedium and expedite prototyping, freeing artists to focus on creative aspects. With such power comes a temptation to lean entirely on the computer. Computationally intensive animation systems sacrifice real-time feedback for physical accuracy. How can we leverage modern computational power to create the best possible shape deformations while maintaining real-time performance as a mandatory invariant? This article summarizes efforts to answer this, culminating in a deformation system with the quality of slow, nonlinear optimization, but at lightning speed.

Description: In undergraduate practical courses, it is common to work with groups of 100 or more students. These large-scale courses bring their own challenges. For example, course problems are too small and lack "the big picture"; grading becomes burdensome and repetitive for the teaching staff; and it is difficult to detect cheating. Based on their experience with a traditional large-scale practical course in image processing, the authors developed a novel course approach to teaching "Introduction to Digital Image Processing" (or EDBV, from the German course title Einführung in die Digitale Bild-Verarbeitung) for all undergraduate students of media informatics and visual computing and medical informatics at the TU Wien.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Description: Usability evaluations are important to improving handheld augmented reality (HAR) systems. However, no standard questionnaire considers perceptual and ergonomic issues found in HAR. The authors performed a systematic literature review to enumerate these issues. Based on these issues, they created a HAR usability scale that consists of comprehensibility and manipulability scales. These scales measure general system usability, ease of understanding the information presented, and ease of handling the device. The questionnaires' validity and reliability were evaluated in four experiments, and the results show that the questionnaires consistently correlate with other subjective and objective measures of usability. The questionnaires also have good reliability based on the Cronbach's alpha. Researchers and professionals can directly use these questionnaires to evaluate their own HAR applications or modify them with the insights presented in this article.

Description: Shape displays are an emerging class of devices that emphasize actuation to enable rich physical interaction, complementing concepts in virtual and augmented reality. The ability to render form introduces new opportunities to touch, grasp, and manipulate dynamic physical content and tangible objects, in both nearby and remote environments. This article presents novel hardware, interaction techniques, and applications, which point to the potential for extending the ways that we traditionally interact with the physical world, empowered by digital computation.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Description: This article features some of the latest advances and applications in computer graphics technology.

Description: This article describes a simple course exercise to deepen the understanding of real-time shadow mapping algorithms. The exercise takes less than 10 minutes to perform during lecture time, leads to a profounder understanding of the topic, and serves as a basis for further discussions of improvements for the shadow mapping algorithm. Using this exercise, the authors noticed an increase in implementing shadow algorithms for later real-time graphics projects.

Description: Having begun her artistic career using brushes, canvases, tubes of paint, and all the proprietary components of those disciplines, May/June 2015 CG&A artist Aurelia Zack spent 14 years managing a commercial graphics and exhibits studio. Now working full time as a digital artist on her own, she enjoys exploring duotone imagery and abstract representations made possible by software programs and rendering techniques.

Description: Detection of outliers and anomalous behavior is a well-known problem in the data mining and statistics fields. Although the problem of identifying single outliers has been extensively studied in the literature, little effort has been devoted to detecting small groups of outliers that are similar to each other but markedly different from the entire population. Many real-world scenarios have small groups of outliers--for example, a group of students who excel in a classroom or a group of spammers in an online social network. In this article, the authors propose a novel method to solve this challenging problem that lies at the frontiers of outlier detection and clustering of similar groups. The method transforms a multidimensional dataset into a graph, applies a network metric to detect clusters, and renders a representation for visual assessment to find rare events. The authors tested the proposed method to detect pathologic cells in the biomedical science domain. The results are promising and confirm the available ground truth provided by the domain experts.

Description: A robotic system can be considered a computer with the capacity to interact with the real world using sensors and actuators. This article reports on the authors' experiences in developing novel user interfaces for robotic systems, especially in the home environment. High-level control methods that use gestural or speech commands are overly ambiguous or excessively detailed for daily use. The proposed approach is to apply techniques developed in the human-computer interaction field, such as augmented reality and tangible user interfaces, to human-robot interaction. The authors introduce prototype systems such as home appliance control methods using augmented reality, a paper-based method for instructing mobile robots, and various I/O devices to enhance physical interaction with robotic systems. They then discuss lessons learned and directions for future research based on their experiences building these prototype robotic systems and interfaces.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

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Description: How do you disrupt an industry? Question the fundamental, sacred assumptions on which that industry is founded, then journey along the path of the possible. The Web extra at https://youtu.be/bDVbj5XO2bU is an audio podcast of author Grady Booch reading his column.

