During my Erasmus exchange at the TU/e, I was able to experience publishing a paper for the first time. I worked with my two teammates Daan and Jules on a data visualization project, which was started as part of the Algorithms for Geographic Data class.
Our work, under the supervision of professors Kevin Buchin and Bettina Speckmann, has been focused on creating word clouds with geographically accurate information. We have called them geo word clouds. The project ended with the preparation of a paper, which was presented at the 2016 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis):
Geo word clouds
K. Buchin, D. Creemers, A. Lazzarotto, B. Speckmann, J. WulmsWord clouds are a popular method to visualize the frequency of words in textual data. Nowadays many text-based data sets, such as Flickr tags, are geo-referenced, that is, they have an important spatial component. However, existing automated methods to generate word clouds are unable to incorporate such spatial information. We introduce geo word clouds: word clouds which capture not only the frequency but also the spatial relevance of words. […]
Here you can see a map generated with our algorithm, written using Python and SageMath:
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© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
You can read the full text PDF here.
It’s true, I start immediately with something that not everyone uses, but in my opinion it’s a pity. 😛 Ubuntu is an operating system alternative to Windows or Mac OS X. It’s fast, free and without viruses.
There are some browsers that are more widespread than others, but I was surprised to see that 90% of the students I have met use Google Chrome. It’s a quite high percentage!
This web service gives 2 GB of free space in the cloud, that can be easily extended by inviting friends to join. You can have access to your files safely using the web interface and automatically synchronize them with the client for all operating systems and for mobile devices.
It’s difficult to exactly define Evernote. It isn’t only a website in which you can write notes, but it also includes a client software for Windows and Mac (under Linux I use the web interface and I am fine), apps for phones and tablets and extensions for the browser. Notes can be divided in notebooks — for instance one for your documents and one for every class you follow — and labeled with tags.
The second extension is called Clearly and allows you to have a readable and distraction-free view of any articles you find online. The extension isolates the important content and eliminates all the rest, allowing also to save the page in Evernote and automatically deciding the most relevant notebook.
At first sight it may seem that this computational search engine is useful only for people studying maths, computer science or engineering. It’s true, You can perform very complicated computations with it, but that’s not all!
What would you think if I told you that my favorite search engine is not Google? Just so, most of the times I use DuckDuckGo, a very convenient search engine that gives a very useful feature: the instant answer.
Some love Facebook, others hate it. Many use it to “waste time” between games and funny pictures. The reality is that this social network reveals its real usefulness when you are abroad, I noticed especially after the Danish course.
Of course going abroad means keeping in touch with people in your own country. There are many VoIP services, but Skype is for sure the most famous of all. It allows you to perform free chats, calls and videocalls through the Internet using a computer or smartphone.
Given that it recently launched also in Italy, I think it’s the best moment to talk about it! Spotify is a music application that combines social features with a huge songs library. The best thing is that by using the program and an Internet connection you can listen to millions of tracks for free.
This application is dedicated to those living in Denmark, but I am sure that there exist some similar in many countries. In general, you should search a service that allows you to search the trains and buses you need in the country where you study.