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Bongwon Suh

Research Scientist
Augmented Social Cognition (research blog)
User Interface Research
Palo Alto Research Center
suh (at) parc.com

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Research

WikiDashboard
WikiDashboard is a visualization tool for analyzing users' editing patterns on Wikipedia articles. The tool shows visualizations embedded in live Wikipedia pages to provide social transparency about who edits how many revisions on each Wikipedia page. Official release
Wikipedia Characterization Study
Wikipedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia, has become one of the most successful experiments in collaborative knowledge building on the Internet. As Wikipedia continues to grow, the potential for conflict and the need for consensus building and coordination increase as well. This research examines the growth of such overhead and describes the development of tools to characterize and identify conflict and coordination costs in Wikipedia.
TimeTree
Existing hierarchy visualizations have largely focused on the visualization of fixed structures and can not effectively depict the evolution of a hierarchy over time. We introduce TimeTree, a novel visualization tool designed to enable exploration of a changing hierarchy. TimeTree enables analysts to navigate the history of an organization, identify events associated with a specific entity (visualized on a TimeSlider), and explore an aggregate view of an individual's career path (a CareerTree).
Semi-Automatic PHoto Annotation and Recognition Interface (SAPHARI)
The SAPHARI automatically creates meaningful photo clusters for efficient bulk annotation. It integrates automatically detected metadata into a bulk annotation interface where users can manually correct errors. The SAPHARI incorporates two automatic techniques; hierarchical event clustering and clothing based person identification. Hierarchical event clustering provides multiple levels of "event" groups. For identifying people in photos, we introduce a new technique which uses clothing information rather than human facial features.
PhotoMesa
PhotoMesa is a zoomable image browser. It allows the user to view multiple directories of images in a zoomable environment, and uses a set of simple navigation mechanisms to move through the space of images. It also supports grouping of images by metadata available from the file system.
Automatic Thumbnail Cropping
Thumbnails generated by shrinking the original image often render objects illegible.
We studied the ability of computer vision systems to detect key components of images so that intelligent cropping, prior to shrinking, can render objects more recognizable.
We developed automatic cropping techniques 1) based on a method that detects salient portions of general images, and 2) based on automatic face detection. These methods result in small thumbnails that are substantially more recognizable and easier to find in the context of visual search.
Popout Prism
Popout Prism is an intuitive, elegant tool to reduce the amount of time users spend looking for information in Web pages. By creating visual "popouts" that emphasize critical elements in Web pages, Popout Prism draws users' attention to the right information.
Video

Education

Ph. D. in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD (2005)
M.S. in Computer Science, Seoul National University Seoul, Korea (1995)
B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics, Seoul National University Seoul, Korea (1993)