Description: Architecture principles epitomize architecture's function: to clearly define the necessary constraints on a system's design without prescriptively defining all the design details. A good set of principles can provide context and justification for design decisions and can foster team collaboration and communication.

Description: In interactive systems, what's the weakest link: the computer or the human?

Description: In the mobile-app ecosystem, user ratings of apps (a measure of user perception) are extremely important because they correlate strongly with downloads and hence revenue. A case study examined the relationship between ratings (and the associated review comments) and static-analysis warnings (collected using FindBugs) for 10,000 free-to-download Android apps. Three warning categories--bad practice, internationalization, and performance--were more frequent in low-rated apps and corresponded to the review comment complaints. Thus, these categories were closely related to the user experience. These results suggest that app developers could use static-analysis tools to identify the bugs behind the issues that users complain about, before releasing an app.

Description: Mobile apps increasingly constitute complete ecosystems to support businesses such as farming. Software architects and engineers from John Deere and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering recently piloted a mobile-app ecosystem for farmers, focusing on data's role in architecting. Having the right data at the right time at the right place is crucial for high user productivity and a good user experience. In particular, offline capability is important but difficult. The authors describe a custom solution for offline capability and share lessons learned regarding data-related architecture decisions.

Description: In the High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems project, researchers are investigating how to construct complex networked-vehicle software securely. Experiments demonstrated that careful attention to requirements and system architecture, along with formally verified approaches that remove known security weaknesses, can lead to vehicles that can withstand attacks from even sophisticated attackers with access to vehicle design data. The Web extra at https://youtu.be/EvG7fjdvyro is an audio podcast of author Michael W. Whalen reading the column that he cowrote with Darren Cofer and Andrew Gacek.

Description: A well-known adage is "diversity brings innovation." Diversity can be in culture, thinking, discipline, gender, and many more aspects. The result is the same: the chances for creating innovation in a given context increase when diversity is involved. To some extent, this principle should also hold for gender diversity in software teams. Achieving gender diversity in IT-related fields has been a goal for decades, but still, too few women choose such a career. But what skills or traits assigned to the feminine role bring concrete advantages to software teams? Researchers addressed this important and, strangely enough, mostly unexplored problem, specifically for software-architecting teams. They interviewed male and female software architects at four major IT companies in the Netherlands and then interviewed a panel of experts. They identified seven feminine expertise "flavors"--traits and skills linked to the feminine role in architecting teams. Much of such expertise relates to the skills required to successfully deal with software architecting's human aspects.

Description: Dynamic program analysis, such as with profiling, tracing, and bug-finding tools, is essential for software engineering. Unfortunately, implementing dynamic analysis for managed languages such as Java is unduly difficult and error prone because the runtime environments provide only complex low-level mechanisms. Programmers writing custom tooling must expend great effort in tool development and maintenance, while still suffering substantial limitations such as incomplete code coverage or lack of portability. Ideally, programmers should have a framework that lets them express dynamic-analysis tools at a high level, robustly, with high coverage and supporting alternative runtimes such as Android. To satisfy these requirements, ShadowVM, an all-in-one dynamic-program-analysis framework, uses a combination of techniques.

Description: The exploration and examination of near-Earth space helps us better understand our solar system and deeply affects our everyday life in areas such as telecommunications, Earth observation, and weather forecasting. Toward that end, scientists developed the onboard data acquisition and control system of the Obstanovka (Russian for environment) experiment in the Russian segment of the International Space Station. Obstanovka, developed by nine teams from different countries, employs 11 sensors to study how the Sun, magnetosphere, and ionosphere influence Earth's weather.

Description: The production of quality software requires data-driven quality management. Fortunately, developers can use a plethora of tools and techniques for this.

Description: Researchers surveyed software professionals on their views regarding the effectiveness of pair programming compared to traditional solo programming. The survey produced three main findings. First, the respondents believed that project complexity and pair composition (the individual programmers' expertise and pair-programming experience) affect pair programming's effectiveness in terms of the effort, defect rate, knowledge transfer, and overall project cost. Second, respondents with pair-programming experience viewed pair programming more positively than those without it. Finally, the more pair-programming experience the respondents had, the more favorably they viewed pair programming.

