Research
After finishing my B.Sc., I worked with Charles Colbourn, studying uniformly sparse graphs. I then investigated aspects of nonmonotonic reasoning with David Poole and Romas Aleliunas, in a then-new area known as 'uncertainty in AI', including the subarea of causality.
I have also always had an interest in computer graphics, and pursued several visualization projects.
During the heydey of the iPhone and iPad, I became interested in mobile computing, and was able to combine all three interests in a piece of software called iCausalBayes
Contact Information
Eric NeufeldDepartment of Computer Science
110 Science Place
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK, CANADA S7N 5C9
(O) 1-306-966-4887
The rat prostate and human embryo reconstructions on this page were painstakingly constructed with Winsurf, my rewrite of a program called SurfDriver, written by Scott Lozanoff and David Moody.
The embryo visualizations are part of a project called DREM (google it) and the prostate was part of a long standing research program led by Barry Timms, now retired.
The brain visualization was part of a related project.
WinSurf, and its predecessor, have been used world-wide.
During the 2020-2021 pandemic, Braden Dubois, a summer student, developed a visualization that let viewers compare case outbreaks with vaccination levels.
The intention was to show several levels of detail at once. The previous box shows a collection of line graphs showing the vaccination levels and daily cases reported in all U.S. and Canadian region on July 20, 2021.
The intensity of the "red" shading indicates how high case levels were for that day. It is easy to see that Canada's levels were mostly low, while the U.S. had low, medium and higher case levels.
At the time of deployment, vaccinations were being pitted against the variants as a significant proportion of new cases were delta variants, hence vaccines versus variants.
At this writing (August 2021) the entire website can be viewed here.
Robert Spence, author of a respected text on Information Visualization noticed this work and included it in the third edition of his text. A career highlight.
This work has an interesting pedigree. The causal graph of the guinea pigs comes from a paper by Sewell Wright written in 1920. Agent Charles Eppes explains on episode 3 of Numb3rs how to fight bioterrorism using "advanced statistical analysis and graph theory". One of the first uses of Bayes nets in TV crime fighting!
The successful creation of this app was the result of perfect timing: terrific teamwork within the Department of Computer Science, the iPhone launching just when Chad Jones, a former Apple employee happened to be teaching sessionally at the University of Saskatchewan, and complete and utter ignorance of formal university processes.
We just did it! The app appeared on CBC behind Peter Mansbridge, in MacLean's magazine, and was used by the institution to promote itself as a haven for "teamwork and ingenuity" in national advertising.
Overview
A complete andup-to-date listing of my publications appears on Google Scholar. I've listed career highlights here, in no particular order.
Combinatorics, Graph Theory
Eric M. Neufeld and Charles J. Colbourn. Lucas sequences in subgraph counts of series-parallel and related graphs. Fibonacci Quarterly 23:4 (1985) 330-337
(It must be everyone's dream to publish here.)
Brent N. Clark, Eric Neufeld, and C.J. Colbourn. Maximizing communicating vertex pairs in series-parallel networks. IEEE Transactions on Reliability R-35(1986) 247-251
Brent Clark and Charlie Colbourn both have an Erdos number of 1, making me a 2.
Emotional Requirements in Computer Games
David Callele, Eric Neufeld, Kevin Schneider. Requirements Engineering and the Creative Process in the Video Game Industry. In Proceedings of RE-2005, Paris 2005: 240-252
David Callele, Eric Neufeld,and Kevin Schneider. Emotional Requirements. IEEE Software 2008 43-45
Just two of several papers authored by David Callele while studying with myself and Kevin Schneider. David drove this idea, and the publications were well-cited.
Artificial Intelligence
Eric Neufeld. Defaults and probabilities; extensions and coherence. In Proceedings of KR-89, (1989) 312-323 (Also in Readings in Uncertain Reasoning, ed. Judea Pearl and Glen Shafer)
Eric Neufeld and S.D. Goodwin., The 6-49 Lottery Paradox. Computational Intelligence, 14:3 (1997) 273-286
(A personal favourite.)
Eric Neufeld. Notes on 'A clash of intuitions'. Artificial Intelligence 48 (1991) 225-240
Information Visualization
Eric Neufeld, Sonje Kristtorn, Quinjuan Guan, Manon Sanscartier. Exploring causal influences. In Proceedings of Visualization and Data Analysis 200 San Jose, January 2005, pp 52-62
So many colleagues and students worked on this project. Although this and a subsequent related paper have not been cited often, the work was noticed by Robert Spence, whose paper The Information Explorer inspired the title, who included references to this work in the third edition of his textbook.
Legacy of Alan Turing
From about 2011 on, Sonje Finnestad and I wrote a series of papers addressing the legacy of Alan Turing, which have attracted attention.
Computer Graphics
E. Neufeld and P. Sorenson. Usips: A Telidon picture creation station. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface, (1983) 65-70
My first publication. We built a graphical editor based on the famous Telidon system - a Canadian attempt at an Internet platform for text and images.
Michael Janzen, Michael Horsch, Eric Neufeld. Camera Selection Using SCSPs. In Proceedings of 3iA, 13th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence Greece, May 2010, 207-212