A lot has happened over the past few months.  Most of you have noticed, but I'll review it for you!  First, Bernd Hamann has been appointed to the position of Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Davis.  In this capacity, he has responsibility for oversight of the various Organized Research Units at UC Davis, of which IDAV is one.  This meant that he could not continue in his position as co-director of IDAV and the campus initiated a "search" to find his replacement.  In September, Ken Joy was asked to serve as the new co-director of the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization, and the activities of this "interesting" year were finally complete.

You may also have noticed that our name has changed.  We applied for this change in 1998, and our patience finally paid off when it was approved in May of 2004. 

So, we have a new co-director, and a new name!

I have always thought that the success formula at the University of California was very simple:  You recruit the best faculty, the best postdocs, and the best graduate students to UC Davis, and then set up an infrastructure that enables them to be successful.  In the past few years, we have been very fortunate to attract some of the world's truly outstanding faculty to our research group, and many professional colleagues have told me that our graduate students are the "envy" of most universities.  But, in order to help these great people become successful, we must create a productive infrastructure, and for us that is IDAV. 

IDAV is an Organized Research Unit at UC Davis that is directly placed under the Vice Chancellor for Research.  It is affiliated with a number of departments --  Computer Science, Applied Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Epidemiology, the Graduate School of Management, and the School of Medicine --  but is placed outside the "academic bureaucracy."  This enables us to move quickly in new situations without the bureaucratic overhead.  As an organized research unit, we get support from the University in the form of space (which is the most valuable commodity on campus) and support for our staff. 

I now have responsibility for this research infrastructure.  To improve this infrastructure, I need input from you.  I need to know the resources that you need to be successful, and I need feedback to see if our actions have a positive effect.  I want to do everything I can to increase the productivity of everyone affiliated with IDAV.  That is my single goal in  taking this job.

My office will be in 2142 Academic Surge, and I will be  wandering through the lab frequently.  Feel free to talk with me about your work, because the more I know, the better I can represent your needs in my discussions with the campus. 

When you bring in the best people, and provide a great infrastructure, then everything works well, everyone becomes successful, and everyone has fun!  I will work very hard to make your work at IDAV fun!

Ken

Installation of a 18'x9' tiled display wall will begin in October. The display wall will be located in the Virtual Reality Laboratory and will comprise six tiles with 12 projectors.  It will support active stereo, and an Intersense ultrasound/inertial tracking system.  A picture of the basic configuration is shown below.

This will be a wonderful addition to our lab.  The projects utilizing this system will be headed by Professor Oliver Staadt.

Graduate Program Announcements

The "all-hands" meeting of the IDAV Visualization and Graphics Group will be held from 7:00-8:30PM on Thursday, September 30, 2004 in Kemper Hall Room 1065.  This is a required meeting for all students who work in IDAV, or who aspire to work in IDAV.  Be There!

Don't forget the weekly seminar of the Visualization and Graphics Group.  It will be held Wednesday's from 5:30-6:30PM.  The room will be announced at a later date. Put it on your calendars!

Awards

• John Owens has been awarded the Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award.
   

• Janine Bennett has received a Student Employee Graduate Research Fellowship (SEGRF) from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  She will be working with Valerio Pascucci and Ken Joy on her research.
   

• Dan Coming has been awarded a HP-CITRIS Fellowship.
   

• Eric Klein received an Honorable Mention in the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

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

• Oliver Staadt was co-author of “blue-c API: A Multimedia and 3D Video Enhanced Toolkit for Collaborative VR and Telepresence,” which received the “best paper” award at the International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry (VRCAI) 2004, held in Singapore.
   

• Lok Hwa, Mark Duchaineau, and Ken Joy were co-authors of “4-8 Texture Hierarchies,” which was chosen as one of the top eight papers at IEEE Visualization 2004, to be held in Austin TX on October 10-15, 2004.  This paper has been invited to be expanded and submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and will compete for the “best paper” award in the conference.

Professional Activities

• Bernd Hamann was co-organizer of the Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Scientific Visualization, Computer Graphics, and Massive Data Exploration, held May 22-27, 2004 at Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the Banff International Research Station, in Banff, Alberta, Canada.  One of the goals of this project was to establish a “Dagstuhl-like” meeting of visualization researchers in North America.  The conference included presentations and brain-storming sessions to attempt to discover new research avenues in visualization and data exploration.  Bernd collaborated with Torsten Moeller and Robert Russell of Simon Fraser University on this effort.
   

• Ken Joy has been selected to be on the organizing panel for the National Visual Analytics Center.  This panel will develop the R&D agenda that will guide future research and development of visual analytics tools and technologies targeted toward Homeland Security issues.  The group met in Richland, Washington from August 3-5, 2004 and will have a second meeting in Austin, Texas from October 7-9, 2004.  The results of the two workshops will be a book describing the research agenda in visual analytics.  Look for this book to be published in January 2005.
   

• Ken Joy has been selected conference co-chair for the 2005 and 2006 EuroVis conference.  (EuroVis is the now the name for the former VisSym conference).  The 2005 conference will be held in Leeds, England, June 1-3, 2005, and the 2006 conference will be held in Pisa, Italy.
   

• Oliver Staadt has been selected to serve on the program committee of IEEE Virtual Reality 2005. The conference will be held in Bonn, Germany, March 12-16, 2004.
   

• Ken Joy has been selected as co-chair of the 2005 and 2007 Dagstuhl Visualization seminars.  The 2005 seminar will be held the second week of June in 2005.
   

• Ken Joy has been selected as a member of an NSF/NIH panel to develop the future research agenda for Visualization.  This effort seeks to update the 1986 NSF report on Visualization.  The panel meets September 22-23, 2004
   

• 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."
   

• John Owens was on the program committee for the Graphics Hardware Conference.  This conference was held from August 29-30 in Grenoble, France.
   

• Oliver Staadt served as program co-chair of the High Performance Computing Symposium, held in Arlington, VA, from April 18-22, 2004.

Conferences and Workshops

• Ingrid Hotz and Ken Joy attended the Dagstuhl Seminar “Perspectives Workshop: Visualization and Image Processing of Tensor Fields”, organized by Joacim Weickert of the University of Saarlands and Hans Hagen from the University of Kaiserslautern.  This seminar brought together researchers from mathematical sciences, image processing, medical sciences and visualization to discuss the difficulties in visualizing  tensor field data.  The seminar was held from April 18-23, 2004
   

• Kwan-Liu Ma and Ken Joy attended the DoE VIEWS workshop at Salt Lake City, Utah, July 20-21, 2004. 
   

• Kwan-Liu Ma gave several invited talks on his recent trip to Taiwan.  He gave talks at the National Cheng Kung University on July 6, 2004, at the National Chao Tung University on July 7, 2004, and at the National Taiwan University on July 9, 2004.
   

• Chris Co, Brett Wilson and David Wiley attended the Joint Eurographics/IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization, held in Konstanz, Germany, May 19-21, 2004.  Chris presented the paper “Meshless Isosurface Generation from Multiblock Data” with authors Chris Co, Serban Porumbescu and Ken Joy.  David presented the paper “Ray Casting Curved-Quadratic Elements,” with authors David Wiley, Hank Childs, Bernd Hamann, and Ken Joy.  Brett presented two papers:  "A Cluster-Space Visual Interface for Arbitrary Dimensional Classification of Volume Data," with co-authors Francis Tzeng and Kwan-Liu Ma, and "High-Quality Lighting for Pre-Integrated Volume Rendering," with co-authors Eric Lum, Brett Wilson and Kwan-Liu Ma.
   

• Ben Gregorski and Josh Senecal attended the Computer Graphics and Imaging Conference (CGIM) 2004, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 17-19, 2004.  Ben presented the paper “Out-of-core Interactive Display of Large Meshes using an Oriented Bounding Box-based Hardware Depth Query, with authors Haeyoung Ha, Ben Gregorski and Ken Joy.  Josh presented the paper “Reversible N-Bit to N-Bit Integer Haar-like Transforms”, with authors Josh Senecal, Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy
   

• Yong Kil and Nina Amenta presented the paper “Defining Point-set Surfaces”, at SIGGRAPH 2004.  Yong had the extra pressure of presenting the first paper of the conference, and he did great!
   

• Aaron Lefohn and John Owens co-authored the paper "Mio: Fast Multipass Partitioning via Priority-Based Instruction Scheduling" at Graphics Hardware in August. They co-authored the paper with Andy Riffel, Kiril Vidimce, and Mark Leone..
   

• Many IDAV students and faculty attended the ACM/SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, which was held August 8-12, 2004.  They included Nina Amenta, Oliver Staadt, John Owens, Nelson Max, Kwan-Liu Ma, Ken Joy, Chris Co, Aaron Lefohn, Brian Budge, Eric Lum, Serban Porumbescu, Ben Gregorski, Louis Feng, Francis Tzeng, Attila Gyulassy, Taylor Holliday, Lok Hwa, Yong Kil, Sung Park, Valerie Szudziejka, Hiroshi Akiba, Runzhen Huang, Hongfeng Yu, Minya Dai and Justin Walker.
   

