Over the past 5.5 years I've been very active in scholarly activities, all of which have involved collaborating with students. I've worked closely with students on 3 Honors projects, 2 Research Experience @ Bridgewater College projects, a research course, and an online book. Although I have not yet had any of our work included in a peer-reviewed publication, my research agenda is very strong and will produce multiple peer-reviewed public publications in the near future.

Philosophy

I believe scholarship helps faculty maintain an understanding of the current state of their field. It encourages growth, participation, collaboration, and that which is essential to a growing body of knowledge: contribution.

I also believe scholarship activities can benefit students and the college. Scholarship is a form of active learning and provides students with an opportunity to go beyond reproducing known ideas and works in the pursuit of new ideas and works. I believe that these opportunities can enhance our students' understanding, provide students with opportunities to publish and present at conferences, lend fresh eyes to faculty research projects, and enhance the college's reputation.

Scholarship Statement

A public and peer-reviewed work in Computer Science is most commonly thought of as a technical document or article that has been reviewed/refereed by 3 or more experts in a computer science field and deemed correct and a valuable contribution to the field, hence worthy of inclusion in a conference proceedings, journal, or other publicly available publication. Some conferences also include peer-reviewed poster sessions and peer-reviewed software demonstrations.

Accomplishments

A list of the students that I have worked with, along with descriptions of the work that we have produced, can be found by clicking on the image above. The descriptions include links to downloadable reports, PowerPoint presentations, and posters as well as links to online demonstrations that we've created, and publicly available source code.

Current Agenda

My primary research interest is in information visualization. My interest in information visualization began when teaching a computer graphics course at Bridgewater College in the spring of 2016. That interest has inspired me to co-write an online book with Patrick Sly titled Using D3.js, a reference book for the D3.js data visualization library, and to create a 3D graph library called YAGL for use in web browsers.

Patrick Sly and myself have been meeting regularly this semester, each Tuesday at 8:00 a.m., to discuss our progress and the work we plan to complete in the coming week. I expect that we'll be finished with the current draft of our book by the beginning of the new year. After that we plan on searching for a publisher, ideally No Starch Press, and will prepare a paper for submission in InfoVIS 2019.

The YAGL library allows users to visualize 3-dimensional graphs in the browser as illustrated by our team's demonstration website. The library currently has a good foundation, but is missing needed functionality to make it useful and worthy of publication. Over the next year, hopefully with the help of a 2019 Research Experince @ Bridgewater College grant, I'd like to incorporate additional graph algorithms for things such as search, network flow, and finding cliques. I'd also like to add additional layout algorithms. Once these things are added, the library will have sufficient functionality to be worthy of a conference paper. My goal is to have a paper ready for submission in March for InfoVIS 2020. Looking long term, I'd like to study and help develop a theory of 3D information visualization.

Another topic that I would like to write about and publish is The Showker Prize. Last weekend at The Pitch event, Dr. Jamie Frueh shared a story about describing the competition to a colleague at a conference he recently attended. His colleague was intrigued and contemplated starting a similar program at his institution. I've suggested collaborating on a paper with Dr. Jamie Frueh and Dr. Randy Young. Currently Dr. Frueh is on board and I will be meeting with Dr. Young shortly.

Other research interests include thoracic biometrics and automated reasoning. My work in biometrics is a continuation of the work that I did during my post-doctoral fellowship. This work included an IRB approved human subject data collection and improvements to the Thoracic Identification System (TIS) software. Dr. Leininger and I have plans to write a paper on a novel algorithm developed by himself and his students, which my students and I implemented in TIS.