Thursday, April 28, 2011

eScience Open Mic, Visualization Panel, Tuesday May 3rd, EE 303 4-5pm with Pizza!

eScience Visualization Panel
Date: May 3rd, 2011 | 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Electrical Engineering 303, University of Washington, Seattle Campus
Pizza and drinks will be provided

Three UW researchers, Cecilia Aragon, Bill Howe & Mark Stoermer will describe how they visualize very large scientific data sets. Panelists will describe their projects for 10-15 minutes each, and the remainder of the time will be spent on questions and discussion.

http://escience.washington.edu/event/escience-open-micescience-visualization-panel

Projects:

Sunfall - Aragon developed Sunfall, a collaborative visual analytics system for supernova discovery and data exploration. The system was designed for an international astrophysics experiment, the largest data volume supernova search in operation in 2008. Sunfall utilizes novel interactive visualization and analysis techniques to facilitate deeper scientific insight into complex, noisy, high-dimensional, high-volume, time-critical data. The system combines novel image processing algorithms, statistical analysis, and machine learning with highly interactive visual interfaces to enable collaborative, user-driven scientific exploration of supernova image and spectral data. Sunfall is currently in operation at the Nearby Supernova Factory; it is the first visual analytics system in production use at a major astrophysics project.

COVE - A visual environment for the oceans The Collaborative Ocean Visualization Environment (COVE) is a visualization system designed with oceanographers to combine the ease of use of applications like Google Earth with the needs of the scientific community. Keith Grochow from Computer Science Engineering is developing COVE in collaboration with the School of Oceanography and Mark Stoermer at the Center for Environmental Visualization (CEV). COVE provides
unique views for Ocean science. As well as being able to change scale and perspective at a science site, it also supports high resolution bathymetry, color gradients to highlight the bathymetry, 3D visualization of datasets, and tracking and planning tools for working with oceanographic assets such as AUVs.

For more information see:
http://cove.ocean.washington.edu/
http://www.cev.washington.edu/
http://www.interactiveoceans.ocean.washington.edu/

VizDeck - Howe works on increasing automation in visual analytics tools, optimizing for user attention rather than raw performance. To this end, we've developed VizDeck, a web-based tool for creating visual dashboards in seconds with zero programming. I'll give a brief demo of this tool and show how you can use it.

Bios:

Cecilia Aragon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and the eScience Institute. Her research interests lie in human-computer interaction and visualization of very large data sets. Previously, she was a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NASA Ames Research Center. In 2009, she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for her work in visualization and analytics. Her research has been recognized with four Best Paper awards since 2004, and she was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic Business Magazine. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004 and her B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology.

Bill Howe holds a Senior Scientist position in the UW eScience Institute and an Affiliate Assistant Professor appointment in Computer Science & Engineering, where he studies tools for scientific databases, data-intensive scalable computing, visualization, and citizen science. Howe has received awards from Microsoft Research for work on managing environmental data, and two paper awards for work on large-scale data-intensive computing platforms. Howe serves on the programming and organizing committees for a number of conferences in the area of scientific data management, including the Science Advisory Board of the SciDB project, an effort by database researchers to build a new database system expressly for science. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University.

Mark Stoermer is a Computer/Ocean Engineer who specializes in scientific
visualization, interactive marine education, Web interface design and advanced display technologies. The main focus of his work is directed at the integration of ocean science with information technologies and informal science education. He is interested in developing new ways for young scientists and their families to remotely explore and study the oceans from their schools, libraries, and living rooms. Current development areas include next-generation Earth and Ocean science visualization systems along with new mapping tools, scientific workflows and video processing systems.