VisLunch/Spring2010

This semester Guoning Chen and Josh Levine will be responsible
for organizing the VisLunch sessions. Please feel free to contact them
for any question regarding VisLunch or for scheduling a talk:

Information regarding the VisLunch sessions will posted on this wiki page (http://www.vistrails.org/index.php/VisLunch/Spring2010)

Open Discussion and Semester Planning

VisLunch is back for this semester and will be organized by Guoning Chen and Josh Levine. If you are unaware, VisLunch provides everyone at SCI a platform to present their research work and/or the latest developments in the community that could benefit the rest of us. In addition, the meeting is a great forum to give practice talks and improve your presentation skills. Plus there's _free_ pizza, and it's a nice opportunity to meet new people. Please let either Josh or Guoning know if

1.) You've submitted work to a research venue (e.g. recent conferences like Siggraph) and would like to share your ideas;

2.) You are preparing a submission to an upcoming venue (e.g. IEEE Vis, Siggraph Asia, etc.) and would like to get some feedback;

3.) Your work has been accepted to some venue and you are preparing a presentation you would like to practice; or

4.) You've recently read a new publication and are fascinated by the ideas and wish to share them with the rest of us.

Please consider volunteering to give a presentation at some point! We're hoping that there will be enough presenters so that we don't cancel any future weeks.

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Mar. 5, 2010

- Fiedler Trees for Multiscale Surface Analysis

In this work we introduce a new hierarchical surface decomposition method for multiscale analysis of surface meshes. In contrast to other multiresolution methods, our approach relies on spectral properties of the surface to build a binary hierarchical decomposition. Namely, we utilize the Fiedler vector of the Laplace-Beltrami operator to recursively decompose the surface. For this reason, we coin our surface decomposition the Fiedler tree. Using the Fiedler tree ensures a number of attractive properties, including: mesh-independent decomposition, well-formed and equi-areal surface patches, and noise robustness. We illustrate how the hierarchical patch decomposition may be exploited for generating multiresolution high quality uniform and adaptive meshes, as well as being a natural means for carrying out wavelet methods.

- Speaker: Matt Berger (SCI), http://www.sci.utah.edu/people/bergerm.html

- Where: Conference Room 3760

- When: Friday noon (03/05)

Feb. 26, 2010

- (Practice talk)

- Speaker: Carson Brownlee (SCI), http://www.sci.utah.edu/people/brownlee.html

- Where: Conference Room 3760

- When: Friday noon (02/26)

Feb. 19, 2010

- Visualizing Statistics for Uncertain Data, with Guarantees

We consider the problem of visualizing statistics on uncertain data. In particular, we assume we are given a data set where each data element has a probability distribution describing its uncertainty. This data arises in robotics, computational structural biology, biosurveillance, and many other important areas. Given a query statistic on this uncertain data, we argue that the answer to the query should itself be represented as a probability distribution. The talk will focus on creating and visualizing distributions for increasingly complicated types of queries: (a) univariate statistics, (b) multivariate statistics, and (c) shape inclusion probabilities (SIPs), which measure the probability that a query point is within a shape summarizing the data. The algorithms to create and visualize these structures are simple and practical; furthermore, we can prove guarantees on their accuracy. We will conclude with open problems, glimpses at ongoing work, and opportunities for collaboration.

(joint work w/ Maarten Loffler)

- Speaker: Jeff Phillips (CS), http://www.cs.utah.edu/~jeffp/

- Where: Conference Room 3760

- When: Friday noon (02/19)

Feb. 12, 2010

- Applying Manifold Learning to Plotting Approximate Contour Trees (VIS paper discussion)

- Speaker: Hao Wang (SCI), http://www.cs.utah.edu/~haow/

- Mapping Text with Phrase Nets (InfoVis paper discussion)

- Speaker: Claurissa Tuttle (SCI) http://www.sci.utah.edu/people/tuttle.html

- Where: Conference Room 3760

- When: Friday noon (02/12)

Feb. 5, 2010

-Distributed visualization using high-speed networks

I will talk about methods of designing a distributed visualization application to take advantage of high-speed networks and distributed resources to improve scalability, performance and capabilities. I will describe how, through distribution, a visualization application can be improved to interactively visualize tens of gigabytes of data and handle large datasets while maintaining high quality. The application supports interactive frame rates, high resolution, collaborative visualization and sustains remote I/O bandwidths of several Gbps.

I will also describe my research in remote data access systems motivated by the distributed visualization application. Because wide-area networks may have a high latency, the remote I/O system uses an architecture that effectively hides latency. Five remote data access architectures are briefly analyzed and the results show that an architecture that combines bulk and pipeline processing is the best solution for high-throughput remote data access. The resulting system, also supporting high-speed transport protocols and configurable remote operations, is up to 400 times faster than a comparable existing remote data access system.

Transport protocols are briefly compared to understand which protocol can best utilize high-speed network connections.

My talk will be concluded with a presentation of interesting future research areas, as well a presentation of the distributed visualization and cyberinfrastructure research project that was recently funded by the National Science Foundation and motivates my visit to Utah and interesting related collaboration areas.

- Speaker: Andrei Hutanu (Louisiana State University) http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~ahutanu/

- Where: Conference Room 3760

- When: Friday noon (02/05)