VisLunch/Spring2011/

Vis Lunch!

Where: Conference Room WEB 3760

When: Friday noon

This semester Paul Rosen and Kristi Potter will be responsible
for organizing the VisLunch sessions. Please feel free to contact them
for any question regarding VisLunch or for scheduling a talk:

Paul Rosen
prosen@sci.utah.edu

Kristi Potter
kpotter@sci.utah.edu

Information regarding the VisLunch sessions will posted on this wiki page (http://www.vistrails.org/index.php/VisLunch/Spring2011)

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 Paul or Kristi 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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Sessions

Date	Presenter	Topic
January 28	Kristi Potter	State of the Art in Uncertainty Visualization
February 4	Carson Brownlee	Talking DIRTY (Distributed Interactive Ray Tracing and You)
February 11	Bei Wang & Brian Summa	Global and Local Circular Coordinates and Their Applications
February 18	Matt Berger	TBA
	Harsh Bhatia	Edge Maps: Representing Flow with Bounded Error
February 25	Jeff Phillips	Skylines and their Efficient Computation on (Approximate) Uncertain Data
March 4
March 11	Shreeraj Jadhav	Topo in Vis Practice Talk
March 18	Blake Nelson	TBA
	Jacob Hinkle	TBA
March 25	Spring Break	NO Vislunch!
April 1	Thiago Ize	TBA
April 8
April 15
April 22

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January 28: Uncertainty Visualization

Speaker: Kristi Potter

State of the Art in Uncertainty Visualization

The graphical depiction of uncertainty information is emerging as a problem of great importance in the field of visualization. Scientific data sets are not considered complete without indications of error, accuracy, or levels of confidence, and this information is often presented as charts and tables alongside visual representations of the data. Uncertainty measures are often excluded from explicit representation within data visualizations because the increased visual complexity incurred can cause clutter, obscure the data display, and may lead to erroneous conclusions or false predictions. However, uncertainty is an essential component of the data, and its display must be integrated in order for a visualization to be considered a true representation of the data. This talk will go over the current work on uncertainty visualization.

February 4: Talking DIRTY

Speaker: Carson Brownlee

Talking DIRTY (Distributed Interactive Ray Tracing and You)

I will talk about a sort-last interactive ray tracing implementation within ParaView/VisIt as well as an OpenGL hijacking program called GLuRay. I will also go over a distributed shared memory paging scheme me and (mostly) thiago worked on. They are three different ways to tackle the same problem, DIRT, within different constraints.

February 11: Global and Local Circular Coordinates and Their Applications

Speakers: Bei Wang

Global and Local Circular Coordinates and Their Applications

Given high-dimensional data, nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithms typically assume that real-valued low-dimensional coordinates are sufficient to represent its intrinsic structure. The work by de Silva et. al. has shown that global circle-valued coordinates enrich such representations by identifying significant circle-structure in the data, when its underlying space contains nontrivial topology. We use this previous work and extend it by detecting significant relative circle-structure and constructing circular coordi- nates on a local neighborhood of a point. We develop a local version of the persistent cohomology machinery. We suggest that the local circular coordinates provide a detailed analysis on the local intrinsic structure and are beneficial for certain applications. We are interested in using both global and local circular coordinates on a broad range of real-world data.

Joint work with Brian Summa, Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson and Valerio Pascucci

February 18: Edge Maps: Representing Flow with Bounded Error

Speaker: Matt Berger

Speaker: Harsh Bhatia

Edge Maps: Representing Flow with Bounded Error (Pacific Viz 2011 practice talk)

Robust analysis of vector fields has been established as an important tool for deriving insights from the complex systems these fields model. Many analysis techniques rely on computing streamlines, a task often hampered by numerical instabilities. Approaches that ignore the resulting errors can lead to inconsistencies that may produce unreliable visualizations and ultimately prevent in-depth analysis. We propose a new representation for vector fields on surfaces that replaces numerical integration through triangles with linear maps defined on its boundary. This representation, called edge maps, is equivalent to computing all possible streamlines at a user defined error threshold. In spite of this error, all the streamlines computed using edge maps will be pairwise disjoint. Furthermore, our representation stores the error explicitly, and thus can be used to produce more informative visualizations. Given a piecewise-linear interpolated vector field, a recent result [15] shows that there are only 23 possible map classes for a triangle, permitting a concise description of flow behaviors. This work describes the details of computing edge maps, provides techniques to quantify and refine edge map error, and gives qualitative and visual comparisons to more traditional techniques.

February 25: Skylines and their Efficient Computation on (Approximate) Uncertain Data

Speaker: Jeff Phillips

Skylines and their Efficient Computation on (Approximate) Uncertain Data

This talk will focus on two aspects of visualization. First, I will discuss the "skyline" data summary and its variants as a way to visualize the important elements of a large multi-dimensional dataset. Specifically, given a large data set where each data point has multiple attributes, the skyline retains all data points for which no other data point is better in *all* attributes. A common example used is for a set of hotels near the beach. For each hotel a user wants a low price and to be close to the beach. A hotel-booking website may want to display all hotel options which for which there is no other hotel which is both closer to the beach and cheaper, as the user's choice will surely be among this limited set.

Second, I will present a series of technical illustrations critical for conveying the details of complicated geometric algorithms. My coauthors and I put much thought, effort, and experience into creating clear and concise illustrations to help explain the simple ideas behind the technical specifications needed to prove and precisely describe our main results. So in the second part of the talk I will define and describe efficient algorithms for uncertain skylines and approximate uncertain skylines. Throughout, I will make an effort to comment on the design of the illustrations used to convey the algorithms.

Joint work with Peyman Afshani, Lars Arge, Pankaj Agarwal, and Kasper Green Larsen

March 4: TBA

Speaker:

March 11: TBA

Speaker:

March 18: TBA

Speaker: Blake Nelson

Speaker: Jacob Hinkle

March 25: Spring Break!

No Vislunch

April 1: TBA

Speaker: Thiago Ize

April 8: TBA

Speaker:

April 15: TBA

Speaker:

April 22: TBA

Speaker: