review Archives - Noeska Smit

Almost 2017 – about time for a 2016 review

The last day of the year is upon us, so it’s just about time for a review of 2016 and to look forward to 2017! I really enjoyed writing a similar post last year, looking back at last year and looking forward to next year, so this means you get to suffer through another one of them :). Again, first of all, my best wishes to all of you for 2017! I hope you have an amazing year with lot of awesomeness all around.

Let’s get down to review business, starting with the looking back part:

Again, I didn’t blog so much, and I really hope to do more next year. I have a long to-do list especially for medvis.org, so I really want to get back into it soon. For personal reasons (still the same ones as last year), I am making this personal blog a bit less personal, and a bit more work-related. I am especially inspired currently by Veronika’s awesome (and frequent) blogposts to start writing more again myself 🙂
I guess one of the major events last year for me personally was my PhD defense. I wrote about it before, so won’t go into too much detail here. I am looking back still on a really cool day with a lot of cool people, and still very thankful to all those people that made this possible for me.
The other major event was moving to a new job and a new country. While last year, at the time of writing my review post, I had no idea this would actually be happening, I accepted a position as a researcher here in the Bergen, Norway, at the visualization group in the department of informatics from the 1st of August. A nice contrast from last year’s review: “I could definitely see that becoming sort of just a thing to do on the weekends while living there” vs. now: “Walking up mountains in the weekend, waddup!”:
View from Fløyen on a nice Søndagstur
I really enjoyed last year ‘academically’, as I got to enjoy a lot of my favorite activties: cool collaborations, paper writing, and attending conferences. I presented papers at Eurographics, EuroVis, VIS, and attended VCBM, co-authoring a paper there too and winning a MedViz image award. I still also have two journal papers under revision, and I find I enjoy these less than conference papers, mainly because they have been dragging on over longer periods of time. Besides, the papers in our field in top conferences end up in journals anyway, and then you get to meet cool people at conferences as an added bonus. This could lead to new collaborations, which in turn could lead to new conference papers, and more conference attending 🙂 Yea, more of my favorite things!

As for looking forward, all three wishes I made last year for this year (more collaborations, wrapping up papers, getting doctorified + starting something new) came true, so fingers crossed for 2017’s plans as well:

First some news: from the 1st of January 2017, I’ll be working as an associate professor (tenure-track) in medical visualization at the Bergen visualization group. I am far beyond excited about this: the research environment and opportunities for true interdisciplinairy medvis collaborations here are incredible, so I am thankful for this amazing opportunity. Therefore, in 2017 and the coming years, I hope to further develop and establish my research agenda, perhaps moving away a bit from the pelvic area, and into new and exciting challenges.
In March, I am visiting Magdeburg again for the VCBM fachgruppe meeting. I visited Magdeburg last year to finalize a STAR, and look forward to returning next year.
In May, I am giving an invited talk together with Annelot Kraima at the annual national symposium for surgical assistants. Really excited to present our joint work including PelVis there for a new audience.
In 2017, I’ll also be co-chairing the EuroRV³ workshop, which is co-located with EuroVis 2017 in Barcelona (so much co- going on there! I also hope it will be co-ol ;)). The theme of this international EuroVis Workshop on Reproducibility, Verification, and Validation in Visualization will be “Perception in Visualization”, and we will be releasing a call for contributions soon :).
Finally, for 2017 besides continuing the things I’m already enjoying, I’m looking forward to new experiences and learning new skills. For instance, I am working on a project proposal currently, and will be teaching as well. I am also learning the Norwegian language, both via Duolingo as via a ‘real course’. Exciting times ahead!

That about wraps it up! I noticed compared to last year’s plans for next year, I now have more concrete plans lined up for next year already, and I consider this a good thing :). I hope this will help with focus and productivity in 2017. Again, all the best to all my (lol) dear blog readers: gott nytt år!

2016 is here! A time for looking back and looking forward.

If cpbotha can post after a four month hiatus, then so can I ^^. First of all, all the best for 2016 to all of you! I hope it’s a good one. The start of a new year is as good a time as any (if not better) for a look back, or review if you want to get fancy about it, of the previous year and to look forward to things happening in the time ahead.