Description: Knowing about big data's potential for exploiting new business ideas is a key capability for staying successful in the market. Potential analysis provides a systematic way to identify and close the gap between big data's possible benefits and the ability to turn that data into business value.

Description: This article reviews scientific studies of factors influencing colocated development teams' performance and proposes five factors that strongly affect performance. In the process, it compares these propositions with the Agile Manifesto's development principles. The Web extra at https://extras.computer.org/extra/mso2016040106s1.pdf details the sources and research methods the authors employed.

Description: Many organizations use business process models to document business operations and formalize business requirements in software-engineering projects. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group, has evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. One challenge is BPMN's complexity: it offers a huge variety of elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN use from the practitioners' perspective are still missing. To close this gap, researchers analyzed 585 BPMN 2.0 process models from six companies. They found that split and join representations, message flow, the lack of proper model decomposition, and labeling related to quality issues. They give five specific recommendations on how to avoid these issues.

Description: Measurement of software security is an ongoing research field. Privacy is also becoming an imperative target as social networking and ubiquitous computing evolve and users exchange high volumes of personal information. However, security and privacy alone don't guarantee proper data protection; software must also be dependable. Several standards typify the main concepts and protection mechanisms for these three properties, and measurement methodologies can quantify the provided protection level. However, security, privacy, and dependability are usually dealt with in isolation. To solve this problem, researchers have proposed a practical, easy-to-use methodology that measures a software system's overall security, privacy, and dependability (SPD) on the basis of the standards for each property. The nSHIELD (New Embedded Systems Architecture for Multi-layer Dependable Solutions) project is applying the SPD methodology to evaluate configurable embedded software in a social-mobility scenario.

Description: From drones to self-driving cars, robot swarms are becoming pervasive and are used in many kinds of applications. However, common "swarm libraries" for software development do not yet exist, and reusing code is difficult owing to the lack of swarm-centric development platforms. Buzz, a programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms, aims to address these problems.

Description: Software Engineering Radio host Robert Blumen speaks to Jürgen Laartz and Alexander Budzier about their joint research on large-IT-project failures.

Description: A proposed data-driven software quality improvement method has three elements. First, the downstream Customer Quality Metric (CQM) quantifies quality as customers perceive it. On the basis of data collected after systems are deployed, it measures how serious defects affect customers. Second, the upstream Implementation Quality Index (IQI) measures the effectiveness of error removal during development. IQI predicts future customer quality; it has a positive correlation with CQM. Finally, prioritization tools and techniques help focus limited development resources on the riskiest files in the code. This research is based on a multiyear program to improve the quality of delivered systems at Avaya, a global provider of business communication and collaboration systems. Regular reviews with Avaya's R&D Quality Council provided governance for the program.

Description: Users continue to stumble upon software bugs, despite developers' efforts to build and test high-quality software. Although traditional testing and quality assurance techniques are extremely valuable, software testing should pay more attention to exploration. Exploration can directly apply knowledge and learning to the core of industrial software testing, revealing more relevant bugs earlier. This article describes exploration's characteristics, knowledge's role in software testing, and the three levels of exploratory-testing practices. Academics and practitioners should focus on exploiting exploration's strengths in software testing and on reporting existing practices and benefits in different academic and industrial contexts.

Description: Enormous amounts of knowledge sharing occur every day in community question answering (CQA) sites, some of which (for example, Stack Overflow or Ask Ubuntu) have become popular with software developers and users. In spite of these systems' overall success, problems are emerging in some of them--increased failure and churn rates. To investigate this trend, researchers conducted a case study of Stack Overflow. First, they evaluated the community perception that the emerging problems are heavily related to the growing amount of low-quality content created by undesired groups of users (help vampires, noobs, and reputation collectors). Reproducible data analyses of content and community evolution supported these findings. Suggestions to deal with the emerging problems include providing users with responder-oriented adaptive support that involves a whole community in QA. Such approaches represent an eminent attitude change regarding QA support, with the aim to preserve CQA ecosystems' long-term sustainability.

