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August 22, 2006
An interview with...Moritz Stefaner
Today we reached the number of 10 interviews,
and we are going to read what Moritz Stefaner, a master student in Interface Design Porgram at FH Potsdam thinks.
1 - When, how and why have you decided to research on infovis ?
The kickstart for my interest in interactive media must have been the Coldcut "Let us play CD-ROM released in 1997. I was fascinated by the interplay of video, sound and graphic elements and the original, playful interaction. Quickly I got familiar with the work of Hexstatic, Tomato and others. At that time I was mainly interested in the narrative and playful elements of media and interaction aspects. After working a few years in the web industry, I noticed that it was getting harder to buildinteresting, useful and innovative applications in this purely commercial and advertisement-heavy context, so I decided to study Cognitive Science in order to get into HCI and interface design research projects.
Being a true "interface man with interests in design, code and human factors, interactive visualization turned out to be a great field of study in which I could bring all my interests and skills together. Over the last four years, I have been researching on information visualization and related topics, such as information design, personal knowledge management, statistics, machine learning, theories and psychology of perception, linguistics, philosophy etc.
What I like most about information visualization is the clash of the personal and the abstract, the technical and the aesthetic, the subjective and the objective. Theres some many perspectives you can have on these topics that I am convinced it will keep me busy and interested for quite some while.
2 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
Of course, the current projects are always the most interesting ones 
(See q.3) In the past, I guess, the ASADO project was the most challenging and the one I learned most in. It was a study project at the University of Osnabrück. On behalf of the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, we developed methods to structure large amounts of archived documents automatically.
The topics we were working on were terminology extraction, ontologies, clustering, cluster labeling and meta-data and similarity-based search. I learned a lot about statistics, formal knowledge representation, machine learning and interface design in that project. Additionally, it was very interesting to meet the knowledge management and engineering staff and get a glimpse on the complexity of processes in large corporations.
We developed a whole system for automatic document clustering, labeling and mapping within the project, but never managed to apply it to other domains as well, so there is no real public demo at the moment, which is a pity. But if you are interested: parts of my work are described in my B.Sc. Thesis about document mapping techniques (http://der-mo.net/DocumentMaps/Thesis_Stefaner_DocumentMaps.pdf).
3 - On what themes are you working now ?
Currently, I am working on my Masters thesis at the Interface Design programme at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. My supervisor is Boris Müller (http://esono.com). The thesis will be about visual strategies to manage the flow of microcontent (mainly via RSS) and how tagging can be used in this context to store, modify and communicate information. I am developing temporal visualizations, automatic layout mechanisms for microcontent and interface solutions for creating and refining tagging and information flow structures.
Besides that, I am still working on my Relation Browser (http://der-mo.net/relationBrowser/), which has gone open source and which has created a lot of interest already.
Plus: Starting in September, I will be coordinating the interface design in the 3-year research project MACE funded by the EU (eContentPlus programme). In the project, we will develop and deploy visual strategies for meta-data based information retrieval and content inter-connection in the field of architecture in Europe.
4 - If you should suggest an education programme to a student interested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
There is lots of ways to get into InfoVis. Usually, people have a background in either psychology/HCI, computer science, interface design or information sciences and then discover their interests in the other topics to finally arrive at information visualization as a unifying discipline.
For me, doing a Bachelor in Cognitive Science and now studying Interface Design has been the perfect combination. For others, a different path might be the best. As a general strategy, getting proficient in one of the involved areas and working from there can never be a bad move. And be prepared that these new and interdisciplinary fields take ages to master, since everything is still unsettled - but thats also part of the fun I guess
5 - How do you think infovis researches will evolve in your country for next years ?
Information visualization and information design are definitely going to gain momentum over the next years and I think this will be no different in Germany.
Places to watch include my home base - the University of Applied Sciences in Postdam (http://interface.fh-potsdam.de, http://incom.org), the University of Konstanz (http://infovis.uni-konstanz.de/), but also companies like Schoenerwissen (http://www.sw.ofcd.com/) and people like Boris Müller (http://esono.com).
Currently, the biggest challenge in my eyes is not to come up with yet another innovative way to visualize abstract structures, but make visualizations work for the people. There are so many really interesting prototypes and ideas out there - how can we actually integrate them into every day information interaction?
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/?p=123
Posted by InfoVis at August 22, 2006 5:10 PM
