Home » Archives for September 2011
The first IEEE Symposium of BioVis is gearing up to rock Providence, Rhode Island next month along with the rest of VisWeek, and their website now shows the selected list of papers, abstracts, and keynotes. But if you want to go, you need to move quickly because the early registration period ends next Friday.
Early registration (reduced rate) for this meeting ends on Friday, 16 September. Single day and two day registrations are available in addition to full week registration. Discounts are available for ISCB, IEEE and ACM members, details are can be found on the registration page.
The goal of BioVis is to create the premier international and interdisciplinary event for all aspects of visualization in biology. This symposium will bring together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in biological data visualization, as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research. As the first annual BioVis Symposium, this event seeks to emphasize inclusion and interaction between these communities as its primary impact.
The program of the meeting includes:
- a keynote by Lynda Chin (MD Anderson Cancer Center / Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard)
- a primer by Lawrence Hunter (UC Denver) and Kun Huang (Ohio State)
- a special session on challenges in biological data visualization with invited speakers Arthur Olson (The Scripps Research Institute), Cydney Nielsen (BC Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre) and Willy Supatto (California Institute of Technology)
- four paper sessions with 24 presentations from all areas of biology
- 27 posters and demos
- presentation of the results from the BioVis Contest
via BioVis 2011.
Science biovis, conference, visweek
IBM Research has a paper online from Bernice Rogowitz and Lloyd Treinish investigating the many strategies of colormaps used in data visualization, in hopes of creating a more stringent rule-based approach that can more intelligently apply default structures. Included are many example visualizations like the one above.
Some of these ideas can be applied to more complex applications with multiple data sets in three dimensions, as illustrated in Figure 9. These data are from an analysis of various weather observations, which indicate the state of the atmosphere on November 19, 1997 at 01:00 local time in the San Jose area. Four distinct colormaps (two isomorphic and two segmented) are used to visualize four different variables using a variety of geometries registered into a single geographic scene. The choice of colormaps used for each of these variables and their realizations is based upon their spatial characteristics and the task associated with the visualization. For example, relatively noisy data such as wind speed are primarily mapped into luminance, while relatively smoothly varying data such as temperature are primarily mapped into opposing saturation pairs to impart a continuous representation. When contouring is selected as a technique, the data are mapped into a set of bands, to which a segmented colormap with perceived ordinality is applied.
via Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color?.
Science ibm, research
ABC’s new series Pan Am focuses on the glory days of American commercial aviation, so it’s no surprise that greenscreen and visual effects come into heavy play to reconstruct some of the bigger scenes of the era. But thanks to the technology from Stargate, you may be surprised to see just how much of it actually is (as shown in the image above).
Stargate based its virtual set on historical photographs to more or less exactly match the Pam Am terminal of the day. “We built the entire set digitally in conjunction with the production designer,” explains Nicholson. “Then we optimize it. It may have 20 million polygons, so you need to cut it down so that it can be pushed through a real-time system at 24 frames per second.”
via Pan Am: retro green screen world | fxguide.
Graphics stargate studios, television, vfx
Randy Krum has a nice roundup of visualization apps for iOS (iPhone and iPad). Some are free, some are paid, but all are neat.
As infographics continue to evolve and grow in popularity, so do the different ways we can view them. A bunch of infographic specific apps have begun showing up on mobile devices. The functions of these apps include viewing world statistics, infographic design portfolios, company dashboards, creating mind maps, finding new apps and exploring your music collection visually.
I really like the “Stats of the Union” application from Ben Fry and others.
via Cool Infographics – Blog – 10 Infographics and Visualization Apps for iOS.
Graphics ios, ipad, iphone, list, mobile
We’ve talked about the impressive “Allosphere” before, the three story aluminum sphere with lots of high definition 3D projections, 128 channels of audio, and more. A new press release at Nanotechnology Now gets into the details of some of the projects using the new tech, including a great simulation of the human body build from a combination of high-resolution scans and simulations.
We are in the process of building our fluid dynamics simulation to get the precise blood flow down the arteries and veins. Then we will get the nano particle geometries from our materials scientists and build a particle simulator so they will be able to run various tests virtually,” said Kuchera-Morin.
via Nanotechnology Now – Press Release: “The AlloSphere Offers an Interactive Experience of Nano-sized Worlds: New research opportunities emerge from instrument that immerses reserachers in multi-dimensional information”.
Science allosphere, interactive, visualization
Congratulations to Kitware and Berk Geveci for winning a nice $150k DOE grant to build a new user-friendly data analysis application for the complex worldwide climate science databases.
