Section: Software

Visualization Tools

Zephyr - Realtime Visualization in JAVA

Participant : Thomas Degris [correspondant] .

Zephyr is a software to visualize numeric variables and data structure in real time and at different time scale. Zephyr is practical because it requires only minimal changes in the code: it uses Java reflexivity to automatically detect variables in the code to monitor and data structure with an associated dedicated view. Zephyr can easily be extended with new plugins because it is based on the popular Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Consequently, Zephyr takes advantage of an already existing and fully operational Eclipse plugins for many of its functionalities. Finally, Zephyr is distributed with a Java python virtual machine named Jython and a lisp implementation named Clojure. An example of a Zephyr screen is shown in Figure 10 .

Zephyr was started in fall 2009 in the RLAI group at the university of Alberta (Canada) when Thomas Degris was a postdoc in this group. Zephyr is still actively used by RLAI. Users include Adam White, Joseph Modayil and Patrick Pilarski from the University of Alberta. Zephyr has been registered on the Eclipse marketplace since October 2011. Documentation about Zephyr is included on its website: http://zephyrplugins.github.com . Zephyr is licensed under the open source Eclipse Public License.

Figure 10. Left: Zephyr showing the different steps of a video processing pipeline in real-time. Right: Zephyr showing different data structure and variables of a reinforcement learning agent at different time scale. A video is available at: http://zephyrplugins.github.com .