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Bio

Yalong Yang is a PhD Candidate at Caulfield School of Information Technology, Monash University, VIC, Australia. He is working at Immersive Analytics Initiative and MArVL: Monash Adaptive Visualisation Lab under the supervision of Prof. Tim Dwyer, Prof. Kim Marriott, Dr Caron (Haohui) Chen from Data61, CSIRO and Dr. Sarah Goodwin.

His research topic is Visualising Spatial Flow Data. More details available at:

Yalong's Visualisation Gallery

He was supervised by Prof. Kang Zhang, from University of Texas at Dallas and Dr. Quang Vinh Nguyen, from MARCS, University of Western Sydney in a visualization project during his master study.

Publications

  • Y. Yang, T. Dwyer, S. Goodwin and K. Marriott, “Many-to-Many Geographically-Embedded Flow Visualisation: An Evaluation,” IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 411–420, Jan. 2017.

    IEEE InfoVis 2016 Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award

    Demo and samples are available at: Yalong's Visualisation Gallery;

    Abstract: Showing flows of people and resources between multiple geographic locations is a challenging visualisation problem. We conducted two quantitative user studies to evaluate different visual representations for such dense many-to-many flows. In our first study we compared a bundled node-link flow map representation and OD Maps with a new visualisation we call MapTrix. Like OD Maps, MapTrix overcomes the clutter associated with a traditional flow map while providing geographic embedding that is missing in standard OD matrix representations. We found that OD Maps and MapTrix had similar performance while bundled node-link flow map representations did not scale at all well. Our second study compared participant performance with OD Maps and MapTrix on larger data sets. Again performance was remarkably similar.

  • J. Wang, Y. Yang, J. Wei, and J. Zhang, “Continuous ultrasound based tongue movement video synthesis from speech,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2016, pp. 1716–1720.

    Pre-print; Final version; Result demo (with audio); Recording demo (with audio)

    Abstract: The movement of tongue plays an important role in pronunciation. Visualizing the movement of tongue can improve speech intelligibility and also helps learning a second language. However, hardly any research has been investigated for this topic. In this paper, a framework to synthesize continuous ultrasound tongue movement video from speech is presented. Two different mapping methods are introduced as the most important parts of the framework. The objective evaluation and subjective opinions show that the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based method has a better result for synthesizing static image and Vector Quantization (VQ) based method produces more stable continuous video. Meanwhile, the participants of evaluation state that the results of both methods are visual-understandable.

  • Y. Yang, K. Zhang, J. Wang, and Q. V. Nguyen, “Cabinet Tree: an orthogonal enclosure approach to visualizing and exploring big data,” Journal Of Big Data, Springer, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–18, Jul. 2015. (2 citations)

    Demo and samples are available at: Yalong's Visualisation Gallery;

    Abstract: Treemaps are well-known for visualizing hierarchical data. Most related approaches have been focused on layout algorithms and paid little attention to other display properties and interactions. Furthermore, the structural information in conventional Treemaps is too implicit for viewers to perceive. This paper presents Cabinet Tree, an approach that: i) draws branches explicitly to show relational structures, ii) adapts a space-optimized layout for leaves and maximizes the space utilization, iii) uses coloring and labeling strategies to clearly reveal patterns and contrast different attributes intuitively. We also apply the continuous node selection and detail window techniques to support user interaction with different levels of the hierarchies. Our quantitative evaluations demonstrate that Cabinet Tree achieves good scalability for increased resolutions and big datasets.

  • Y. Yang, N. Dou, S. Zhao, Z. Yang, K. Zhang, and Q. V. Nguyen, “Visualizing large hierarchies with drawer trees,” SAC '14: Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2014. (3 citations)

    Samples are available at: Yalong's Visualisation Gallery;

    Abstract: Enclosure partitioning approaches, such as Treemaps, have proved their effectiveness in visualizing large hierarchical structures within a compact and limited display area. Most of the Treemaps techniques do not use node-links to show the structural relations. This paper presents a new tree visualization approach known as Drawer-Tree that can be used to present the structure, organization and interrelation of big data. By utilizing the display space with traditional node-link visualization, we have developed a novel method for visualizing tree structures with high scalability. The name "drawer" is a metaphor that helps people understand the visualization.

Qualifications

Projects

  • Visualisation for clustering algorithms

    June 2016 ~ July 2016

    Details and an interative demo are available at: Yalong's Visualisation Gallery.

