This Wednesday at DUB, Robin Stewart will be giving a talk entitled “OmniGraphSketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs.” Robin is currently a developer at the Omni Group, a Mac software company that has produced some of the best known and loved Mac software, such as OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniFocus. Robin will talk about Omni’s latest product, OmniGraphSketcher, that has grown out of the project that Robin started during his Master’s work at MIT and for which he received Best CHI Note this year. I hope to see you all on Wednesday for this interesting talk.

Note that this Wednesday, DUB will be held in the Electrical Engineering building (EEB 403). Directions are below.

*Where:* EEB 403 (directions below)

*When:* July 22th, 12-1:20PM

*Who:* Robin Stewart (Omni Group)

Food will be provided!

SPEAKER: Robin Stewart

TITLE: OmniGraphSketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs

ABSTRACT:

Scientists, engineers, and educators commonly need to make graphs that quickly illustrate quantitative ideas yet are not based on specific data sets.  I call these graphs quantitative concept diagrams (QCDs).  To reduce the cost of creating QCDs, I developed software that deeply integrates the data plotting capabilities of charting programs with the direct manipulation techniques of illustration programs.  I will demo the latest version of this software – OmniGraphSketcher – and show some of the ways customers are using it.  I will then step back a bit to discuss how to use new interaction techniques to solve old problems, as illustrated by some of my favorite direct-manipulation interfaces from the Mac software world.

BIO:

Robin Stewart is a software developer and user interface designer at The Omni Group, a Mac software company in Seattle.  Robin started programming for Mac OS X during his first year at Williams College, when he discovered that there was no good software for making economics-style graphs.  After doing research in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval, he decided all of that was boring compared to graph sketching, and wrote his MIT masters thesis on what had become a five-year “side project.”  He joined Omni last fall and the side project became their newest application, OmniGraphSketcher. The paper describing this software was a Best Note at CHI 2009.

SPEAKER SCHEDULE

You can see the entire speaker schedule for the quarter here:

http://dub.washington.edu/events/meetings/. You can also subscribe to the Google Calendar feed by either searching for “dub group” within Google Calendar or adding designusebuild@gmail.com in the Google Calendar interface.

SEMINAR LOCATION

We are meeting in room 403 (on the 4th floor) of the Electrical Engineering Building (EEB). EEB is located south of the HUB and south east of Drumheller Fountain (see South Central Campus Map below). EEB is also connected to the Paul Allen Center and room 403 is at the end of EEB furthest away from the Paul Allen Center (see EEB 4th Floor Map below). If you are taking the elevator, get off on floor 4, not 4M.

South Central Campus Map: http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/graphics/SCmap.gif?103,62,757,641

EEB 4th Floor Map: https://www.ee.washington.edu/operations/facilities/EE4thFloor.html