New York, London, Dundee, Glasgow, Amsterdam

This June I will be traveling to Europe to present a paper I co-authored which will be published at the ITiCSE 2007 conference at the University of Dundee. As I’ve never been to Europe, I am certainly taking this as an opportunity to see all I can. I will be flying out of JFK June 22, landing at Heathrow in London. After remaining there for the weekend, I will take the Eurail to Dundee for the conference June 25-27. Following the conference, I will board a train to Glasgow to speak with Prof. Paul Strachan at the Energy Systems Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde about a possible Ph.D program in the fall of 2008. After that, I will take a personal trip to Stockholm or Amsterdam, and then return to London for my flight home.

Gimme money!

I am in the process of applying for a student bursary sponsored by the British Computer Society which would cover the cost of the conference, as well as travel expenses within the UK. I am finding it best to close my eyes when I make travel accommodation transactions, as the cost is starting to weigh in. I keep telling myself it is an investment in my career, and an all-around cultural experience I should have had years ago.

Nerd alert!

The paper that has been chosen for publication is entitled “Data Structure Visualization with LaTeX and Prefuse.” Effectively, it is a survey of two paradigms for data structure and object-oriented program visualization. In the first, Dr. Ali Erkan shows how LaTeX’s tree packages can be used to create slide presentation “animations” out of Java data structures. He implements the toString() method of various Java data structure implementations in order to generate LaTeX markup at each critical point in execution.

The second method discussed is implemented as j-specter, an application Tim Scaffidi and I developed for our undergraduate senior project. Effectively, it uses AspectJ, an aspect-oriented programming package, to construct a map of object instantiation. From this, it constructs a graph using the Prefuse Visualization Toolkit to illustrate the program’s components at any point in execution.

I am working on a project site for j-specter, and will keep you posted on its status. Cheers!