Description: Although splines have been in popular use in CAD for more than half a century, spline research is still an active field, driven by the challenges we are facing today within isogeometric analysis and big data. Splines are likely to play a vital future role in enabling effective big data exploration techniques in 3D, 4D, and beyond.

Description: Alvaro Ocampo traversed many landscapes to arrive at his current space in the digital art landscape. Eventually, the artist then made his way to the digital world, where he is no longer subjected to the tyranny of the one-off. He believes digital art is the new version of traditional etching in the way that it eliminates the idea of the one original piece of art.

Description: Just as notebook computers once freed us to take our computers with us, smartphones freed us to walk around with computers in our pockets, and wearables will soon free us from needing to hold a screen at all. Today, as high-quality virtual and augmented reality begins to become available at consumer prices, the "screen" will soon be all around us. But the largest long-term impact here may not merely be one of form factor, but rather one of language itself. Once wearables become small enough, cheap enough, and therefore ubiquitous enough to be accepted as part of our everyday reality, our use of language will evolve in important ways.

Description: Volcanic eruptions are not only hazardous in the direct vicinity of a volcano, but they also affect the climate and air travel for great distances. This article sheds light on the Grímsvötn, Puyehue-Cordón Caulle, and Nabro eruptions in 2011. The authors study the agreement of the complementary satellite data, reconstruct sulfate aerosol and volcanic ash clouds, visualize endangered flight routes, minimize occlusion in particle trajectory visualizations, and focus on the main pathways of Nabro's sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere. The results here were developed for the 2014 IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest, which centers around the fusion of multiple satellite data modalities to reconstruct and assess the movement of volcanic ash and sulfate aerosol emissions. Using data from three volcanic eruptions that occurred in the span of approximately three weeks, the authors study the agreement of the complementary satellite data, reconstruct sulfate aerosol and volcanic ash clouds, visualize endangered flight routes, minimize occlusion in particle trajectory visualizations, and focus on the main pathways of sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere. This video provides animations of the reconstructed ash clouds. https://youtu.be/D9DvJ5AvZAs.

Description: The healthcare industry's widespread digitization efforts are reshaping one of the largest sectors of the world's economy. This transformation is enabling systems that promise to use ever-improving data-driven evidence to help doctors make more precise diagnoses, institutions identify at risk patients for intervention, clinicians develop more personalized treatment plans, and researchers better understand medical outcomes within complex patient populations. Given the scale and complexity of the data required to achieve these goals, advanced data visualization tools have the potential to play a critical role. This article reviews a number of visualization challenges unique to the healthcare discipline.

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Description: For all you readers who want the inside dope on how to be an architect, you've come to the right place. Here's a real-life story of the evolution of an E2E architect who has shared her lessons learned with us. There's clear insight here. She describes her realization that it's not just about knowledge of the domain or technical skill, but also about communication and learning. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/_RujP0FIjhY is an audio podcast in which Bett Correa and Russ Miller discuss contextual design (CD), a user-centered design process created by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. CD helps software architects and developers better connect with the needs of their users and enables them to more easily "re-imagine" the solution they create for users.

Description: Articles regarding the many faces of software analytics highlight the power of analytics for different types of organizations: large organizations and open source projects, as well as small- to medium-sized projects.

Description: Free, open source software development communities can become large and complex. They can also be a focus of interest for competing companies relying on their outcomes, with employees joining the development and maintenance effort. In those cases, it's especially important for both companies and communities to understand how this collaboration is working and how it matches their policies and expectations. This articles looks at two cases (OpenStack and WebKit) that the authors studied using analytics techniques. They conclude that such analytics can improve factual knowledge about how development communities are performing in aspects that are of interest to companies.

Description: Finding yourself in a situation with a working and a buggy system is quite common. Differential debugging methodically can help by comparing a known good system with a buggy one, working toward the problem source. Some simple steps include applying differential debugging by looking at log files and increasing a system's log verbosity when needed. If the system doesn't offer a sufficiently detailed logging mechanism, you can tease out its runtime behavior with tools that trace calls to the operating system or that trace network packets. You can also compare carefully the two environments where the systems operate. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/qnXS6b4hakg is an audio podcast of author Diomidis Spinellis reading his Tools of the Trade column, in which he discusses how comparing a good system with a buggy one can help locate the source of the problem.

