An Illustration from the paper “Adaptive 4-8 Texture Hierarchies”, by Lok Hwa, Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy, published at IEEE Visualization 2004 (more)

Welcome to the second issue of the newsletter for the Visualization and Graphics Research Group of the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization at UC Davis. The past two months are the "off season" for our group. During the summer and fall, our lives are driven by conferences, presentations and papers. In the fall, we look toward preparation of research results and papers for the conference submission dates that come upon us too quickly.

This will all soon change, as the first dates are almost upon us. December 17th is the submission date for EuroVis 2005, with several more falling in January.

This newsletter issue reflects the activities of our group from October through December 2004. For previous issues of our newsletter please visit the newsletter archive in our website http://graphics.idav.ucdavis.edu.

Enjoy!

Great programs are built with great people -- intellectual horsepower -- and we have taken steps in the past two months to attract many top-rank students to our program.

First, with Hans Hagen and the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, we have been chosen as the lead United States institution in the creation of an international graduate school for "Visualization of Large and Unstructured Data Sets - Applications in Geospatial Planning, Modeling, and Engineering.'' This effort is sponsored by The German National Research Foundation. Other US institutions collaborating on this effort are Arizona State, Utah, and UC Irvine. This effort will bring a number of outstanding German research students to our institute, and will allow selected American graduate students to work in Germany.

Second, together with the same institutions, we have submitted an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) proposal to the National Science Foundation. If funded, this would support the initial graduate student training years for as many as eight students per year. (Bernd Hamann, Gunther Weber and Ingrid Hotz of IDAV lead the US efforts on both of the above proposals.)

Third, we will hold our initial "information day" for prospective graduate students on Saturday, December 11, 2004 at UC Davis. We expect a number of prospective graduate students to attend, to talk with faculty, look at demos, and to see the possibilities for outstanding research at UC Davis.

We expect 12 to 15 new students to enroll in graduate programs that support our Institute at UC Davis in the fall of 2005. If you add this to the number of international visitors from the International Graduate School, we could have as many as 20 new students each year performing research in IDAV.

Now, all I have to do is find space for all of these great people.

It's a great problem to have...

Ken

IDAV Announcements

Installation of our 18'x9' tiled display wall began in early November, and is about 90% complete. Fakespace installed the structure, the screen, and the 12 projectors (6 tiles with 2 projectors each). The liquid crystal shutters we require for active stereoscopic display have been delayed, but will hopefully arrive in about a week.

The computing cluster to drive the display wall (one dual-Opteron head node, six single-Opteron render nodes with ATI FireGL X2 graphics cards, two single-Opteron audio nodes, and Gigabit Ethernet) has arrived and is installed, but is "flakey." All our VR software is running on the display wall, currently using anaglyphic stereo with red/blue glasses.

The above picture was taken in the installation process, and shows the dual projector setup.  This virtual environment is the first of its kind installed in the world.  The projects utilizing this system will be headed by Professor Oliver Staadt.

Also, the Keck CAVE is finally moving ahead - the purchase order went out to Fakespace Systems about a week ago (The last guarantee we got from Fakespace during the bidding process was installation within 20 weeks of order -- so February 2005 seems likely.)  We are currently preparing two NSF proposals about Keck CAVES work, and have started developing the Keck applications on our existing VR infrastructure.  The IDAV effort is supported by Oliver Kreylos, Oliver Staadt and Bernd Hamann.

Upcoming Seminars

Dr. Tony DeRose, the head of the new Research Division of Pixar, will be visiting campus on Tuesday, December 7, 2004.  The time and title of his talk will be announced.

The weekly seminar of the Visualization and Graphics Group is held Wednesday's from 5:30-6:30PM in 1131 Kemper Hall.

Awards

• 

  Brian Budge has been awarded a DAAD graduate student research scholarship. The scholarship will run from the 15th of January to the 15th of August 2005. He will be working with Prof. Alexander Keller at the University of Ulm in Germany on photorealistic rendering techniques. The scholarship covers travel to Ulm from the US as well as a monthly stipend.
  