  • Ultrasound based SSI (Silent Speech Interface)

    Sep 2012 ~ Jan 2015; in Tianjin Key Lab of Cognitive Computing and Application; supervised by Prof. Jianrong Wang (web page in Chinese) and Prof. Jianguo Wei (project details available in our publications)

    Part of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61304250 and No.61175016)

    We used a ultrasound transducer to get real time images of the vocal tract (mainly the tongue), and to recognize (or synthesize) the sound of the speech with the images.

    We aim to improve aids for the speech-handicapped, communication privacy and speech recognition rate in noisy environment.

    Related techniques: Speech recognition; Machine Learning; Image Processing; HMM ( Hidden Markov Model); GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model); K-means.

  • Accurate measurements of chips using microscope images

    Apr 2013 ~ Nov 2013; cooperated with the Samsung and the Olympus Company; Patent pending

    We used image processing technology to measure the size of chips automatically.

    The result is in an accuracy of 5um.

    Related techniques: Image Processing; Machine Vision; OpenCV; Windows Form programming; C# programming; Software privacy protection and software deployment.

  • Robocup (Official site)

    Sep 2010 ~ Jun 2012; supervised by Prof. Jianrong Wang (web page in Chinese)

    Biped Walking Demo Video

    Team members: Yaolong Haung; Chao Ma; Haobo Ma; Yang Yu; Jun Song and Chang Gao.

    The 3rd Prize for China Robot Contest (RoboCup China Open) in 2011.

    Team Description Paper (TDP) for 2011; 2012

    Related techniques: Robotics; Biped Walking; Prologo; linux; C++ and python.

  • Remote Control using mobile devices

    2010 ~ 2012

    Team members: Haobo Ma; Yang Yu.

    By using a micro computer as a router which receives commands from mobile devices and sends them to the home appliances.

    Invited to the National Students' Innovation Council, 2012

    Won the 1st prize of Students' Innovation Contest in SCS(School of Computer Software), Tianjin University

    Reported by the medias (web page in Chinese)

    Related techniques: Mobile platform development; functional protocol design and presentation and hardware development.

  • Virtual joystick

    2010 ~ 2012

    Team members: Haobo Ma; Yang Yu.

    Demo1, Demo2

    By using the accelerate sensor on mobile phone to simulate the joystick.

    By using the bluetooth to communicate with the normal PC

    Won The 2nd Prize of National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest 2010 Embedded System Design Invitational Contest (Intel Cup).

    Related techniques: Mobile platform development; windows driver development (by Haobo Ma).

Teaching

  • 2014.04 2014.05

    TA for Assembly Language unit (Tianjin University)

    Assisted in the programming experiments.

  • 2013.03 2013.06

    TA for Software Project Management unit (Tianjin University)

    Assisted in designing experiment exercises and helped students with the IBM JAZZ Software Develop Management by writing tutorials.

  • 2012.09 2012.11

    TA for Assembly Language unit (Tianjin University)

    Assisted in the programming experiments.

  • 2015.12 2016.02

    Helped develop FIT5147 - Data exploration and visualisation (Monash University)

  • 2016.02 2016.06

    Tutor for FIT5147 - Data exploration and visualisation (Monash University)

Awards & Certificates

  • NICTA (National ICT Australia) Victoria Scholarship

    Oct 2014

  • 2014 Standard Chartered Scope International Technology Scholarship

    May 2014

  • 2013 Standard Chartered Scope International Technology Scholarship

    Apr 2013

  • IBM Chinese Excellent Student Scholarship

    Dec 2011

    74 scholarships in whole China this year, including undergraduates, post-graduates

  • The 3rd Prize for China Robot Contest (RoboCup China Open)

    Aug 2011

    RoboCup is an international robotics competition founded in 1997. The aim is to promote robotics and AI research, by offering a publicly appealing, but formidable challenge. Our team take part in the Simulation 3D competition this year, and I am the team leader.

  • The Excellence Award for China Mobile Second College Student Innovation Contest

    Apr 2011

  • IBM Certified Operator AIX 6.1 Basic Operations

    Dec 2010

  • The 2nd Prize for National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest 2010 Embedded System Design Invitational Contest (Intel Cup)

    Dec 2010

Extracurricular Activity

  • Microsoft student technology club

    Mar 2009 -- July 2013

    Chairman from Jul 2012 to Sep 2013

    Assisted in Organizing the 14th Computing in the 21st Century Conference hosted by Microsoft in Tianjin, Oct 2012

    Attended the Summer Camp of Microsoft Research Asia, Aug 2012

    Organized 3 programming contests in Tianjin University

  • Monash Postgraduate Association (MPA)

    From Mar 2015

    Volunteering orientation for new students (July 2015)