• Eric Klein and Oliver Staadt attended the High-Performance Computing Symposium in Arlington, VA, April 18-22, 2004. Eric presented the paper "Sonification of Three-dimensional Vector Fields" with authors Eric Klein and Oliver Staadt.
   

• Kwan-Liu Ma gave an invited talk at Nissan Motor Company in Japan on June 24, 2004.
   

• Yong Kil presented the paper "The Domain of a Point Set Surface" at the Eurographics Symposium on Point-based Graphics, held in Zurich Switzerland, June 2-4, 2004.  He co-authored this paper with Nina Amenta.
   

• Brett Wilson presented the paper "I/O Strategies for Parallel rendering of Large Time-Varying Volume Data," at the Eurographics Symposium on parallel Graphics and Visualization (EGPGV04) at Grenoble, France, June 10-11, 2004.  The paper was co-authored by Hongfeng Yu, Kwan-Liu Ma and Joel Welling.
   

• Bernd Hamann, Ingrid Hotz, Peer-Timo Bremer, Kwan-Liu Ma and Ken Joy attended the Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Scientific Visualization, Computer Graphics, and Massive Data Exploration, held May 22-27, 2004 at Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the Banff International Research Station, in Banff, Alberta, Canada.
   

• Ken Joy attended the workshop to set the R&D agenda for the National Visual Analytics Center in Richland Washington, held August 3-5, 2004.
   

• Brett Wilson presented the paper "Rendering Complexity in Computer-Generated Pen-and-Ink Illustrations," at the 3rd International Symposium on non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, held in Annecy, France, June 7-9, 2004.  He co-authored the paper with Kwan-Liu Ma.
   

• Kwan-Liu Ma participated in the National Science Foundations ITR Principal Investigator meeting in Washington DC on May 23-27, 2004.

Internships

The Institute seems empty this summer, as many of our students have internships where they work jointly on problems with our industrial and national laboratory partners. 

• Aaron Lefohn worked at Pixar this summer.  He normally works one day per week at Pixar during the academic year.

• Hiroshi Akiba worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado.

• Karim Mahrous is working at Electronic Arts for the summer.

• Janine Bennett is working with Valerio Pascucci at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

• Sung Park is working with Peter Lindstrom at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the summer.

• Valerie Szudziejka is working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

• Taylor Holliday is working with Valerio Pascucci at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory this summer.

• Serban Porumbescu is working with Mark Duchaineau at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

• Robert Lin is working at Electronic Arts.

• Brian Budge has an internship at NVIDIA.

• Eric Klein has an internship at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C.

• Brett Wilson spent the summer at Google.

IEEE Visualization 2004

Lok Hwa, Ingrid Hotz, Eric Lum, Greg Schussman (alumni), and Min-Yu Wang will all present papers at the IEEE Visualization Conference, to be held in Austin, Texas, on October 10-15, 2004. 

• Lok will present the paper “Adaptive 4-8 Texture Hierarchies,” that he co-authored with Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy

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

• Greg, who received his Ph.D. this year, will be presenting the paper “Anisotropic Volume Rendering for Extremely Dense, Thin Line Data,” that he co-authored with Kwan-Liu Ma.

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

Aaron Lefohn, Ian Buck, Robert Strzodka, and John Owens will be giving a tutorial at the conference entitled "GPGPU: General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processors".  Aaron is the organizer of this tutorial.

Pacific Graphics 2004

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

• Josh will present 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 will present 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.

Supercomputing 2004

Hongfeng Yu and Kwan-Liu Ma will attend Supercomputing 2004, held in Pittsburg on November 6-12, 2004.

• Hongfeng will present the paper "A Parallel Visualization Pipeline for Terascale Earthquake Simulations" that he co-authored with Kwan-Liu Ma.

Workshop on Visualization and Data Mining for Computer Security

• Soon Tee Teoh will present the paper "Combining Visual and Automated Data Mining for Near Real Time Anomaly Detection and Analysis in BGP" at the CCS Workshop on Visualization and Data Mining for Computer Security, to be held in Washington DC, October 29, 2004.  He co-authored this paper with Ke Zhang, Shih-Ming Tseng, Kwan-Liu Ma and S. Felix Wu.
   

• Chris Muelder will present the paper (PortVis: A Tool for Port-Based Detection of Security Events) at the CCS Workshop on Visualization and Data Mining for Computer Security, October 29, 2004.  The paper has co-authors Jonathan McPerson, Kwan-Liu Ma, Paul Krystosk, Tony Bartoletti, and Marvin Chrisstensen.

Degrees Awarded

• Justin Walker received his Master’s Degree in Computer Science and has started work at Rhythm and Hues in July.

