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Texas A&M’s Dr. Scotty Schaefer has just received the NSF CAREER Award for his work on “Parameterization and Tessellation for Computer Graphics”.  With the award he’ll be continuing his work through 2017, investigating the relationships between surface shape and quality to parameterization.

“Project outcomes will significantly advance the state of the art not only in computer graphics and geometric modeling, but also in other areas of applied mathematics and computer science where the representation and precise control of smooth freeform shapes play a key role,” Schaefer said.

via Schaefer receives prestigious NSF CAREER Award | News | 2012 | 01 | 20 | College of Engineering.

Science award, nsf, research, texasa&m

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The Autodesk Research team has just published “Citeology” on their website.  It’s a java applet for visualizing a large collection of technical research papers.  As you can see from the image above, the end result combines both the text of the papers along with a timeline and information on a chosen topic and where it appears within.

Citeology looks at the relationship between research publications through their use of citations. The names of each of the 3,502 papers published at the CHI and UIST Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conferences between 1982 and 2010 are listed by year and sorted with the most cited papers in the middle. In total, 11,699 citations were made from one article to another within this collection. These citations are represented by the curved lines in the graphic, linking each paper to those that it referenced.

I’m surprised to see this coming from Autodesk Research, not what I would typically expect from them.  Nonetheless it’s an impressive visualization that’s both beautiful and functional.

via Citeology – Projects – Autodesk Research.

Science autodesk, interactive, research

A group of researchers have come up with a new data mining tool that aims to not just find trends in data, but find which combinations of data produce the simplest and most reliable correlations.  The implications are huge, especially when looking at some of the new giant datasets coming out:

But what if there are many simultaneous dependencies in the data? Suppose that you are looking at how genes interact in an organism. The activity of one gene could be correlated with that of another, but there could be hundreds of such relationships all mixed together. To a cursory inspection, the data might look like random noise.

“If you have a data set with 22 million relationships, the 500 relationships in there that you care about are effectively invisible to a human,” says Yakir Reshef.

Of course, it’s all statistical voodoo that computes a valu called the “Maximal Information Coefficient”, or MIC.  They’ve already had some success in the above example:

In another example, the researchers identified genes that were expressed periodically, but with differing cycles, during the cell cycle of brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). They also uncovered groups of human gut bacteria that proliferate or decline when diet is altered, finding that some bacteria are abundant precisely when others are not. Finally, the team identified performance factors for baseball players that are strongly correlated to their salaries.

Of course, not everyone is convinced of the usefulness of the algorithm, but no doubt it’ll be a good published paper at an upcoming event.  Hopefully after some more eyes look over it, it’ll find a good home in the visualization and analysis toolbox.

via Tangled relationships unpicked : Nature News & Comment., via insideHPC

Science data mining, research, statistics

The NSF has funded research that has recently culminated in a tool called the “Action Science Explorer”, a fascinating graph-visualization tool for scientific journal databases.

“While traditional search tools for scientific publication databases are still designed as single scrolling windows filled with text we believe that modern information visualization practices, including graphical user interfaces can produce breakthrough ideas,” he said. “The research team brings together skills in search, text analytics and visualization, all focused on searching large databases of scientific publications, so as to accelerate the processes of scientific research.”

A tool like this overlaid over databases like Citeseer would make finding relationships between papers and tracing references such much simpler. Hopefully this technology will be publicly available soon.

via A new visualization method makes research more organized and efficient.

Science interactive, nsf, research

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

In a new research study published in the Journal of Vision, author Martin S. Banks exposed several subjects to varying depths of 3D imagery to see how they stressed viewers eyes.

According to the article, 3D content viewed over a short distance (like with desktops and smartphones) is more visually uncomfortable when the stereo content is placed in front of the screen. In a movie theater, it’s the opposite: Stereo content that is placed behind the screen causes more discomfort than scenes that jump out at you.

With 3D cropping up everywhere, I suspect we’ll see many more similar studies.

