Visualization of the Week
Submissions are OPEN
Regular time: Mondays, 13:05 in room S1
Next VotW: Apr. 9, 2018 (Round Seven)
Current entries: 0 (+2 from previous weeks)
Congratulations to Pavel Straňák/Amir Kamran, joint winners of the 6th VotW!
(The previous winners are immortalized on the Previous Winners page.)
What is the Visualization of the Week?
The Visualization of the Week (VotW) is a friendly competition in which members of the department submit various visualizations and other results related to their work, and the weekly winner then briefly presents the visualization before the UFAL seminar starts.
I stole this idea from my research stay at CP JKU in Linz; it is a practice that is quite helpful to their research, and I’m confident it would be worth trying to replicate it here.
How does it work?
You can submit pictures to the competition. Every week, a winner will be selected, who will then have two important duties:
1. Briefly present the visualization and discuss it with your colleagues.
2. Accept chocolate.
Substitute edibles are available, upon request. :)
How do I submit visualizations?
Send the file to hajicj@ufal.mff.cuni.cz, with the subject "Visualization of the Week“. You can add a brief explanation of what the visualization means to the submission email, but it is not required.
You can start submitting right now. The first Visualization of the Week will be held on Feb. 19.
What can I submit?
Technically, anything that is a visualization, in a broad sense: picture, graph, etc. — anything that could be a Figure in a paper. Because we are a linguistics/NLP department, examples of text outputs of course count as well. Or video/audio, for instance if you are working with speech. Interactive stuff is also great!
What we would encourage most are preliminary results — maybe you had an exciting idea, tried it on a toy dataset, and it looks like it could work; this is exactly the kind of submission we would love to see. Work in later stages of progress is just as fine. Or just stuff you think looks cool. Or illustrations of where you are stuck and might appreciate help.
(On the other hand, submitting figures from submitted/accepted/published papers kind of defeat the point, as it makes the discussion not so useful.)
By the way, the IT department is definitely invited to participate as well. I suspect there will be some pretty cool charts.
How are the winners selected?
In Linz, this was done in a dictatorial, yet highly functional manner: the winner was selected simply by the person responsible for organizing VotW. Because we are a larger department, I decided to make a VotW Board. To preserve elements of dictatorship, this board currently consists of me, but if you want to be on the board, feel free to nominate yourself. :)
It would be nice if the previous winner of VotW also volunteered to participate in selecting the next winner.
What about the presentations?
The VotW presentation sessions will take place before the Monday seminars: 12:40 in room S8 (this is right before the Deep Learning talk; there is an empty slot in the room). The winner will be notified on Thursday, to have some time to prepare, if necessary.
This implies that while you can send submissions at any time, the weekly winner will be selected from the queue of unprocessed submissions received before Thursday morning.
The presentation is very informal; you should have about five minutes to introduce the visualization, and the rest of the time will be for discussion.
Why should I submit visualizations?
We feel there are several benefits that VotW could bring to UFAL — both to attendees, and to VotW submitters and presenters. I have seen these effects and discussed it with my colleagues at JKU, and they agree submitting visualizations is both a service to the department and to yourself.
To attendees:
- You will get an early look at your colleagues’ ideas, at a point where they are excited about them. :)
- You will be perhaps able to contribute to their topics and find new opportunities to collaborate.
- You will get inspiration for making nicer figures.
To submitters:
- The probability of chocolate was shown to be proportional to the number of submissions.
- You will have motivation to formulate your initial ideas clearly and create the appropriate visualization for them. Even if you don’t win the week, maybe it will still help you make follow-up research better.
- You will learn how to make nicer figures!
- The existence of this informal venue is empirically known from JKU to be a good motivation to create something tangible out of sparks of inspiration that would otherwise be left unexplored, and surprisingly often it actually does lead to papers.
To winners:
- The fabulous feeling of fame! (Also, your visualizations may get featured on the UFAL web.)
- You will have the opportunity to present some exciting ideas and get early-stage feedback.
- You might find someone enthusiastic to collaborate with you.
- You will get chocolate.
I like this idea! How can I help it succeed?
Submit visualizations. As stated above, you can submit at any time; just send an email with the visualization to hajicj@ufal.mff.cuni.cz, with the subject "Visualization of the Week".