  
  
  

• Dr. Professor Hans Hagen of the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and Bernd Hamann have received notification of the funding of an International Research Training Group entitled ``Visualization of Large and Unstructured Data Sets - Applications in Geospatial Planning, Modeling, and Engineering,'' This international graduate program involves the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany as the overall lead institution, UC Davis as the U.S. lead institution, and Arizona State University, UC Irvine, and University of Utah.  This program is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), by 2,540,940 Euro.

  This joint PhD student research training effort will support twelve German PhD students to pursue their degree in areas at the interface of visualization and geospatial research. The program has a built-in requirement for the German students to spend a substantial part of their research training at the US partner institutions, of which IDAV is the lead institution.

Invited Talks

• Nina Amenta gave an invited talk at the conference on Mathematical Methods for Curves and Surfaces, held in Tromso, Norway from July 1-6, 2004.
  

• Oliver Staadt gave an invited talk at the High-Performance Computing Symposium, held in Arlington, VA, from April 18-22, 2004.

Best Paper Awards

• Lok Hwa, Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy were co-authors of “Adaptive 4-8 Texture Hierarchies,” which was chosen as the best paper of IEEE Visualization 2004.  The conference was held in Austin Texas from October 10-15, 2004.

Professional Activities 

• Nina Amenta has been appointed an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Graphics.
  

• Ken Joy has been busy with the activities to set the research agenda for the National Visual Analytics Center. He is a member of a national panel that will develop the R&D agenda to guide future research and development of visual analytics tools and technologies targeted toward Homeland Security. Recently, the group met in Austin, Texas from October 7-9, 2004, and has been developing chapters for a book that will appear in January, 2005..
  

• Aaron Lefohn was co-organizer and speaker in the ACM/SIGGRAPH short course “GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware”, held August 11, 2004 at SIGGRAPH  2004 in Los Angeles.  He was also a speaker in the short course "Real-time Volume Graphics."

Conferences and Workshops

• Many IDAV students and faculty attended the IEEE Visualization 2004 conference in Austin Texas, which was held October 10-15, 2004. They included Kwan-Liu Ma, Frances Tzeng, Eric Lum, Minya Dai, Hiroshi Akiba, Runzhen Huang, Hongfeng Yu, Nathan Fout, Min-Yu Huang, Ken Joy, Lok Hwa, Louis Feng, Chris Co, John Owens, Aaron Lefohn, Nina Amenta, David Wiley, Matthew Godwin, Nelson Max, Ingrid Hotz, Vijay Natarajan, Hank Childs
   

• Lok Hwa, Ingrid Hotz, Eric Lum, Greg Schussman, Vijay Natarajan, and Min-Yu Wang presented papers at the IEEE Visualization Conference,  held in Austin, Texas, October 10-15, 2004.

  • Lok presented the paper “Adaptive 4-8 Texture Hierarchies,” that he co-authored with Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy. This paper won the best paper award of the conference.
    

  • Ingrid presented the paper “Physically Based Methods for Tensor Field Visualization,” that she co-authored with Louis Feng, Hans Hagen, Bernd Hamann, Boris Jeremic and Ken Joy
    

  • Eric presented the paper “Lighting Transfer Functions Using Gradient Aligned Sampling,” that he co-authored with Kwan-Liu Ma.
    

  • Vijay presented that paper "Local and global comparison of continuous functions," that he co-authored with Herbert Edelsbrunner, John Harer, and Valerio Pascucci
    

  • Min-Yu presented the paper “Visualizing Gyrokinetic Simulations,” that he co-authored with Kwan-Liu Ma, Scott Klasky and Stephane Ethier.
    

• Aaron Lefohn, Ian Buck, Robert Strzodka, and John Owens gave a full-day tutorial at the IEEE Visualization Conference entitled "GPGPU: General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processors".  This course was featured in the NVIDIA Developer Newsletter, and the course notes have been downloaded approximately 2500 times since they were posted. These notes can be found at http://www.gpgpu.org/vis2004. Aaron was the organizer of this tutorial.
  

• Josh Senecal and Brian Budge attended Pacific Graphics 2004, held in Seoul, Korea on October 6-8, 2004.

  • Josh presented the paper “An improved N-bit to N-bit reversible Haar-like Transform,” that he co-authored with Peter Lindstrom, Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy.
    

  • Brian presented the paper “Multi-dimensional transfer functions for interactive 3D flow visualization,” that he co-authored with Sung Park, Lars Linsen, Bernd Hamann, and Ken Joy.
    

