The VisCenter is a key partner in the Renaissance Computing Initiative (RENCI). This is a partnership among 5 NC universities: UNC Chapel Hill, NC State, UNC Charlotte, Duke, and UNC Asheville. The VisCenter has joined with the Urban Institute and CAGIS to form RENCI@uncc. The thrust of RENCI@uncc is the development of urban growth models for the whole state and novel interactive visualization techniques to enable understanding and decision-making using these complex models. The VisCenter leads the latter effort through the development of the Renaissance Situation Room, located in the VisCenter, which includes a multi-touch table, tiled display, immersive stereoscopic environment, and integrated interaction for all these tools. New interactive visualizations of the urban growth model and related models are displayed and used within this environment. To learn more about RENCI@uncc, click here.

At IEEE VisWeek, October 10-16 (which includes the Visualization, InfoVis, and VAST Conferences), the VisCenter again had one of the largest groups of attendees with 18 students and faculty. VisCenter attendees led workshops, planned future VisWeek events, participated in many discussions, and presented papers and posters.

Lane Harrison and Roman Pyzh of the Computer Science Department have been awarded DHS Fellowships that will give them 2½ years of support with a stipend of $2300 per month and $1500 per year of travel support for 3 years. Fellowship holders will have summer internships at Pacific Northwest National Lab or another laboratory conducting relevant research. The purpose of the fellowships is to build a cadre of future research and development leaders in science areas relevant to homeland security. The fellowship program is administered by James Foley of Georgia Tech and William Tolone of UNC Charlotte.

Bill Ribarsky has been named to the Steering Committee of the DHS Center of Excellence for Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure, and Emergency Management (DIEM). He will oversee efforts in Advanced Information Systems. Ribarsky and his colleagues Aidong Lu and Zachary Wartell will lead research in applying visualization and visual analysis to hurricane wind and rain fields, storm surge on coastal terrain, and the resilience of urban infrastructures in coastal cities.

The interdisciplinary Dance.Draw Project was performed during the UNC Charlotte Fall Dance Festival November 19th-23rd, 2008. The dance is called "A Mischief of Mus musculus". See http://www.performances.uncc.edu/dance.htm

The Dance.Draw Project (http://www.sis.uncc.edu/~clatulip/DanceDraw/) is a joint collaboration between VisCenter members Dr. Celine Latulipe and Dr. David Wilson, both from SIS, Professor Sybil Huskey (from the Dept. of Dance), and a digital artist, Mike Wirth.

Robert Kosara’s group wins two awards at IEEE VisWeek

Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara won Honorable Mention (the second highest award) at the IEEE InfoVis Conference for their paper, “The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors”. Also, Alex Godwin, Kosara’s student, won Best Poster for his submission, “Visual Data Mining of Unevenly-Spaced Event Sequences”.

At IEEE VisWeek, October 18-24 (which included the Visualization, InfoVis, and VAST Conferences), the VisCenter was represented by 14 Ph.D. students and 4 faculty, one of the largest contingents from any university. This group presented the following papers and posters. (The papers are linked to our Technical Reports page.)


Scott Barlowe, Tianyi Zhang, Yujie Liu, Jing Yang, and Donald Jacobs. Multivariate Visual Explanation for High Dimensional Datasets. Accepted for publication, IEEE VAST 2008.

Thomas Butkiewicz, Wenwen Dou, Zachary Wartell, William Ribarsky, and Remco Chang. Multi-Focused Geospatial Analysis Using Probes. Accepted for publication, IEEE InfoVis 2008.

Dong Hyun Jeong, Wenwen Dou, Felesia Stukes, William Ribarsky, Heather Richter Lipford, and Remco Chang. Evaluating the Relationship Between User Interaction and Financial Visual Analysis. Accepted for publication, IEEE VAST 2008.

Tera Green, William Ribarsky, and Brian Fisher. Visual Analytics for Complex Concepts Using a Human Cognition Model. Accepted for publication, IEEE VAST 2008.

Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara. The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors. Accepted for publication, IEEE InfoVis 2008.

Alex Godwin, Remco Chang, Robert Kosara, William Ribarsky. Interactive Poster: Visual Data Mining of Unevenly-Spaced Event Sequences. Accepted for publication, IEEE VAST 2008.

Dong Hyun Jeong, Remco Chang, William Ribarsky. An Alternative Definition and Model for Knowledge Visualization. IEEE Visualization 2008 Workshop on Knowledge Assisted Visualization.

Xiaoyu Wang, Wenwen Dou, Seok-won Lee, William Ribarsky, Remco Chang. Integrating Visual Analysis with Ontological Knowledge Structure. IEEE Visualization 2008 Workshop on Knowledge Assisted Visualization.

On October 1, Chancellor Holden Thorpe of UNC Chapel Hill and Chancellor Phil Dubois of UNC Charlotte visited the Charlotte Visualization Center. They visited the Renaissance Situation Room, which is part of the VisCenter and a new facility of RENCI@UNCC (administered under the auspices of the UNCC Urban Institute in collaboration with the VisCenter and CAGIS), to view presentations and demos about collaborative RENCI projects in urban modeling and analysis. Prominent among these projects are visual analytics applications and novel display and interaction methods. The Chancellors came away impressed with all they saw and with the collaborations underway not only at UNCC but between the Charlotte and Chapel Hill campuses.

Visualization in the World Symposium, April 24-25, 2008

More information at http://www.viscenter.uncc.edu/symposium08.htm

At the recent DHS University Summit, Hangzai Luo of the Charlotte Visualization Center, a Ph.D. student of Jianping Fan, won the DHS Director of Research award for Second Place Best Student Poster. This was in competition with students from all the DHS Centers of Excellence. His poster was titled, "Exploring Large-Scale News Video Databases via Visual Analysis".

VisCenter member Robert Kosara was one of the recipients of the Best Panel Award at the IEEE Visualization conference in Baltimore, MD, for the panel titled "Is There Science in Visualization?". It was organized by T.J. Jankun-Kelly, and panelists were Robert Kosara, Gordon Kindlmann, Chris North, Colin Ware, and E. Wes Bethel. The panels were judged by a committee based on "attendance, the quality of presentation, the interaction with the audience, and the potential for impact on the field."

Hosted by Dr. Celine Latulipe and Dr. Heather Richter
Software and Information Systems Department
College of Computing and Informatics
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Schedule: Tuesday, November 14, 2006.
Location: 111 Cone Center

See detail at http://hci.sis.uncc.edu/hci/OpenHouse/

Complete contents of the Grand Opening Symposium on the Future of Visualization have been updated. Presentation slides and high-quality video streaming services are also available.

Check the contents at http://www.viscenter.uncc.edu/symposium06/