Update 7/27: Be sure to read the followup to this article here, complete with a link to the actual paper.

via Who Could Have Guessed: 3D Hurts Your Eyes | TechCrunch.

Science human vision, research

Gregor Aisch gave a recent sneak-peek of some OpenSpending visualization work that has resulted in a new visualization method he calls “radial bubble trees”.  Built entirely in web-friendly technologies like HTML5 and SVG, it’s a highly-interactive method of diving into the data.

We recently re-implemented the bubble visualisation from WDMMG to make it more re-usable for almost every dataset. Our main aim was to use it in the OpenSpending explorer which lets users explore and analyse government spending in a fun way. We now call the visualisation radial bubble tree, or just bubble tree, because that’s what it actually does: displays tree datasets in a radial layout with bubbles representing the individual nodes. For our purposes, each node represents a budget item.

via New Visualisations for OpenSpending | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.

Science algorithm, financial, research

The latest issue of Scientific Computing has a great article from some NASA researchers on analyzing and visualizing airflow around landing gear, in hopes of redesigning them to reduce vibration and “aeroacoustic” effects (eg, Loud rumbling).  If you see their “Digital magazine” Version you can see some movies of their visualizations.

To generate the flow animations presented here required saving a small portion (12,000 snapshots or time steps) of the flow simulation record. With each snapshot resulting in a file size on the order of 4 to 5 gigabytes, the total time record saved is in excess of 50 to 70 terabytes of data. Although such an aggregated file size is not excessively large by today’s standards, it is still too large for routine visualization of the results. The push toward much larger simulations (a nose gear computation on a grid twice as large as the current grid is ongoing) precludes relying on traditional methods for post-processing of CFD data; that is, saving the volumetric information at each time step for analysis at a later time, as these are highly inefficient and no longer practical. Such large datasets demand concurrent real-time simulation, analysis and visualization of the flow field without the need to save countless terabytes of information that would soon tax the storage capacity of even the largest supercomputers.

Scientific visualization of high-fidelity, large-scale flow simulations such as these has become an indispensable tool for providing global insights and knowledge that enable the development of viable engineering solutions to pressing environmental issues affecting the public good. The landing gear simulations, for example, together with those from other disciplines relevant to aircraft design, will soon be used to help develop a new breed of subsonic aircraft that will not only reduce noise pollution, but will burn less fuel and produce fewer harmful emissions — all to improve life on our planet.

via High-Fidelity Simulation of Landing Gear Noise.

Science hpc, nasa, research, scivis

Researchers at Caltech have come up with a new way to visualize the warping of space and time using what they call ‘Tendex’ lines, a clever way to visualize these fields similar to electric and magnetic forces.

Tendex and vortex lines provide a powerful new way to understand black holes, gravity, and the nature of the universe. “Using these tools, we can now make much better sense of the tremendous amount of data that’s produced in our computer simulations,” says Dr. Mark Scheel, a senior researcher at Caltech and leader of the team’s simulation work.

Shown above is the vortex rendering of the pulsations of a black hole.

via Tendex And Vortex Lines – A New Way To Visualize Warped Space And Time.

Science algorithm, blackhole, research, tendex

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just completed a 5-year project called “Urban Photonic Sandtable Display”, or UPSD, that creates realtime, color, 360-degree 3D holographic displays.  Without any special goggles, an entire team of planners can view a large-format (up to 6-foot diagonal) interactive 3D display.

UPSD is based on full-parallax technology, which enables each 3D holographic object to project the correct amount of light that the original object possessed in each direction, for full 360- degree viewing. Current 3D displays lack full-parallax and only provide 3D viewing from certain angles with typically only three to four inches of visual depth.

Looks like the technology was developed by Zebra Imaging, and is currently being deployed to an Air Force lab and two Army labs for use.

via defence.professionals | defpro.com.

Science darpa, hologram, interactive, research, zebra imaging