First up, looking back:

I didn’t blog so much, because a) I was crazy busy (final year of the PhD anyone?), and b) personal issues that I will not discuss here. Maybe I will increase the update frequency, maybe I won’t. Wait and find out?
In September, I presented at VCBM! My favorite conference in the world (eat it, VIS!). It was in Chester, UK this year (full report here) and I presented work festively entitled “Illustrative Multi-volume Rendering for PET/CT Scans”, which does exactly whatever you think it does. To make sure it does, check the full paper and pretty pictures here.
In September/October I went on a month-long research visit to the Bergen Visualization group in Norway, which was great for several reasons:
- I met soooo many cool new people as well as cool people I knew from conferences before. It’s really an excellent group in all ways possible.
- Bergen itself is really heaven on earth. It has it all, mountains within walking distance, a harbor, waffles and lots of metal. Also, VCBM 2016!
- A little more on these mountains…. I’m not much of a sporty person, but on my first weekend there, I was invited to hike up Ulriken (only the highest of the Seven Mountains they have, luckily):
  Ulriken as viewed from the airport bus
  
  Talk about life-changing experiences… Mind=blown by the view, experience and sheer exhaustion.
  
  View from Ulriken, Bergen. Hi, Bergen!
  
  It’s quite addictive really. I hiked up there once more during my stay. I could definitely see that becoming sort of just a thing to do on the weekends while living there.
- I presented at a medviz seminar, check the flyer here. Yes, there was a flyer with my face on it!
- I got some great PhD advice and started collaborating on a paper together. I can really recommend a visit like this, if it is at all possible, to anyone doing a PhD.
2015 was definitely the year of collaborations. Good ones too (for me at least ^^)! I worked with people from Leiden, Magdeburg, Bergen and recently Koblenz, and they are all awesome and I hope to do more of that in 2016.

Then for the looking forward bit:

I hope to have more awesome collaborations in 2016.
I have approximately a million, ok four-ish, papers to wrap up and then…
I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but 2016 could be the year I ~~get my PhD~~ (correction sent in by cpbotha: get doctorified) . After which I’ll have to change the subtitle of this blog into something yet unknown. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of change, but let’s just say, ‘it is time’. I’ve been walking around at the TU Delft since 2005 (yes, really…), first as a bachelor student, then master, then PhD, and a decade is more than enough for me. I’m looking forward to starting something new somewhere else. Anywhere else 😉

Alright, I just spent my full two week holiday working interspersed with family visits, the first part of which is not really my style, but hey, desperate times, desperate measures. So I guess I’d better go finish 1 out of those million papers. Till next time!

Weekly Status Update #30: Always be Pomodoroing

Time flies when you are writing a weekly status update almost every week, edition 30 is here! 30 weeks of blogging, although not entirely consecutive. This week featuring: pomodoros, Todoist, implants, a new laptop and reviews:

The Leap Motion: First Leap!

This is just a quick and dirty post about my first leaps with the Leap Motion. For those of you unfamiliar with this device, it’s a tiny device that provides ‘motion sensing technology for human–computer interaction’ and promises to be World’s Most Accurate 3-D Motion Control. Today I got to play around with a Leap Motion, because the lovely Computer Graphics and Visualization group is awesome that way.

First up: some low-quality phone pictures!

The Leap Motion box, casually hanging out at my desk with my amigurumi android

Leap Motion magic! I felt like I was casting a spell, but the LeapMotion wanted to show me its range

Leap Motion drawing — Drawing an air-heart with the Leap Motion

Comparison of Task Managers: Remember the Milk vs. Astrid vs. Wunderlist vs. Todoist

A blog post topic that has been ironically lingering on my To-do list for some time is a comparison of task managers I’ve been using over the years: Remember the Milk (RTM), Astrid, Wunderlist and Todoist. If there’s anything I love doing, it’s making To-do lists and if there’s another thing I really love it’s finding cool apps that help me get stuff done. I’m by no means a GTD-fan, but I do enjoy a good AutoFocus FV session (I’ll write a blog on that technique next) and lists in general. So let’s get started with the list comparison (lol). I’ll summarize my love, feelings of meh and other assorted ramblings for Remember the Milk, Astrid and Wunderlist and Todoist below.