Browsing by Author "Ray, Andrew"

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    The Interaction Framework For Innovation: A Method for Creating Reusable Three Dimensional Interaction Techniques
    Ray, Andrew (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-30)
    The field of three dimensional interaction techniques (3DITs) provides a way for users to interact with virtual environments (VEs). Interacting with these environments helps provide the numerous benefits that VEs impart to their users. However, the methods and tools for building 3DITs are not well defined. Because of this, there is little reuse of techniques between different VEs. An example of this is the fact that the only reuse happening in the field of 3DITs is developers reading publications about techniques and implementing the techniques from scratch. This work investigates the reasons behind the lack of reuse through personal experiences, a literature review, and a community survey. It then provides a solution for creating reusable techniques. This is done through foundational work and a toolkit designed to create reusable 3DITs called the Interaction Framework For Innovation (IFFI). We demonstrate that this toolkit can be used to build reusable techniques by studying the reusability of techniques built with the tool; by conducting both a conceptual and in-depth evaluation on creating reusable techniques. These three methods demonstrate that it is possible and feasible to build techniques that can be reused across both applications and toolkits.
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    Securing the Food Industry: An Introduction to Cyberbiosecurity for Food Science
    Miller, Rebekah J.; Yun, Yin; Ray, Andrew; Duncan, Susan E. (2022-07-26)
    As technology becomes ever integrated into our food system and everyday life, our food industry and supply become ever more vulnerable to attack. Cyber attacks continue to threaten large and small companies, government agencies, individuals, and food and agriculture. This module, ‘Securing the Food Industry,’ aims to introduce the idea of cyberbiosecurity through a lecture format along with three case studies allowing students to interact and think through the concepts and materials. This module was built for implementation into college level courses with connection or interest in the food industry, food science, and agriculture as well as and technology courses focused on real world applications. The lecture starts by introducing the amount of technology in food science and the food industry then transitions into concerns about security. After discussing multiple subtypes of security already integrated into the food industry, cyberbiosecurity is introduced. The term and definition are discussed before the categories of cyber attacks are introduced. The lecture relates these ideas back to the food industry before sharing a few real-life examples of detrimental cyber-attacks. The lecture concludes are explain the impact a cyber attack can cause, who is responsible for preventing and recovering from these attacks, as well as suggested practices to reduce vulnerabilities. Three theoretical but realistic case studies with discussion questions follow the lecture. These studies were written to act as small group discussion starters but could be used for whole class discussion, individual writing assignments, or other applications. A list of additional resources can be found with the course material. This list provides a small sampling of additional documents which discuss cyberbiosecurity. The resources listed at the end of the lecture are not included in the additional resources document but also provide helpful information in the exploration and understanding of cyberbiosecurity. Food science resources are also included in this document to provide additional background around the food industry portion of this course material. Securing the Food Industry is an open educational resource (OER). Instructors reviewing, adopting, or adapting the module should indicate their interest at https://forms.gle/orFRGhYs8owBP7gD6.
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    Snap2Diverse: Coordinating Information Visualizations and Virtual Environments
    Polys, Nicholas F.; Ray, Andrew; Moldenhauer, Maxim; Dandekar, Chetan; North, Christopher L. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2003)
    The field of Information Visualization is concerned with improving with how users perceive, understand, and interact with visual representations of data sets. Immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) excel at providing researchers and designers a greater comprehension of the spatial features and relations of their data, models, and scenes. This project addresses the intersection of these two fields where information is visualized in a virtual environment. Specifically we are interested in visualizing abstract information in relation to spatial information in the context of a virtual environment. We describe a set of design issues for this type of integrated visualization and demonstrate a coordinated, multiple-views system supporting 2D and 3D visualization tasks such as overview, navigation, details-on-demand, and brushing-and-linking selection. Software architecture issues are discussed with details of our implementation applied to the domain of chemical information and visualization. Lastly, we subject our system to an informal usability evaluation and identify usability issues with interaction and navigation that may guide future work in these situations.