“ClimatePipes will provide access to data that can have a real impact on global climate changes. It will allow the public to better appreciate climate change and enable industries to use climate data in a variety of unforeseen applications,” said Berk Geveci, director of scienfitic computing at Kitware and principle investigator on this SBIR grant. “Our solution aims to be the platform for user-friendly data access, but not to replace high-end analysis tools for scientists. We are looking forward to a tool that is very simple, intuitive, and that can be used by non-researchers and non-programmers.”
I can’t say for certain, but I suspect this will rely heavily on their already built “ParaViewWeb” system for the visualization parts, but I look forward to seeing what they come up with for data provenance.
via Kitware Awarded Department of Energy Research Grant to aid Access to Data Provided by the Ongoing Efforts of the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Science climate, doe, kitware, nsf
AMD is pushing into the GPU-compute space hard with systems like Fusion, and has now managed to get their FirePro discrete card certified for OpenCL acceleration of the Abaqus Finite Element solver.
“Many of the tasks that used to take a full day to complete can now be done in about half that time with GPU compute, saving engineering time and resources during product research and design, and reducing overall time to market,” said Sandeep Gupte, general manager, AMD Professional Graphics. “With SIMULIA’s latest realistic simulation software, which is compliant with OpenCL standards, engineers can achieve precise results in their design analysis with minimal hardware limitations.”
via AMD FirePro certified for OpenCL-compliant Abacus finite element analysis (FEA) software | FireUser Blog.
Science amd, gpgpu, opencl, simulation
In an amazing detailed post over at Impulse Adventure, they break down all the different settings of JPEG images and found one interesting little quirk in how Photoshop handles JPEG Images. The moral of the story: Never use JPEG Quality 7.
What many people don’t know is that there is a quirk in the way that Photoshop defines its quality range. As mentioned earlier, Quality level 6 is the last point in which chroma subsampling is used. At Quality level 7 and higher, no chroma subsampling is used at all. With the amount of color information encoded now doubled, the file size would have naturally increased significantly at this level versus the previous level.
However, it is likely that Adobe decided to allocate the various quality levels with some relationship to the final compressed file size. Therefore, Adobe chose a poorer luminance and chrominance compression quality (i.e. higher level of compression) in Quality level 7 than Quality level 6!
What this means is that the image quality of Quality level 7 is actually lower than Quality level 6 (at least from luminance detail perspective).
This fact has apparently been confirmed with subjective MOS scores against various images at both quality levels.
Get all the details at their site.
via ImpulseAdventure – JPEG Quality and Quantization Tables for Digital Cameras, Photoshop. via Gizmodo
Graphics, Science image processing, photoshop
We represent several online publications looking for online advertising sales reps. Some sales experience required – but more importantly is a comfort with cold calling on companies. We need someone to build some email and phone campaigns and pitch them with creativity and passion. We’ll point you to the right companies – your job will be to find the right contacts and introduce them to the publications and pitch them on advertising. These are pretty simple, straightforward sales. Compensation is commission only – but a very good commission. You work your own hours – from your own home or office. Candidate needs excellent email and phone skills as well as basic Internet search skills. Potential to represent multiple publications translates to increased income.
Interested?
Send us your pitch. Send a letter introducing yourself. Tell us what you have been doing the past several years, why you think you are a good candidate for this type of position, and why you want this job.
Email letter to [email protected]
via Wanted: Online Advertising Sales Rep | VizWorld.com.
Graphics, Hardware, Science, Website feature, Website
Profit margins on LCD Televisions have been falling steadily over the last few years, and the 3D TV craze has largely failed to boost them up again. So what’s a manufacturer to do? Sharp thinks “Go Bigger”.
Sharp said it expects the new model, Aquos Quattron 3D LC-70X5, whose screen measures 153.9 centimeters in width and 86.6 cm in height, to retail for around 800,000 yen.
Sharp is keen on securing good profit margins from the 70-inch model, as retail prices of smaller LCD TVs such as those with 30 to 40 inch displays have been falling sharply amid intense competition, Sharp officials said.
So that’s a $10,000 Television, a 70-inch Aquos Quattron. I’m not so sure I agree with their philosophy (Especially when a 60-inch one is only $2k), but I know I’ld love to have one.
via Sharp to release 70-inch LCD TV in Japan – The Mainichi Daily News.
Hardware sharp, television
VizWorld.com 
Comments