Panel Members: Larry Rosenblum, NSF, Hanspeter Pfister, MERL,
Donald R. Jones, PNNL, DOE
In this panel, there are three presentations followed by questions from audiences. On-going research initiatives and possible funding
opportunities in visualization and computer graphics will be extensively addressed by the three panelists (see
talk abstracts and speakers' bio below).
Lawrence J. Rosenblum "Current Research Trends in Visualization"
The field of visualization has undergone considerable changes since its founding in the late 1980s. From its origins in scientific
visualization, new areas have arisen. These include information visualization and, more recently, mobile visualization (including
location-aware computing) and visual analytics. Several new trends are emerging. The most important is the fusion of visualization techniques
with other areas such as machine vision, data mining and data bases to promote broad-based advances. Another trend, which has not been well
met to date by visualization researchers, is for algorithms to be combined with usability studies to assure that techniques and systems
are well designed and that their value is quantified. This presentation will discuss current research trends in
visualization as well as briefly discuss trends in U.S. research funding.
Speaker's Bio:
Dr. Lawrence J. Rosenblum is Program Director for Graphics and Visualization at the National Science Foundation. He is on detail from
the Information Technology Division of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where for the past ten years he has been Director of Virtual
Reality (VR) Systems and Research. His research interests include mobile augmented reality (AR), scientific and uncertainty
visualization, VR displays, and applications of VR/AR systems. He has published over eighty scientific articles and has edited two books,
including Scientific Visualization: Advances & Challenges. From 1992 to 1994, he was Liaison Scientist for Computer Science at the Office
of Naval Research European Office. Rosenblum has guest edited special issues/sections of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A),
Computer, and Presence on visualization, VR, and AR.
Rosenblum received his Ph.D. in mathematics from The Ohio State University. He is on the editorial boards of IEEE CG&A and Virtual
Reality. He also has served on both the editorial board and advisory board of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer
Graphics. He is a Director of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee. Rosenblum received an IEEE Outstanding
Contribution Certificate for initiating and co-founding the IEEE Visualization Conference. He serves on the program, conference, and
steering committees of numerous international conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the IEEE Computer Society,
ACM, and Siggraph.
Hanspeter Pfister "NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges."
Relevant web page: http://www.sci.utah.edu/vrc2005/index.html
It has been 17 years since the original NSF report "Visualization in Scientific Computing" (McCormick, DeFanti et al. 1987). In the
intervening years, many of the grand challenges from those days have been addressed, and some of them have been answered. New frontiers
likewise have grown up to take their place. Conferences have been formed and thrive, seminal algorithms have appeared and matured, and
software and networking systems have been exploded beyond the imaginations of the attendees of the original panel. Great changes
have taken place, and hardware for visualization has become nearly ubiquitous. We are at a crossroads, and new vision is required.
The building of this new vision is the goal of the Visualization Research Challenges Report. To write the report, NIH and NSF organized
two very successful workshops. In the fall 2004 workshop, the panelists helped to outline the past achievements in scientific,
medical, and information visualization over the past 2 decades. We also began discussions on the future grand challenges for our
field. In the spring 2005 workshop, the panelists concluded these explorations and deliberations and crafted the structure for a report
that may serve as a guidebook for future initiatives, outlining the immediate and long-range challenges for the discipline of
visualization and its many related research areas, topics, and applications.
In this presentation I will summarize the findings and recommendations from the two workshops that are documented in the Visualization
Research Challenges Report. I will also solicit input and comments from the audience.
Speaker's Bio:
Hanspeter Pfister is Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at MERL - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories - in Cambridge,
MA. He is the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric's real-time volume rendering hardware for PCs. His research interests
include computer graphics, scientific visualization, and graphics architectures. His work spans a range of topics, including point-based
graphics, appearance modeling and acquisition, computational photography, 3D television, and face modeling. Hanspeter Pfister
received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received his M.S. in
Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, in 1991. Dr. Pfister has taught courses at
major graphics conferences including SIGGRAPH, IEEE Visualization, and Eurographics. He has been teaching introductory and advanced graphics
courses at the Harvard Extension School since 1999. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
(TVCG), chair of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (vgtc), and has served as a member of international program
committees of major graphics conferences. Dr. Pfister was the general chair of the IEEE Visualization 2002 conference. He is senior member
of the IEEE, and member of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Eurographics Association.
Personal web page: http://www.merl.com/people/pfister/
Donald R. Jones "Visual Analytics Future Technical Challenges"
The Department of Homeland Security's Directorate of Science and Technology serves as the primary research and development arm of
Homeland Security, using our nation's scientific and technological resources to provide federal, state, and local officials with the
technology and capabilities to protect the homeland. The focus is on catastrophic terrorism-threats to the security of our homeland that
could result in large-scale loss of life and major economic impact. Science and Technology's work is designed to counter those
threats, both by evolutionary improvements to current technological capabilities and development of revolutionary, new technological
capabilities
The analysis process requires human judgment to make the best possible evaluation of incomplete, inconsistent, and potentially deceptive
information in the face of rapidly changing situations. Today, analysts have a select number of software programs available to help
them organize their information, gain an overview of it, explore it, and examine high-level trends. Although these tools help, they only
scratch the surface in terms of meeting true analyst needs. Current technologies cannot address the needs for handling the massive, messy,
and ever-changing volumes of information and the diversity of types of information. Furthermore, current analytical tools provide basic
capabilities such as query and search but very little in the way of support for the complex tasks of the analysis, synthesis, and
discovery process. Few current tools address the need to communicate analytical results and products to their audiences.
One major mission of this organization is to advance science and technology to develop capabilities that enable the creation,
application, and dissemination of knowledge to prepare for, anticipate, prevent, and detect terrorist activities and, if
necessary, restore the nation's operational capabilities.
Visual analytics represents an avenue for addressing many of these major challenges. It emphasizes the creation of software and methods
that help the analyst see and understand information more thoroughly and rapidly through a combination of innovative data transformations,
visual representations, and analytical techniques.
The National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) is a national resource that provides strategic direction and coordination of
activities to discover, develop, and implement innovative visual information analysis methods. Visual analytics helps analysts to both
detect the expected and discover the unexpected. It combines the art of human intuition and the science of mathematical deduction to
perceive patterns and derive knowledge and insight. NVAC will pave the way for fundamentally new software tools to deal with huge volumes of
data in the digital libraries of the future. The techniques developed by NVAC will apply to homeland security problems, but will also have
value in other fields where data volumes are overwhelming, such as biological research. The NVAC builds upon a wealth of research,
drawing upon such diverse fields as scientific and information visualization, statistics, mathematics, cognitive science, and
decision theory. Much of this research has been reduced to practice in computer systems that
facilitate understanding and discovery.
The NVAC has established a blue ribbon panel composed of leaders from academia, industry, and government to define the
research and development agenda for visual analytics. This agenda recommends a wide
variety of actions necessary to meet homeland security needs. These recommendations will drive future research investments in visual
analytics research and development.
This presentation provides an overview of major analytical challenges to be addressed by NVAC. It will also present the major research and
development recommendations for Visual Analytics to build a robust research community in visual analytics and enabling accelerated
adoption of new technologies by the user community
Speaker's Bio:
Dr. Donald R. Jones is a Scientist V at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He joined PNNL in 1989. His currently assignment
is with the Computational and Information Science Division as a member of the leadership team for the National Visual Analytics Center (NVAC)
with specific responsibilities for the NVAC R&D Computer Systems Architecture. Previously he worked in the Environmental Science
Molecular Science's (EMSL) as a Technical Group Leader for Molecular Science Compute Facility (MSCF) Visualization and User Services
(VisUS) group and the manager of the EMSL MSCF Graphics and Visualization Laboratory. This VisUS group provided software
engineering, scientific consulting for software applications, web site development, web site management, software development,
general-purpose computer graphic resources and visual computing tools for EMSL scientists and MSCF users. He also served as the Deputy
Manager of the Computational Science & Engineering Initiative. Chief Technical Officer for AGIS at PNNL spin-off business that was to
utilize remote sensing technology for agriculture applications. He was the group leader for the Computational Chemistry Environment (CCE)
group which developed a new electronic problem solving environment for computational chemistry, called Extensible Computational Chemistry
Environment (Ecce), part of the Molecular Science Software Suite (MS3) which was recognized with an R&D 100 award for 1999. His research
interests include object oriented data bases, data mining, internet applications development, software engineering, software development,
scientific visualization, graphical user interfaces, image processing, data fusion, video technology for the sciences, multimedia for
scientific presentations, and scientific animation. Dr. Jones received his Ph.D. in engineering at Brigham Young University in
1985. He is a member of the Association of Computing Machines - SIGGRAPH. Jones also is an associate member of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is currently the Cochairman of the HPC Analytics Committed for Supercomputing 2005 & 2006. He is
also a member of the steering committee for the Department of Energy (DOE) Computer Graphics Forum. He served as a member of the executive
committee of the Molecular Graphics & Modelling Society of the Americas. He has served as the chair of both the Special Interest
Group on Scientific Visualization at Hanford and the Tri-Cities
ACM-SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter from 1992 - 1998. He has served as the chairs of GViz '94 and Gviz '96, a local conference for graphics
and visualization in Richland, Washington. He has written or contributed to more than Forty publications in his field. He has been
an invited speaker at numerous symposia and conferences.
