Alberto Lluch Lafuente

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that DBLP, the computer science bibliography site, provides a nice visual feature called DBLPVis.

The feature is accessible from the main link or from the publication records, for instance following the Vis link besides the author’s name.

Various kinds of diagrams are offered but those I like most are person-to-person (co-authors) and person-to-word (keywords).

The person-to-person diagram offers a bird’s eye on co-authorship. You can see a round node for each co-author. The larger the distance from the center representing the main author, the more articles have been co-authored. The size of the node of each co-author represents its publication record size and the co-authored articles are represented as a pie piece. Colors are also used to denote the years of collaboration.

coauthor diagram in dblpvis

The person-to-word diagram offers a nice perspective on the keywords touched by an author along a certain period. Each keyword node (rounded boxes) also denotes its popularity with its size.

Keywords diagram in dblpvis

All in all, it provides a nice picture of part of your research activities.

I had recently the honour to assist to the Colloquium in occasion of the retirement of Thomas Ottman.

During the last years Ottmann has been a full professor at the Institute fur Informatik of the University of Freiburg. He has been one of the main founders and promoters of the institute and the faculty of angewandte wissenchaft.

His most relevant scientific contribution is probably the Bentley-Ottmann algorithm, which solves the line segment intersection problem. The algorithm is another evidence of the importance of considering output-sensitive complexity and the convenience of using so-called sweep-line techniques, also applied to other fundamental computational geometry problems (Voronoi diagrams, Delaunay triangulation, etc.). That was impressive for me but he used to said: “I was just the right man and the right moment, that’s all.” Always modest, always professional.

The colloquium had also very interesting invited talks by Amitava Datta (on data-parallel dynamic programing on gpus) and Rolf Klein (on geometric neighborhoods). Both talks had a perfect balance between technical contribution, abstraction level and connection to Ottmann’s contribution.

This post is just my modest way to express my gratitude for giving me the opportunity to get a PhD, and to render honour to one of the most professional persons I have ever encountered.

I just finished the preliminary versions of two very simple visualiser for

• our algebra of hierarchical graphs;
• caspis, a service oriented calculus.

Both are available at http://www.albertolluch.com/adr2graphs/ as companions of the pi-calculus visualiser I posted some days ago.

These are just small steps towards the implementation of the technique described in the draft available at http://www.albertolluch.com/papers/adr.caspis.pdf.

The visualiser is based on adr, graphviz and maude.

I just finished a preliminary version of a very simple visualiser of finite pi-calculus agents and delivered it under http://www.albertolluch.com/adr2graphs/

The underlaying techinque is described in a draft (http://www.albertolluch.com/papers/adr.caspis.pdf), where you find the credits to the original encoding by Fabio Gadducci and its rephrasing in our approach.

The visualiser is based on adr, graphviz and maude.