Two UF students mapped out the entire world in 14 hours.
Joseph Murphy and Chad Juehring won the world’s largest student data visualization competition for their program, “Six Degrees of Transportation.”
Murphy, a 27-year-old first-year student in a UF’s Digital Worlds Institute’s masters program, competed in the Interactive Challenge at the Visualizing Global Marathon with Juehring, a 30-year-old in his second year of the same program.
Of the 1,017 students scattered across 38 countries and 176 universities, “Six Degrees of Transportation” was chosen as one of the best interactive projects submitted online for the 2012 competition.
In the competition, students had 48 hours to tackle one of three data-visualizing challenges. The three options were Disease Alerts, Global Flights Network and U.S. Election in Social Media.
Murphy and Juehring chose the Global Flights Network challenge, which had nine other entries.
Contestants were asked to look at the intricate network of flight patterns worldwide and visualize them in a new way. Murphy said their interactive design mimics a solar system and measures in number of flights rather than in distance.
“Our perspective was to look at it not as a network looking down at Earth, but thinking of it as a single person,” Murphy said.
“Six Degrees of Transportation” has dozens of colored circles that represent airports all over the world. A person can choose an airport, and the program will show six different flights to get to the final destination.
“I would never plan my travel using it, but it is fun to play with,” Murphy said.
During the 14 hours it took to program, Murphy and Juehring took turns sleeping and had data running on five different computers. For their design, they won $2,500, which they will split.
“For me it was about having a good portfolio piece, whether we won or not,” he said. “Winning was a good bonus, though.”
James Oliverio, director of the Digital Works Institute, wrote in an email that he was proud of Murphy and Juehring’s work.
“Their intuitive interaction design and solid technical prowess are clearly exemplified in not only this project, but in their ongoing work in Digital Worlds’ classes,” he said.
Contact Alexa Volland at avolland@alligator.org.