Panel Members: Thomas Ertl,
University of Stuttgart, Kari Pulli, Nokia Research Center
and MIT Graphics Lab, Karthik Swaminathan, Screentoons
International, Leonard Quam, Vindigo
Moderator: Jon Peddie, President, Jon Peddie Research
Until recently mobile platforms, with their tiny monochrome displays, slow processors, and closed development environments did not provide an interesting graphics platform. This has changed: high-quality color displays are supported by fast CPUs and in some cases by dedicated graphics hardware, and open development platforms with recently standardized mobile 3D APIs provide very interesting and quickly developing graphics platforms. Our panel has representatives from all aspects of the mobile graphics world. Brief introductory presentations by the panelists are followed by an interactive discussion on the current state and future of mobile graphics.
Speakers' bio:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Ertl is a full professor of computer science at
the University of Stuttgart, Germany and the head of the Visualization and
Interactive Systems Institute (VIS). He received a MS in computer science from
the University of Colorado at Boulder and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from
the University of Tuebingen. His research interests include visualization,
computer graphics, and human computer interaction.
Web page: http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~ertl/
Dr. Kari Pulli is a Research Fellow at Nokia Research Center and
currently also a Visiting Scientist at MIT. He has been an active contributor to
several mobile graphics standards and heads most graphics research activities at
Nokia. Kari has a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Washington and
Lic.Tech., M.Sc., and EMBA from University of Oulu (Finland).
Web page: http://people.csail.mit.edu/kapu/
Karthik Swaminathan has been working in the Interactive Entertainment
industry for more than 15 years. After studying Psychology at NYU he received
his masters in Interactive Telecommunications at Tisch with his thesis on small
screen design in '96. Being an early adopter of Macromind Director, he had
started his career working as a developer of CD-ROM entertainment titles. When
attention was shifting to the web he became a shockwave and rich media
specialist working for Razorfish R-Sub gallery and Word Magazine. Karthik
started designing applications for mobile devices and telephones for Lucent and
Viacom and now has been creating games and entertainment for the small screen as
co-founder of Screentoons. He is also the founding member of the IGDA's Mobile
Game Development SIG.
Web page: http://www.karthik.tv
Leonard Quam is Director of Games for leading U.S. mobile media publisher
Vindigo. A 20-year game industry veteran, he has designed or produced over 40
games played by millions of people in diverse media, from print, to online, to
PC, and most recently mobile phones. He was previously CTO and co-founder of
U.S. mobile games pioneer Unplugged Games and prior to that VP of Product
Development for developer Crossover Technologies.
Dr. Jon Peddie is one of the pioneers
of the graphics industry, starting his career in computer graphics in 1962.
After the successful launch of several graphics manufacturing companies, Peddie
began JPA in 1984 to provide comprehensive data, information and management
expertise to the computer graphics industry. In 2001 Peddie left JPA and formed
Jon Peddie Research (JPR) to provide customer intimate consulting and market
forecasting services. Peddie lectures at numerous conferences on topics
pertaining to graphics technology and the emerging trends in digital media
technology. Recently named one of the most influential analysts, he is
frequently quoted in trade and business publications, and contributes articles
to numerous publications including as well as appearing on CNN and TechTV.
Peddie is also the author of several books including Graphics User Interfaces
and Graphics Standards, High Resolution Graphics Display Systems, and Multimedia
and Graphics Controllers, and a contributor to Advances in Modeling, Animation,
and Rendering.
Web page: http://www.jonpeddie.com