• Hongfeng Yu attended Supercomputing 2004, held in Pittsburg on November 6-12, 2004.  He presented the paper "A Parallel Visualization Pipeline for Terascale Earthquake Simulations" that he co-authored with Kwan-Liu Ma.
   

• Soon Tee Teoh, and Chris Muelder attended the CCS Workshop on Visualization and Data Mining for Computer Security, held in Washington DC, October 29, 2004.
   

  • Soon Tee presented the paper "Combining Visual and Automated Data Mining for Near Real Time Anomaly Detection and Analysis in BGP" that  co-authored with Ke Zhang, Shih-Ming Tseng, Kwan-Liu Ma and S. Felix Wu.
     

  • Chris presented the paper "PortVis: A Tool for Port-Based Detection of Security Events" that he co-authored with Jonathan McPerson, Kwan-Liu Ma, Paul Krystosk, Tony Bartoletti, and Marvin Chrisstensen.
     

• Yong Kil gave a presentation at the UC Berkeley Graphics Lunch
   

• Kwan-Liu Ma, Bernd Hamann, Oliver Staadt and Ken Joy attended the LLNL/OVCR Workshop on Homeland Security at UC Davis on November 4, 2004.

• David Wiley will is going to Austin Texas to present the ``evolutionary morphing'' project to a group of biologists working on the evolutionary tree of Amphibians (AmphibiaTree). David is working on this project with Nina Amenta.

We have hosted the following visitors during the past two months:

• Werner Benger from the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum in Berlin, Germany visited on November 3rd.
  

• Andreas Gerndt from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, visited on November 15th.
  

• Professor Kenji Ono from Tokyo University in Japan visited IDAV on November 15-16, 2004
  

• Michael Garland from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, visited on November 18th.

New Members of our Group

• 

  Vijay Natarajan has recently joined us as a post-doctoral researcher.  He recently graduated from Duke University with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He holds a bachelors degree in computer science and a masters degree in mathematics from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, India. Vijay's primary research interests are in scientific visualization, computational geometry, computational topology, and meshing.  In collaboration with researchers at IDAV, Vijay is currently developing efficient methods for segmenting scalar and vector fields. He is also working with scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Davis to apply these topology based methods to different application domains.

Student News

• Over 30 students, faculty, and postdocs from IDAV attended the "Incredibles" premier on November 5th as part of the November Student Social Outing.

• Soon Tee Teoh participated in the visualization contest of InfoVis 2004 and won second place.

Alumni News

• Lok Hwa (MS, 2004) has taken a position as a layout technical director with Dreamworks/PDI.

For Fun!

• Karim Mahrous (MS, 2004) is mentioned in a Washington Post article on gaming. Fun reading at the Washington Post.

The following publications from our group have appeared recently:

• Martin Bertram, Mark A. Duchaineau, Bernd Hamann and Kenneth I. Joy, "Generalized B-Spline Subdivision-Surface Wavelets for Geometry Compression," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 10, No. 3, May/June 2004, 326-338.  

• David Wiley, Martin Bertram and Bernd Hamann, "On a Construction of a Hierarchy of Best Linear Spline Approximations Using a Finite Element Approach," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 10, No. 5, September/October 2004, 548-563.

   

• Ben Gregorski, Joshua Senecal, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy, "Adaptive Extraction of Time-Varying Isosurfaces," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 10, No. 6, November/December 2004, 683-694.

   

• Richard Cook, Nelson Max, Claudio T. Silva and Peter L. Williams, "Image-Space Visibility Ordering for Cell Projection Volume Rendering of Unstructured Data," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol 10, No. 6, November/December 2004, 695-707.

We invite the reader to browse through our publication database at http://graphics.cs.ucdavis.edu/publications.

On making mistakes...

"So go ahead and make mistakes.  Make all you can.  Because that's where you'll find success.  On the far side of failure."  Thomas J. Watson, Sr.

"The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.  Do not be afraid to make mistakes providing you do not make the same one twice." Theodore Roosevelt

"Trying to not make mistakes is probably the biggest mistake of all."  John Wooden

Remember.  All the great advances lie outside your comfort zone.