For a technology oriented company like ILOG, it is essential to keep in close contact with the academic research community in order to facilitate fruitful idea exchange. Our visualization components contain state of the art graph layout technology, and the research community dealing with graph layout holds an annual conference, the Graph Drawing Conference. New trends and major innovations of graph layout technology are the subject of this conference. This year, it will be held on September 21 - 24 in Heraklion, Crete, Greece (see http://www.gd2008.org), and as in previous years, ILOG will be one of the sponsors of the conference.

In order to stimulate new research in graph layout algorithms, a contest is organized in conjunction with the GD’2008 conference. The topologies of several graphs from real world applications are given, and the goal is to create the best (aesthetically or, for the application domain, the most suitable) drawing of the graph by using state of the art or new innovative graph layout algorithms. Additionally, an online contest similar to a programming contest is held, where a difficult problem must be solved online within 1 hour. The details of the contest can be found at http://www.graphdrawing.de/contest2008/.

I have the pleasure to be a member of the contest committee this year, and I am excited to soon see the result of these difficult graphs at the conference. If you are a JViews customer, most likely you are already using our graph layout algorithms. You can try the contest graphs and you will see why they are so difficult to lay out. But who knows, maybe you also know how to solve the challenge, and maybe you will be the next winner of the Graph Drawing Competition. Then the honor will be all yours!

Tags: Academia, Conference, Graph Layout

Posted by Georg Sander in Diagrammer, Graph Layout. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.