SCI faculty members Amir Arzani, Kate Isaacs (@kisaacs.bsky.social), and Bei Wang Phillips recently received a prestigious national honor: the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Congrats to these rising stars! 🌟 #PECASE @utah.edu
Speaking of Bergen, ever considered moving to Norway? We have a job opening for a Tenured Associate or full Professor in Visual Data Science / Visualization 📊! I can add that as a tenured associate professor there is a clear path towards promotion to full professor. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
👇 We're building something new... 👇
Check out the full video from our #SC24 Art of HPC submission showing cancer cell transport. Did you check out the mini-art exhibit at the conference? I thought it was a fun new addition.
The 2025 SciVis Contest Data is available!
If you/your team/your students are looking for an exciting visualization challenge (it's about helping scientists develop new, sustainable materials), take a look at the contest data:
sciviscontest2025.github.io
#Visualization #IEEEVIS #SciVis #Contest
Trying something new:
A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?"
It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...
Poster by Hayden Estes and team showing iSeeMore, a kinetic data sculpture visualizing predicted tokens in an LLM. It is a spiral tower of LED matrices held by an aluminum chassis.
Some neat data visualizations in the posters too. This ACM SRC poster describes iSeeMore from VirginiaTech, a kinetic sculpture for visualizing parallel algorithms, in this case LLM computations. Hope to some day see it in person!
"Challenges of Finding Cyber Attacks and Remediating Network Issues" by Phuong Cao at NCSA. This shows a node link diagram showing 2.29 million TCP connections in the Yifan Hu layout. It's cloud of tiny black points and thin lines with small clusters of scanner attacks targeting a single node, resulting in internal cone-like structures. Four zoom ins show more details of these attacks.
Phuong Cao at NCSA visualizes 15 seconds of TCP connections drawn by Gephi (29k-ish nodes). The online version shows different cyber attacks: sc24.conference-program.com/presentation...
So many questions to ask of this data! Graph drawings get messy quick, but curiosity always has us looking!
The Art of HPC at #SC24 houses all kinds of art and data visualizations this year. Come see in B301!
"What's going on in there?" by @cscullyallison.bsky.social , Kevin Menear, & Dmitry Duplyakin delightfully displays the kinds of science being computed on Kestrel.
NASA’s Nicky Fox delivering an incredible plenary for #SC24. Here she is discussing monitoring the uncontrolled wildfires in Pacific states this year
Screenshot from a video of NASA’s Nicky Fox (pictured on stage, to the right) presenting gorgeous rotor flow for better understanding the aerodynamics of smaller aircraft like drones. Also pictured is the SC24 sign-language translator doing an excellent job.
Visualization of a parachute inflation simulation, with SC24 plenary speaker, NASA’s Nicky Fox, pictured to the right. Her excellent sign-language interpreter is pictured to the left.
SC24’s plenary speaker, NASA’s Nicky Fox, presenting a coronal mass ejection event from Sep. 29, as imaged by the GOES-19 satellite
NASA’s Nicky Fox is presenting an enchanting plenary for #SC24. The high-impact applications she’s highlighting from Earth’s weather to aerodynamics to #CFD to medicine to space flight to space weather and more all depend on 🧪 and #HPC!
Photo of slide from Shilpika's talk at ProTools24. It shows a D3js visualization in a Jupyter notebook of the load on the Theta supercomputer. Day time spike (top) versus regular load in the evening, color versus baseline. A scatter chart shows temperature variations.
Yesterday at ProTools, Shilpika from Argonne presented their system for finding patterns in regularly sampled data about their machines, too much to store without this kind of analysis along the way, including machine visualizations in Jupyter to examine.
What more HPC vis will today bring? #SC24
Photo of three 3D printed objects sitting on the keys of a piano. The middle is a white teapot on a red trapezoidal base. The lid of the teapot has a red capital U for Utah on it. On the left is a flat kit for a six sided die in red and white. On the right is a flat kit for a similar four sided die. In both, the 1 is replaced with a U.
Halfway to my full set of 6 platonic solids by way of the Utah booth at #SC24 thanks to the cool folks at CHPC.
I am recruiting a postdoc! The research emphasis is participatory design for decision-making interfaces. Check out the two project descriptions on my website. people.cs.uchicago.edu/~kalea/prosp...
The position is through UChicago’s Data Science Institute. datascience.uchicago.edu/research/pos...
The day after I have multiple low-stakes small-group activities.
Here is the ARXIV link to the paper if anyone is interested in reading it in full. arxiv.org/abs/2205.04557 Also, please reach out to me if you have any questions about the work, I’d love to chat.
UpSet won the #ieeevis InfoVis 10-year test of time award 🎉. Thanks to @ngehlenborg.bsky.social @henstr.bsky.social Romain Vuillemot, and Hanspeter Pfister for being an awesome team to work with on this. I wrote up my reflections on what made UpSet successful: vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2024/10...
I was super excited to present my work on vis and preference elicitation for participatory budgeting yesterday at IEEE VIS. arxiv.org/abs/2407.20103
Lots more work to do in public-facing vis applications and collective decision-making!
Come see Yifan talk about it in the "Applications: Industry, Computing, and Medicine", first paper in the last session of the day!