Description: Amisoft, a Chilean software company with 43 employees, successfully uses software analytics in its projects. These support a variety of strategic and tactical decisions, resulting in less overwork of employees. However, the analytics done at Amisoft are very different from the ones used in larger companies.

Description: With smartphones being the primary handheld device for more than a billion people, mobile Web apps are a necessity in both technical and commercial fields. There are several approaches to developing mobile Web apps, but given the fast speed of mobile software evolution, in which the leading companies become marginal in months and new gadgets continually appear, it's crucial to understand the basic technologies. Authors Nicolás Serrano, Josune Hernantes, and Gorka Gallardo examine current development approaches that can enhance the decision-making process.

Description: Software analytics guide practitioners in decision making throughout the software development process. In this context, prediction models help managers efficiently organize their resources and identify problems by analyzing patterns on existing project data in an intelligent and meaningful manner. Over the past decade, the authors have worked with software organizations to build metric repositories and predictive models that address process-, product-, and people-related issues in practice. This article shares their experience over the years, reflecting the expectations and outcomes both from practitioner and researcher viewpoints.

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Description: Agile processes seek "just enough" requirements. However, this focus on simple software solutions can come at the expense of solutions that meet more creative requirements. To explore alternatives, this article reports results from extending one agile process with creativity techniques in a project for a large media organization. Domain experts ranked the requirements generated with the process as more novel than baseline epics from the product backlog of the same project, while the requirements' usefulness increased overall after incubation over the duration of a sprint.

Description: As the last standardization effort was done in 2004, the software engineering curriculum is currently being revised. Haven't we reached the point where agile development should be part of all software engineering curricula? And if so, shouldn't new curriculum standards ensure that it is?

Description: Component-based development is a relatively new paradigm for software development, compared to more established approaches such as object-oriented analysis and design. The authors conducted a study to examine the ease-of-reuse perceptions of analysts in modeling business systems using a library of components versus a library of objects. A survey of the IT professionals who participated in the study showed that perceived components to be much easier to reuse than objects. Users also expressed significantly higher satisfaction with components and, by a large majority, a preference for reusing components to reusing objects.

Description: The Visual Computer Managed Security (Vicoms) framework assists programmers in coding access control for Java applications. Vicoms provides a transparent way of managing security aspects in enterprise-level applications, including legacy ones. It has been embedded within the Eclipse open source integrated development environment and used experimentally in several case studies, one of which is described in the article.

Description: With software analytics, software practitioners explore and analyze data to obtain insightful, actionable information for tasks regarding software development, systems, and users. The StackMine project produced a software analytics system for Microsoft product teams. The project provided lessons on applying software analytics technologies to positively impact software development practice. The lessons include focusing on problems that practitioners care about, using domain knowledge for correct data understanding and problem modeling, building prototypes early to get practitioners' feedback, taking into account scalability and customizability, and evaluating analysis results using criteria related to real tasks.

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Description: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications editor in chief Gabriel Taubin welcomes the magazine's incoming EIC Miguel Encarnação and bids farewell to editorial-board members David Kasik, Kari Pulli, and Diego Gutierrez.

Description: The winners of the 2012 IEEE Visualization Contest combined methods from molecular, flow, and scalar data visualization to reveal the characteristics and processes in the contest data. Because the simulated material didn't behave according to theory from textbooks, one challenge was to find meaningful visualizations to facilitate exploratory analysis. The contest winners created an interactive visual-analysis application based on MegaMol, their visualization framework. The tailored visualizations revealed data characteristics such as thermal vibrations and the spatial distribution of polarization domains. Domain expert knowledge verified the results. This video at http://youtu.be/RXnNKekY7VE shows the dataset used and the development of vector clusters over time.

Description: The next generation of VR simulators could take into account a novel input: the user's mental state, as measured with electrodes and a brain-computer interface. One illustration of this promising path is a project that adapted a guidance system's force feedback to the user's mental workload in real time. A first application of this approach is a medical training simulator that provides virtual assistance that adapts to the trainee's mental activity. Such results pave the way to VR systems that will automatically reconfigure and adapt to their users' mental states and cognitive processes.

Description: In conventional vehicle teleoperation systems, using low-bandwidth, high-delay transmission links causes a serious problem for remote control of the vehicles. To solve this problem, a proposed teleoperation system employs 3D maps and GPS time synchronization. Two GPS receivers measure the transmission delay, which the system uses to estimate the vehicle's location and orientation. Field experiments show that the 3D-map-based interface lets users easily comprehend the remote environment while navigating a vehicle. The experiments also show that taking communication delays into account improves maneuverability.

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Description: This special issue features three articles on interactive 3D developments for the Web. Two articles discuss exploiting GPU ubiquity and performance; the other applies current Web3D languages to a real-world education challenge.

Description: Until recently, a major drawback of declarative-3D approaches for the Web was the encoding of scene-graph-related structured data along with a text-based description of unstructured vertex data. Loading times were long, and 3D Web content wasn't available until the full page had completely loaded. To overcome this limitation requires external mesh data containers that are referenced in the scene description. In particular, sequential image geometry containers and explicit binary containers align well with GPU buffer structures, thus enabling fast decoding and GPU uploads. Furthermore, progressive binary geometry enables simple, yet highly progressive transmission of arbitrary mesh data on the Web.

Description: This issue's article examines the digital artwork of Michael Frank.

Description: Image retargeting adjusts images to arbitrary sizes such that they can be viewed on different displays. Content-aware image retargeting has been receiving increased attention. In particular, researchers have improved a patch-wise scaling method for image retargeting at the object level. The scaling partitions the image into rectangular patches of adaptive sizes, which are comparable to the sizes of the salient objects in the image. This partitioning is based on a visual-saliency map; accordingly, the method labels the patches as important or unimportant. Then, the method scales the important patches as uniformly as possible and stretches or squeezes the unimportant patches to fit the target size. A patch-based image-similarity measure finds the optimal set of scaling factors. In experiments, the improved method performed well for three image types: lines and edges, foreground objects, and geometric structures.

Description: The LiverAnatomyExplorer is a real-time surgical teaching tool based on state-of-the-art Web technologies such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), X3D (Extensible3D), and WebGL (Web Graphics Library). Unlike other medical e-learning systems, the LiverAnatomyExplorer combines traditional clinical 2D imagery with interactive Web-based 3D models derived from patient-specific image data. The tool is enhanced by surgical videos, a self-assessment tool, and an online authoring tool with which instructors can manage the presented case studies and create multiple-choice quizzes.

Description: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Editor in Chief Gabriel Taubin welcomes Pak Chung Wong as the magazine's associate editor in chief for special issues. The Web extra thanks our many reviewers for all their hard work in 2012.

Description: This article takes a look at the computer-based artwork of Lynne Medsker.

Description: The emerging field of game user research (GUR) investigates interaction between players and games and the surrounding context of play. Game user researchers have explored methods from, for example, human-computer interaction, psychology, interaction design, media studies, and the social sciences. They've extended and modified these methods for different types of digital games, such as social games, casual games, and serious games. This article focuses on quantitative analytics of in-game behavioral user data and its emergent use by the GUR community. The article outlines open problems emerging from several GUR workshops. In addition, a case study of a current collaboration between researchers and a game company demonstrates game analytics' use and benefits.

Description: Public-display installations can range from large-scale media facades that are embedded in architectural structures and that people can interact with only from a distance, to direct-touch interactive kiosks that provide information of local interest. These different scenarios impose different challenges and research questions regarding the design of interfaces and interaction techniques. The articles in this special issue present snapshots of several ways that researchers are addressing these challenges.

Description: Interactive tabletops and surfaces (ITSs) provide rich opportunities for data visualization and analysis and consequently are used increasingly in such settings. A research agenda of some of the most pressing challenges related to visualization on ITSs emerged from discussions with researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and a variety of visualization fields at the 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces (Dexis 2011).

Description: Users increasingly expect more-interactive experiences with public displays for applications including learning, gaming, urban visualization, and planning. However, user interaction with applications on public displays is challenging and often doesn't lend itself to established interaction techniques. Navigation using only freehand gestures captured with low-cost devices might often be an appropriate solution. A formal, quantitative lab experiment and an informal, qualitative field study compared freehand gestural interaction with keyboard-and-mouse interaction. No significant difference in navigation performance existed between the two interaction types. However, gestural interaction provided a more natural experience in both personal and public environments.