Tamara Munzner, Graphics Ph.D. Student

Information Visualization

Tamara Munzner completed her undergraduate studies in 1991. After working for four years at the Geometry Center, a National Science Foundation funded research center, located in Minnesota, Tamara returned to Stanford in 1995 as a Ph.D. student in the Graphics group of the CS department.

Tamara's primary research has been in information visualization. At the Geometry Center, she developed ways to visualize rather complicated mathematical concepts, to aid in the teaching and demonstration of these concepts. At Stanford, her thesis will concentrate on graph representations (layout, drawing, and navigation).

Graphs are collections of nodes, and edges (links between nodes). Graphs can be used to represent problems such as choosing from the different ways to get from San Francisco to Stanford, or represent such complicated networks as the World Wide Web and all of its respective sites and links. Information visualization is the graphical representation of data (such as a graph of the Internet's MBone structure)

This video explains in detail the process of turning a sphere inside out, assuming that the sphere is hollow, its material is flexible and cannot be pinched or cut. Outside In visualizes the concept first posited by Steve Smale in 1957, and uses a method described in 1970 by Bill Thurston, "corrugations." Outside In makes such advanced mathematics concepts accessible to everyday people, by demonstrating the process in several different ways. Tamara and her team chose to demonstrate this concept because it was so difficult to represent it in anything but a video form (the best representation to date having been picture stills).

This software provides a graphical representation and GUI for navigation of large graphs (5,000 Ü 100,000 nodes). H3 uses the directory structure of a website to produce a spanning tree of a graph, and uses a 3-D hyperbolic view of the graph (each node being a page and each edge being a hyperlink). H3 touts such features as guaranteed frame rate (20 fps) during rotation and navigation of the hyperbolic space, animation of site traffic, and a 3-D representation of a website. Tamara proves that the gap between research/academia and industry can be bridged, as she developed H3 in research, then consulted with Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to incorporate the H3 visualization into Site Manager, an SGI-distributed application for webmasters.

This video is a representation of the Internet MBone (Multicast backbone). Using OpenGL, the different nodes and edges of the MBone are shown on a globe of the world. The graphics use VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) to allow hyperlinking from the nodes and edges.

Tamara worked at the Geometry Center to "rediscover mathematics." Despite having little math experience in college, Tamara believes that math department courses may not be directly applicable to computer graphics; rather, the mathematics know-how that is needed may be best learned from CS graphics courses and colleagues. The Geometry Center worked to evangelize math, to produce 3-D software tools that made it easier for mathematicians to produce visualizations of math figures.

Through her involvement in various projects and papers at the Geometry Center, Tamara decided that research was the way to go. She came to Stanford to work with Pat Hanrahan, working on mathematics and information visualization. Having started research on representation of node-link graphs at the Geometry Center, Tamara's research at Stanford centers around such work. Tamara is developing software that can represent such large scale projects as the graph representing a portion of the World Wide WebÍs site and hyperlink structure. This visualization of cyberspace was partly inspired by Tamara's mathematics work at the Geometry Center and partly inspired by the science fiction notions of cyberspace.