Thomas Butkiewicz

Background

Thomas Butkiewicz is currently a Ph.D. student of computer science at UNC Charlotte and a member of the Data Visualization Group at the Charlotte Visualization Center.

My primary research right now involves visual analysis of terrain and other geospatial datasets, with my current main projects being change detection between annual urban LIDAR scans in an integrated GIS environment, and developing an exploratory interface for an urban growth simulation on a high-resolution, multi-touch display; I'm also working on incorporating error-awareness into terrain calculations such as model creation/extraction and line-of-sight as well as a probe-based interaction model for geospatial visualizations.

I also have an interest in the virtual reality research being conducted in the Future Computing Lab here at UNC Charlotte. Specifically, the creation of highly realistic simulations, the development of new hardware for displays and tracking systems, and exploring the future use of VR technology for entertainment purposes.

Outside of the computer science field, my interests include classical physics, electronics, medieval architecture, motorcycling, and collecting, fixing, and playing pinball machines.

Publications

	Multi-Focused Geospatial Analysis Using Probes. Thomas Butkiewicz, Wenwen Dou, Zachary Wartell, William Ribarsky, and Remco Chang. to appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) InfoVis 2008.
	Visual Analysis and Semantic Exploration of Urban LIDAR Change Detection. Thomas Butkiewicz, Remco Chang, Zachary Wartell, William Ribarsky. EuroVis 2008 / Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 27, num. 3, 2008. (PDF) and slides (PPT)
	Visual Analysis for Live LIDAR Battlefield Change Detection. Thomas Butkiewicz, Remco Chang, Zachary Wartell, William Ribarsky. SPIE Defense and Security Symposium 2008. (PDF)
	Visualizing Uncertainty for Geographical Information in Global Terrorism Database. Josh Jones, Remco Chang, Thomas Butkiewicz, William Ribarsky. SPIE Defense and Security Symposium 2008. (PDF)
	Legible Simplification of Textured Urban Models. Remco Chang, Thomas Butkiewicz, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Zachary Wartell, Nancy Pollard, William Ribarsky. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Special Issue on Procedural Urban Modeling. To Appear May/June 2008. (PDF) and video (MP4).
	"Visual Analysis of Urban Terrain Dynamics", Thomas Butkiewicz, Remco Chang, William Ribarsky, and Zachary Wartell. In "Understanding Dynamics of Geographic Domains", May Yuan, Kathleen S. Hornsby. CRC Press/Taylor and Francis. 2007. (An image of my LIDAR work was also featured on the cover.) (Purchase Book)
	"Analyzing Sampled Terrain Volumetrically with Regard to Error and Geologic Variation", Thomas Butkiewicz, Remco Chang, Zachary Wartell, William Ribarsky, Proc. SPIE Visualization and Data Analysis 2007, San Jose, CA (PDF)
	"Hierarchical Simplification of City Models to Maintain Urban Legibility", Remco Chang, Thomas Butkiewicz, Zachary Wartell, Nancy S. Pollard, William Ribarsky, Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH 2006 Conference on Sketches, Aug. 2006, Boston, MA, ACM Press. (PDF)
	"Interactive Virtual Client for Teaching Occupational Therapy Evaluative Processes" Sharon Stansfield, Tom Butkiewicz, Evan Suma, and Marilyn Kane, Proceedings of ASSETS 2005, Oct. 2005, Baltimore, MD (PDF)

Unpublished technical reports of my research may also be found at Charlotte Visualization Center.

Projects

Multi-touch Probe-based Urban Growth Simulation

As part of the RENCI initiative, I am currently developing a new probe-based application to bring interactivity to CAGIS's urban growth simulation. What makes this project particularly exciting is that it is designed to be used collaboratively on our lab's new multi-touch table. The simulation's existing output (static maps for multiple dates in the future) will be transformed into a highly interactive, multi-user tool for experimentation and understanding.

More information coming soon....

LIDAR Change Detection & Analysis

By creating error models for LIDAR data we can determine our confidence as to whether a point in a newly aquired scan represents an actual change in the urban environment. The extracted changes can be transformed into 3D models of construction and earth movement. Visual analysis can then be used to detect unreported development, tax discrepancies, or to gain an understanding of the growth of a city.

More Information + Images from this project

Probe-Based Visual Analysis of Agent Simulations

By applying geospatial probes to a variety of map views, the user is able to apply visual analysis and information visualization tools to individual patches, regions, or global regions of interest. This work is being also being integrated into the above urban change detection project as well as into the Legible Cities census data exploration environment.

Interactive Line of Sight with Time-Critical Error

This project takes terrain data from various sources and produces volumetric models with guaranteed error bounds (based on sampling technique and geologic variations), then allows the user to place and move military-type units. The software outputs unit-to-unit visibility for all units, as well as unit-to-volume 3D visibility information for chosen regions-of-interest.

Public Safety Log Explorer

This info vis application allows the user to explore two years of Ithaca College's police incident reports. It can assist an analyst in finding temporal and spatial crime patterns. This allows for one to determine where extra patrols or security cameras may be most useful, or to determine the effectiveness of previous preventative measures.

Automated Surviellence and Tracking

This image processing project utilizes adaptive thresholding to perform background-diff based motion detection in a wide variety of lighting conditions. It can be used for continous (day, dusk/dawn, night) security monitoring, selectively captures objects of interest (people) by size and shape, and predicts their motion for tracking purposes.

Anatomically-Correct Skeleton Tracker-Data Player

This application was written to allow the occupational and physical therapists at Ithaca College to replay for analysis the arm motions recorded during reach experiments by electromagnetic sensors on the shoulder, upper arm, forearm, and wrist