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 myself. 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 me 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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Feb. 12, 2010

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

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

- ?? (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

- 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 (02/05)