With the increasing cost of new construction projects, keeping the built facilities at acceptable levels of functionality has become a vital and challenging task. This is particularly so for non-residential buildings, such as schools, which are important infrastructure assets that require frequent maintenance and repair of their many components and sub-components. Maintenance and repair jobs, however, involve huge sets of data which contain useful interrelated information about costs, resources, conditions, and productivity. To support decision making at different management levels with respect to the utilization of resources requires the managing, analyzing, and visualizing of these huge amount of data. This thesis presents a simple and inexpensive approach to managing, reporting, and facilitating the visualization of maintenance and repair data for school buildings. The proposed model conveniently integrates widely used spreadsheet software – MS Excel – and Geographic Information System (GIS) software – MS MapPoint. The spreadsheet’s simple and powerful capability of managing data is exploited to design a data warehouse that can facilitate reporting and visualization. The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language was used to facilitate the integration between the two software systems and to automate the generation of a variety of reports and maps that can show analysis trends, reveal hidden relationships, and support decision making for different management levels. A real-life case study involving two years of maintenance data for 93 schools at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is used in this thesis to illustrate the development of the model and to demonstrate its simplicity and efficiency. The use of the model as part of an integrated framework for building asset management is also highlighted.

With the increasing cost of new construction projects, keeping the built facilities at acceptable levels of functionality has become a vital and challenging task. This is particularly so for non-residential buildings, such as schools, which are important infrastructure assets that require frequent maintenance and repair of their many components and sub-components. Maintenance and repair jobs, however, involve huge sets of data which contain useful interrelated information about costs, resources, conditions, and productivity. To support decision making at different management levels with respect to the utilization of resources requires the managing, analyzing, and visualizing of these huge amount of data. This thesis presents a simple and inexpensive approach to managing, reporting, and facilitating the visualization of maintenance and repair data for school buildings. The proposed model conveniently integrates widely used spreadsheet software – MS Excel – and Geographic Information System (GIS) software – MS MapPoint. The spreadsheet’s simple and powerful capability of managing data is exploited to design a data warehouse that can facilitate reporting and visualization. The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language was used to facilitate the integration between the two software systems and to automate the generation of a variety of reports and maps that can show analysis trends, reveal hidden relationships, and support decision making for different management levels. A real-life case study involving two years of maintenance data for 93 schools at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is used in this thesis to illustrate the development of the model and to demonstrate its simplicity and efficiency. The use of the model as part of an integrated framework for building asset management is also highlighted.

This thesis describes the development of a tool to assist animators in doing walk cycles. In traditional animation, animators create expressive walk cycles with key poses. The process of generating walk cycles by hand is tedious and repetitive. To help animators, many researchers in computer graphics have worked on automating gait generation. However, almost all of them used methods that eliminate animator defined key poses. Although they produce realistic results, their methods are not suitable for expressive walk cycles that can be found in cartoons. The tool described in this thesis attempts to incorporate practices of traditional animators such as comparison of key poses and the use of arc into the program interface. With this tool, animators can concentrate only on setting key poses, which is the most creative task in animating expressive walk. The gait generation program can produce highly expressive walks like the double bounce walk and the sneak. With automated features of the developed tool, animators can save time and effort when animating expressive walk along a curved path.

In this work we describe the design and implementation of a general framework for visualizing and editing motion planning environments, problem instances, and their solutions. The motion planning problem consists of finding a valid path between a start and a goal configuration for a movable object. The workspace is, in traditional robotics and animation applications, composed of one or more objects (called obstacles) that cannot overlap with the robot. As even the simplest motion planning problems have been shown to be in- tractable, most practical approaches to motion planning use randomization and/or compute approximate solutions. While the tool we present allows the manipulation and evaluation of planner solutions and the animation of any path found by any plan- ner, it is specialized for a class of randomized planners called probabilistic roadmap methods (PRMs). PRMs are roadmap-based methods that generate a graph or roadmap where the nodes represent collision-free configurations and the edges represent feasible paths between those configurations. PRMs typically consist of two phases: roadmap con- struction, where a roadmap is built, and query, where the start and goal configura- tions are connected to the roadmap and then a path is extracted using graph search techniques.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1988.

Thesis (M.U.D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

Information visualizations have become increasingly popular in the last decade. Viewing data visually has proved helpful in communicating or revealing information in many fields ranging from science to journalism to art. Information is incredibly malleable; given the same data, a group of designers may make wildly different information visualizations. The malleability of an information visualization leads me to believe that there are certain and finite truths in data, but when a designer converts data into information, they pass these truths through a screen of their experience. Additionally, a reader brings their own screen of experience, through which they read an information visualization. These screens of experience create infinite ways to communicate and interpret information. This report reviews some concepts and methods that I have found helpful when creating information visualizations. / text

The proliferation of mobile computing devices with powerful sensing and communication capabilities has created an immense social landscape of awareness and connectedness. Social media applications have been largely designed for asynchronous expression and collaboration among individuals. Though these models have served as suitable surrogates for social interaction in a rapidly evolving digital age, they have been insufficient at connecting people spatially and temporally. This report describes Revolver: an appli- cation utilizing the state-of-the-art in mobile and distributed computing to provide users with a shared sense of time and space. Revolver allows users to synchronously capture image data of their surroundings with the ability to virtually reconstruct an event from the separate sources. We present the ratio- nale for the project, design considerations, implementation details, results of the prototyping effort, and conclusions to carry this project to future phases of development for viable deployment. / text

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Visualization can be an effective way to explore and understand abstract data. Due to the rapidly changing technological environment of sys admin work and the scale of data involved, enhanced visualizations might provide benefit in this domain; however, despite research efforts, to-date the tools for system administrators (sys admins) minimally employ the use of interactivity in models and provide limited visualizations in tools. This may be because sys admins have a culture of command-line interface (CLI) use that is at odds to the graphical user interface (GUI) that accompanies most tools that incorporate interactive visualizations. We designed a two phase study to gain a better understanding about the work of sys admins, their current tool environment, their preferences for CLI and GUI based tools, and their perspective about how the inclusion of interactive visualizations in tools and system models might enhance their routines. The first phase of contextual inquiries and semi-structured interviews with 37 participants gave us a rich understanding of system admin work practices and their desired functionality for future tools. In the second phase, an on-line survey with 331 sys admins allowed us to generalize our findings. Based on our research, we generated recommendations for desired tool features in each of the sub-domains of sys admin work (i.e., network, virtualization etc.,). We also conducted an analysis of the type of visualizations that could be implemented in future tools to support the challenging nature of sys admin work.