Authoring Conceptual Diagrams by Codifying Visual Representations

This is the source for "Authoring Conceptual Diagrams by Codifying Visual Representations," the Ph.D. dissertation by Wode "Nimo" Ni. The document is submitted in October, 2024.

Defense talk

The thesis defense talk was held on September 26, 2024. Check out the talk here:

YouTube Link

Open-source software

Most of the software mentioned in the document can be found in the penrose/penrose GitHub repository. Visit https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu for more on Penrose.

Publications behind this thesis

The main content of this dissertation came from the first 3 papers with some additional material and edits.

Title	Authors	Conference/Journal	Links
How Domain Experts Create Conceptual Diagrams and Implications for Tool Design	Wode Ni*, Dor Ma'ayan*, Katherine Ye, Chinmay Kulkarni, and Joshua Sunshine	In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'20)	PDF, BibTeX
Penrose: From Mathematical Notation to Beautiful Diagrams	Katherine Ye, Wode Ni, Max Krieger, Dor Ma'ayan, Joshua Sunshine, Jonathan Aldrich, and Keenan Crane	ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH'20)	PDF, BibTeX, Website, Repo
Edgeworth: Efficient and Scalable Authoring of Visual Thinking Activities	Wode Ni, Sam Estep, Hwei-Shin Harriman, Ken Koedinger, and Joshua Sunshine	In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S'24)	PDF
Codifying Visual Representations	Wode Ni*, Sam Estep*, Hwei-Shin Harriman*, Jiří Minarčík, and Joshua Sunshine	In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (DIAGRAMS'24)	PDF
Substance and Style: domain-specific languages for mathematical diagrams	Wode Ni*, Katherine Ye*, Joshua Sunshine, Jonathan Aldrich, and Keenan Crane	Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI 2017), co-located with SPLASH	PDF, Slides, Website, Repo

Check out other papers related to Penrose that were mentioned in this dissertation:

Title	Authors	Conference	Links
Rose: Composable Autodiff for the Interactive Web	Sam Estep, Wode Ni, Raven Rothkopf, and Joshua Sunshine	In Proceedings of the 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP'24)	PDF
Minkowski Penalties: Robust Differentiable Constraint Enforcement for Vector Graphics	Jiří Minarčík, Sam Estep, Wode Ni, and Keenan Crane	In ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Conference Proceedings (SIGGRAPH'24)	PDF

Getting started

• Prerequisites
  • Install Noto Sans Simplified Chinese, Noto Serif Simplified Chinese, Noto Sans, and Noto Serif fonts.
    • On Mac OS, you can install them by brew install --cask font-noto-sans-sc font-noto-serif-sc font-noto-sans font-noto-serif.
    • On Mac OS, also install TeX by brew install --cask mactex.
• make to compile the whole document
• make clean to remove auxiliary files
• make distclean to remove axiliary files and the output pdf

Setup

• The template is based on cmuthesis.cls with some minor changes.
• Used LuaTeX to compile the document due to Chinese fonts.
• Used BibLaTeX to manage references for commands like \citetitle.

How to cite

Cite this dissertation as:

@phdthesis{nimo2024,
  author       = {Wode "Nimo" Ni},
  title        = {Authoring Conceptual Diagrams by Codifying Visual Representations},
  school       = {Carnegie Mellon University},
  year         = {2024},
  type         = {Doctor of Philosophy in Software Engineering},
  address      = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA},
  month        = {October},
  note         = {CMU-S3D-24-110},
}