• Peer-Timo Bremer has taken a Postdoc position with John Hart at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  His Ph.D. will be signed off in December.

• Lars Linsen, who has been a Postdoc in IDAV for nearly two years, has taken a professorial position at Universität Greifswald in Germany.

• Ben Gregorski received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and has started work at Electronic Arts in Redwood City.

• Eric Lum has received his Ph.D. in Computer Science.  He will stay at IDAV as a postdoc.

• Soon Tee Teoh has received his Ph.D. in Computer Science.  He will stay at IDAV as a postdoc.

• Yang Liu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science.  He has plans for attending Law School.

• Greg Schussman received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, and is working at SLAC.

• Christian Hofsetz received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and now is a professor at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos in Brazil.

• Jonathan McPherson received his Master’s Degree in Computer Science and has started work at Microsoft in Redmond Washington.

• Alden Chew received his Master’s degree in Computer Science and has started work for Bioware in Alberta Canada.

• Abel Gezahegne received his Master’s degree in Computer Science and has started work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

• Nerissa Oberlander received her Master's Degree in Computer Science and has started work for Lockheed Martin.

• Ian Bowman got his Master's Degree in August 2004 and is now with Electronics for Imaging.

• David Crawford, who working in IDAV as an undergraduate researcher, received his Bachelor's degree in June 2004 and is now with MIT Lincoln Lab

Alumni News

• Liz Jurrus (MS, 1999) has taken a leave of absence from Pacific Northwest Laboratory and has entered the computer science graduate program at the University of Utah to work on her Ph.D. [SCI got a good one!]  Liz will also serve this year as the secretary of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics.

• Gerik Scheuermann (Postdoc, 1999-2001) has accepted a professorial position at the Institut für Informatik at the Universität Leipzig in Germany.  Gerik has been an Assistant Professor at the Universität Kaiserslautern for the past few years.

Student News

• Soon Tee Teoh was married on August 28, 2004.
   

  

A new academic year is starting.  This year we have twelve new students who have expressed interest in visualization and computer graphics. 

• John Anderson comes to us from the University of Pacific where he received his Bachelors Degree in June of 2004.  John has worked as a summer intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the past two summers, so he should fit in well.
   

• Yue Wang graduated from Peking University (China) with a Master's degree in computer science in 2004. 
   

• Shubhabrata Sengupta comes to us from the Indian Institute of Technology where he completed a Master's degree in 1998.
   

• Deb Ghosh received her Batchelor's degree from the University of Utah in May.  She has been working in IDAV most of the summer.
   

• Max  Mai is a UC Davis graduate, receiving his Bachelors Degree from UC Davis in June.
   

• Tom Slankard is also a UC Davis graduate, receiving his Bachelor's degree in computer science in 2004. Tom worked in IDAV as an undergraduate.
   

• Scott Dillard received his Bachelor's Degree in computer science from UC Davis in June.  He also worked in IDAV as an undergraduate.
   

• Hari Krishnan received his Batchelor's from UC Davis in 2002.  He worked in private industry for the past two years.
   

• Alfred Fuller received his Bachelor's degree from UC Davis last year.  He has a double major in computer science and computational physics.
   

• Bojin Li was awarded his Bachelor's degree from UC Davis in computer science in 2004.
   

• Chris Muelder graduated with a computer science Batchelor's Degree from UC Davis last year.
   

• Luke Gosink comes to us from industry where he has worked for the past 4 years.  He has been an extension student at UC Davis, taking courses in visualization and computer graphics for about a year.
   

• Alex Hartmann is an international visitor from the Technical University of Vienna.  He will be working with Ken Joy for the next few months, then return to Vienna to complete his degree.

Due to the length of this newsletter, and the productivity of our researchers, we felt that it would be excessive to add a list of the recent publications with IDAV co-authors to this newsletter.  When the newsletter is published regularly, we will complete this section.

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

One of the most valuable books running around the lab is not a visualization or a graphics text.  It is the book "Brag! : The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn without Blowing It" by Peggy Klaus.  This book (or one like it) should be an integral part of your library.

"Why?", you ask!  Because "self promotion" is one of the most difficult things for many of us.  We are computer geeks -- quiet people -- who are not well trained at public speaking or interpersonal communication. 

Suppose you meet Pat Hanrahan on an elevator at the hotel at SIGGRAPH.  You have less than 30 seconds to impress him with a description of your work.  Could you do it?  I don't believe that many of us could.

So check out this book.  I will be wandering through the lab at times, and will ask this question when I see you.  I have a little more than 30 seconds, but not much more...

Ken