...or, check out the paper "Visual Exploratory Analysis for Designing Large-Scale Network-on-Chip Architectures: A Domain Expert-Led Design Study"
The mesh view has a semantic zoom capabilities. At the current level of zoom, components are shown aggregated in 4 x 4 super nodes. A bird's eye view in the lower left shows traffic across the mesh.
My collaborators were tempted to skip design process steps, leading to some interventions. Yifan's sincere championing of vis, tools, & design kept these fruitful and pleasant. :)
Furthermore, designing domain-side gave us a fluid data collection to vis implementation loop!
Overivew of Vis4Mesh system. There are four linked views. One shows a node-link diagram indicating a mesh network on the chip. Links are drawn in both directions and color indicates how congested the computer component is. Another panel shows an icicle timeline indicating fine-grained behavior within a selected component. The third panel is a stacked bar chart with an aligned pez chart shows both total network traffic and the most congested link. The fourth has controls for filtering the kinds of network traffic.
Too many computing problems to vis, not enough time!
Thursday #ieeevis, fourth session, *Computer Architecture* Prof. Yifan Sun presents a domain-expert led design study!
Three chip experts, with some help from me, designed an interactive vis to analyze simulations of new architecture ideas:
Our full collection of tasks and queries is described in the paper linked below.
We assembled these to help us with both selecting visual designs for large scale Gantt charts but also for data management concerns that come with drawing them!
arxiv.org/abs/2408.04050
A partial view of the heat map. It shows the first 7 rows indicating data queries of "Get data from range", "Get event attributes", "Get data on pattern match", "Get events in cond. range", "Get track details", "Get track ordering", and "Get node neighbor details." It also shows the first 15 tasks, including "Display full Gantt", "Display event attributes", "Display a window", "Re-encode", "Compare datasets", "Display event distributions", "Aggregate events", "Derive attributes", "Display patterns", "Browse", "Highlight events", "Lookup events", "Aggregate tracks", "Display track attributes", "Re-order tracks". The first query, Get data from range, matches many of the tasks, with up to 24 papers implementing "Browse" but only 2 implementing "Derive attributes."
While the example above is small, in computing and manufacturing contexts, Gantt chart data might have billions of events.
We collect supported tasks, how they are implemented in vis designs, and what queries need to be optimized to support them. This heat map shows prevalence in the literature:
Depiction of a Gantt chart. There are two axes, "Time" in horizontal and "Track" in vertical. The legend shows that rectangles indicate events and arrows indicate dependencies. This example has three discrete rows of rectangles. Each rectangle has a different length and position in Time, but a fixed height and one of three fixed Track positions. Arrows point between boxes, crossing between different tracks.
Thursday #ieeevis, first session, Sayef Azad Sakin is presenting "A Literature-based Visualization Task Taxonomy for Gantt Charts," in the "Short Papers: Perception “& Representation” session!
We collect visualization tasks implemented by Gantt charts:
Alright, just had my last presentation at 🌴 IEEE VIS for this year (talked about #DaVE - dave-vis.com ) and while I am very happy for the discussions that are happening in the conference Discord, I cannot wait to meet everyone again in person. Let’s meet in #Vienna!
#ieeevis
A nice write up of the really impressive showing from University of Utah/SCI at this years #ieeevis! Exciting to be part of this mind bendingly cool group
www.sci.utah.edu/the-institut...
Thanks Alark!
interested in accessibility, visualization, and data ethics?
i'm recruiting phd students to join the data & design group at cu boulder!
we're building a collaborative space for people to grow into interdisciplinary researchers of technology and society.
#ieeevis
data-and-design.org/recruiting
Screen capture from a Jupyter notebook that has cells. The first is an interactive node-link diagram representing the calling context tree. The second is a table of data. These are essentially linked views in that interacting with the node-link diagrams via selecting causes the table cell to change automatically to show the data associated with the selection.
We observed that even strong coders found vis better suited for some tasks and that blending interactive vis and scripting could suggest alternative designs for multiple coordinated views. However, even in a domain with strong programming skills, state tracking in the notebook could be challenging.
Diagram showing task analysis in our specific case of calling context tree analysis. We found path tracing, identifying ancestors & descendants, structure comparison, outlier detection, and elision of substructures to be better suited to visualization. Scripting better served metric comparisons, complex criteria filtering, scaling analyses, and storing and recovering. We implemented ways of detecting outliers based on a single metric, aggregating based on function identity, and extracting state from the visualization in both scripting and interactive visualization.
Our context was an interactive call tree visualization for use in tandem with a domain-specific data science library for use in Jupyter notebooks. We considered what tasks were better handled by coding or interactive vis to prioritize design elements and features:
Diagram showing how to select whether a task should be supported by visualization or scripting (or both) based on the frequency of the task and the specificity (e.g., complexity, concreteness) of the task. Highly specific and infrequent tasks are better suited to scripting. Low specificity tasks done frequently are better suited to visualization. However, there's a large overlap where either could support and there are certain kinds of tasks which are suited predominantly to one or the other despite frequency or complexity. For example, we found network structure tasks strongly suited to visualization for our audience.
Wednesday #ieeevis, fourth session, Connor Scully-Allison is presenting “Design Concerns for Integrated Scripting and Interactive Visualization in Notebook Environments,” in the Scripts, Notebooks, and Provenance session!
We consider whether to support tasks via scripting or visualization:
