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Michael Gleicher

Professor
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin, Madison
1210 West Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706
gleicher@cs.wisc.edu

Office: 6385 Computer Sciences

Office Hour: (Spring 2023) Wednesdays, 2:15pm-3:15pm. (except 3/15 (spring break) and 3/29 (MMSD spring break)). Office hours are in person. CS559 students can join by Zoom (see the course web for instructions)

I am a professor working in areas related to Visual Computing. My research these days is mainly about robotics and data visualization. With both, I am interested in how we can make them useful for people. I remain interested in animation, virtual reality, multimedia, …

A brief biography will tell you how I got here. You can see a reasonably current CV, but you probably are looking for papers, talks, videos or advice.

Teaching: This semester (Fall 2022), I will teach CS765 Data Visualization. Last semester (Spring 2022), I taught CS559 Computer Graphics.

I have some pages with various Advice I generally give to students. This includes the format for status reports, what I’d like to see in Prelims and Theses, my grad school FAQ, or my advice on how to give a talk.

You might be interested in my grad school FAQ. Come and talk to me if you’re interested in data visualization, robotics, computer graphics or related topics. If you are an undergrad and looking to work on a project, please see Undergrad Research, Projects and Directed Studies. If you are asking about a reference letter, please see Reference Letters for Students in Classes.

If you’re interested in joining our group, come talk to me! If you aren’t a student at Wisconsin yet, please look at my grad school FAQ, particularly the last few questions.

Current Research Themes

The projects list was more than slightly out of date. I need to revitalize it. But, there are several things going on with robotics (tele-operation, providing awareness to remote users, using novel sensors, …) and visualization (summarization, text collection exploration, uncertainty, …).

Selected Past (but recent) Themes

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Communicating Physical Interactions: We are working on ways for people and robots to communicate to each other about how objects should be manipulated in the world. Manipulations necessarily involve physical interactions (e.g., forces must be applied correctly). We are exploring ways for people to tell robots how to act with appropriate forces (e.g., to teach manipulation skills) as well as for robots to communicate back to people about the actions they are performing.
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Communicative Robot Motions: If robots are going to work around people, it will be important that people can interpret the robots movements correctly. We are developing ways to make robots move such that people will interpret them correctly. For example, we are considering how to design robot control algorithms such that the resulting movements are understandable, predictable, aesthetically pleasing, and convey a sense of appropriate affect (e.g. confidence).
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Interacting with Machine Learning: People interact with machine learning systems in many ways: they must build them, debug them, diagnose them, decide to trust them, gain insights on their data from them, etc. We are exploring this in both directions: How do we build machine learning tools into interactive data analysis in order to help people interpret large and complex data? How do we build interaction tools that can help people construct and diagnose machine learning models?
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Visualizing Comparisons for Data Science: Data interpretation tasks often involve making comparisons among the data, or can be thought of as comparisons. We are developing better visualization tools for performing comparisons for various data challenges, as well as to developing better methods for inventing new designs.

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Perceptual Principles for Visualization: Understanding how people see can inform how we should design visualizations. We have been exploring how recent results in perception (e.g., ensemble encoding) can be exploited to create novel visualization designs, and how principles of perception can inform visualization designs.
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Video, Animation and Image Authoring: Our goal is to make it easier for people to create useable images and video. For example, we have developed methods for improving pictures and video as a post-process (e.g. removing shadows and stabilizing video). We have also worked on adapting imagery for use in new settings (e.g. image and video retargeting or automatic video editing) and making use of large image collections (e.g. intestingness detection or panorama finding).

Teaching

These are the main classes I teach. You can see more on the Graphics Group Courses Page.

Older classes that might not get taught again for a while:

  • CS777: Computer Animation is a graduate level CS class for people with some graphics background. This taught was taught regularly in the past (2013, 2011, 2006, 2004, 2003). It kindof died off from lack of interest (student interest and my interest)
  • CS679 Computer Games Technologies: this class was popular, so I tried to teach it regularly for several years 2012, 2011, 2010).
  • Advanced Graphics: In the Spring of 2009, I taught an Advanced Graphics class.

You can find other information on graphics group classes on the Graphics Group Courses Page.

Selected Recent Publications

A (pretty) complete list is available here. Here are some selected recent ones:

  • RAL ‘22 (IROS ‘22): Geometric Calibration of Single-Pixel Distance Sensors w/ Sifferman and Gupta
  • RSS ‘22: Proxima: An Approach for Time or Accuracy Budgeted Collision Proximity Queries w/Rakita and Mutlu
  • TVCG ‘22: embComp: Visual Interactive Comparison of Vector Embeddings w/Heimerl et al.
  • Haptics ‘22: Assessing the Perceived Realism of Kinesthetic Haptic Renderings Under Parameter Variations w/Zhang et al.
  • Visual Informatics ‘22: Trinary tools for continuously valued binary classifiers w/Yu and Chen