Representing the Sketch Recognition Lab and Director Dr. Tracy Hammond at CHItaly 2015 was Seth Polsley and Harish Vangavolu, the graduate mentor and the leader of the Frontier Capstone team, respectively. The duo presented the capstone project completed over the spring semester. Frontier worked on creating an application for web browsers which would allow for website history to be tracked in a non-linear fashion. Presently, browsers can only track one line of history, not multiple.
(Vangavolu presenting Frontier at CHItaly)
Imagine painting a dotted line – each dot represents a site that a user goes to while using a browser. Now imagine drawing a solid line off of one of the dots, covering all sequential dots after it, and stretching past the end of the original dotted line. This is how browser history works, now. Users can use the back and forward navigations in a browser to return to previous pages. But when they click a different link in the middle of their history, all information from that point onward is rewritten – which can be incredibly annoying when someone is, for example, researching information for a project or work.
Of course, if the original dotted line was not a line at all, but a series of pathways stemming off of one another – each connected, but not dependent on one another – users would not lose information by changing the pattern, they would just create another, branching pathway. This is the aim of Frontier: taking the linear history map and creating a more intuitive and graphically-based map. The application’s design is much like a circle graph, where each circle represents a visited site connected by lines to other circles.
“I really enjoyed the connections I made with the international CHI research community,” Polsley commented. “As someone who hasn't done a lot of travel prior to graduate school, I think this sort of event is fairly eye-opening in that it makes you think about research and development in a global perspective.”
(Vangavolu and Polsley having dinner at CHItaly with other researchers)
Moving forward from his experiences at CHItaly, Polsley stated that he now considers how his work impacts not just those around him – both at Texas A&M University and the nation – but a global community. It was an eye-opening experience.
“It's great experience. Being in Rome wasn't too bad either,” Polsley joked. “We explored all over that city! It was a lot of fun all around.”
While he joked further about how difficult it was to find natural, un-carbonated water and how impressed he was by the cuisine of Italy, Polsley was moved by his experience in a city as old and full of culture – both from the past and present – as Rome. He was struck by each experience he had and could not decide which was more impactful, seeing the Pope speak or exploring the Colosseum.
(Vangavolu and Polsley at the Colosseum)
“Here in the U.S., we have a couple hundred years of history, but when you walk around an ancient city like Rome, literally everywhere you turn, you're looking at buildings and streets that have thousands of years of history,” he explained. “I was amazed by everything I saw, from every magnificent church to ancient, winding roads.”
Reflecting again on the experience of the CHItaly conference, Polsley praised them on bringing in other European researchers and experts to showcase their work as well as exemplifying a heightened global awareness, to a degree which he was unused to seeing in America.
“CHItaly is a fairly small CHI community. They do a lot of great work, especially in education from what I saw,” Polsley concluded. “It is a great community, and I learned a lot.”
