InformationDynamics

Commissioned by turbulence.org, Bonding Energy is an electrogeography and data visualization project inspired by ideas associated with micro-credit loans and distributed computing applications such as SETI@home.

It consists of a set of "Sunsmile" devices that measure solar energy from seven sites around New York State. Every ten minutes each Sunsmile device takes a reading from its solar panel and sends the data to the turbulence.org server. When a viewer visits Bonding Energy they are presented with a live visualization of the data collected from the seven devices.

Data from each device is represented by a wedge in an animated circle. The colors in the wedges change as the data from the previous seven days is played back; oranges represent low light levels, yellows medium, and blues indicate high ones. Highlighted bands indicate maximum and minimum data values, and a rotating line of text displays the date and time of the data being displayed in the center of the circle at each moment. Shapes overlaid on the animation represent changing data relationships between and within the Sunsmile devices.

i/denti/tee is a music collective that got together around their shared love for music. In order to find how different lyrics intersect with each other, they built an engaging visualization tool entitled visual i/zer. You can start by searching for a song, an artist or a lyric. You can then roll over the song title, in order to view the full lyric in a well-balanced transition, and then click on any keyword to see how it connects with other lyrics. The experience is dynamic, fluid and highly enticing.

Created for Seed Magazine, this diagram maps the connections between the most disparate of forces, events and systems affecting our planet. In the center of the concentric circles are the most fundamental influences (population growth, deforestation, increased fertilizer demand, etc). Rippling outward are the effects, which create a surprising number of synergies. Red lines depict reinforcing relationships, while blue lines show some of the inhibitory forces that also come into play.

It was during my days at TED Global in Oxford, in the end of July 2009, that I discovered Cymatics - the study of wave phenomena and the effect of sound (vibration) on matter. Cymatics is a fascinating area of study for anyone interested in Data Visualization, or in the pursuit for visual sound. Named by Swiss medical doctor Hans Jenny, Cymatics derives from the Greek "kuma" meaning "wave", to describe the periodic effects that sound and vibration has on matter. The apparatus is fairly simple, usually involving a Chladni Plate (a flat brass plate excited by a violin bow), the results however are spectacularly complex and visually stunning. There are many parallel interpretations to Cymatics, but my favorite relates to crop patterns.

We present Brahms, an algorithm for sampling random nodes in a large dynamic system prone to malicious behavior. Brahms stores small membership views at each node, and yet overcomes Byzantine attacks by a linear portion of the system. Brahms is composed of two components. The first is an attack-resilient gossip-based membership protocol. The second component extracts independent uniformly random node samples from the stream of node ids gossiped by the first.

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