CS 595B – Visualization

Fall 2003

General Information


Class Hours:	 Mo 4:30-6:00pm, First session: Tue, Sept. 23rd, 4pm
Enrollment Code: 72553
Units:           2 
Class Location:	 CS Conference Room, Eng.I, 2114
Instructors:	 Matthew Turk, Tobias Höllerer

Visualization transforms the symbolic into the geometric, enabling people to "see the unseen" - to observe simulations and computations, and to provide new insights through visual methods. In many fields it is already revolutionizing the way scientists do science. Visualization involves several aspects of computer science, including 3D graphics, image processing, algorithms, and human-computer interaction. In this seminar we will survey the literature in visualization algorithms, techniques, and applications. Participants are responsible for thoroughly reading the material, actively taking part in the discussions, and presenting at least one topic or paper, or, alternatively, implementing and demonstrating a specific visualization technique.

Visualization Topics

The field of visualization can be tackled in many different ways. Here are just three possible approaches of organizing it into different topics:

By academic sub-field: IEEE Visualization, the major conference in the field, was first held in 1990. Since then, several workshops and symposia have been 'spun off' in order to facilitate a closer look at special visualization topics. The following list reflects those symposia that ended up being held regularly, indicating that there is an active research community behind them:

Scientific Visualization	(the original 'core' topic of IEEE Visualization)
Information Visualization	(InfoVis, yearly since 1995)
Volume Visualization	(VolVis, every 2-4 years since 1996)
Parallel and Large-Data Vis. & Graphics	(PVG, every 2 years since 1999)
Software Visualization	(ACM SoftVis 2003)
Virtual Reality	(IEEE VR is not a 'spin-off' of IEEE Visualization, but instead the major yearly VR conference since 1993)

By output/display modality:

2D visualization	(e.g. treemaps, table lens, hyperbolic browser, ...)
3D desktop visualization	(e.g. data flow systems, PARC Information Visualizer, ...)
Semi-Immersive Virtual Reality	(e.g. applications on Visual Workbench)
Immersive Virtual Reality	(applications in fully tracked HMD or CAVE environments)

By application area:
Architecture, Biomedical Applications, Bioinformatics, Business Process Modeling, Chemistry, Climatology, Commerce, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Earth Sciences, Ecosystems, Engineering (Aerospace, Automotive, Mech. Eng, Environmental Eng., etc.), Finance, Geology, Genome Visualization, Human Anatomy, Library Visualization, Medical Visualization, National Security and Homeland Defense, Network Visualizations, Oceanography, Particle Physics, Plant Visualization, Software Visualization, ...and many more!

Orthogonally to these and other classifications, we can group visualization publications into algorithms and techniques, architectures and systems, and case studies and applications.

Schedule

This schedule is meant as a first suggestion. It will be refined and updated during the first few sessions.

Tue, Sept. 23rd	Introduction and scheduling	IntroSlides
2nd week Mon, Sept. 29th	History and Foundations of Visualization	89-OverviewArticle 94-VisReport_ResearchIssues
3rd week Mon, Oct. 6th	Early Scientific Visualization	90-apE_DataFlow 91-VirtualWindtunnel
4th week Mon, Oct. 13th	Recent Scientific Visualization	96-IlluminatedStreamlines 01-VolRendTransferFunctions
5th week Mon, Oct. 20th	Non-Photorealistic Rendering of Illustrations	02-NonPhotoRealisticVolRend 98-NPR-LightingModel 99-NPR-Course
6th week Mon, Oct. 27th	Medical Visualization, Visualization for Biochemistry	98-ARLaprascopicSurgery 01-InteractiveMolecularDynamics 02-DynamicMolecularConformations
7th week Mon, Nov. 3rd	Information Visualization: Overview	Chapter 1 (Card, MacKinlay, Shneiderman) - handout 98-Survey of InfoVis Applications 95-NavigationalViewBuilder
8th week Mon, Nov. 10th	InfoVis: Interaction, Focus and Context	94 - Visual Information Seeking 95 - Selective Dynamic Manipulation of Visualizations 94 - Review and Taxonomy of Distortion-Oriented Vis 94 - Table Lens
9th week Mon, Nov. 17th	InfoVis: Software Visualization	03 - 3D Representations for SW Vis 03 - Graph Vis of SW Evolution
10th week Mon, Nov. 24th	Geographical Visualization Systems	01 - Cognitive Semiotic GeoVis 99 - Interactive Maps for Visual Data Exploration
11th week Mon, Dec 1st	Visualization and Sound	TBA

Books

In this seminar, we will mostly discuss papers that we will distribute online, or, in rare cases, as a xerox copy. There are, however, also several very good books. Most of the following works give introductions to and present stimulating examples from the field of Information Visualization, but we also list one book each for Scientific and Biomedical Visualization

Edward R. Tufte
    Envisioning Information (1990)
    The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1992)
    Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997)

Stuart K. Card, Jock D. MacKinlay (Editor), Ben Shneiderman (Editor)
    Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999)

Benjamin B. Bederson, Ben Shneiderman
The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections (2003)

Colin Ware
Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2000)

Richard Saul Wurman, Peter Bradford (Editor)
Information Architects (1997)

L. Rosenblum, R.A. Earnshaw, J. Encarnacao, H. Hagen, Gregory M. Nielson, A. Kaufman
Scientific Visualization: Advances and Challenges (1994)

Richard A. Robb
Biomedical Imaging, Visualization, and Analysis (1999)

Visualization Software

VTK - Visualization Toolkit
Khoros
InXight VisServer
Maya
Data Flow Systems:
- IRIS Explorer
- APE
- AVS,
- IBM Data Explorer
- Amira
more pointers