Symposium on the Future of Visualization

William Ribarsky, Director, Charlotte Visualization Center

Complete Symposium Schedule

Continued from page 2

Jim Foley talked about the What, Where, When, Why, and How of Evaluating Visualizations. He addressed the continuing need to evaluate this most human-centered of activities. Now, however, with visualization becoming ubiquitous and even necessary, evaluation must be more wide-ranging. Usability studies are necessary, but they do not address usefulness. For more complex and application-driven visualizations, evaluation must encompass task analyses and should involve real users and domain experts. Certain visualization applications, especially some visual analytics applications, must also consider validation and verification. Other aspects must be considered, such as the effect of culture on visual interface design and how to set up and support collaboration in a fundamental way. Daniel Keim took a fresh look at another principal problem in visualization through a discussion of Scalability in Visual Data Exploration. His talk looked carefully at two main issues, how to effectively approach very large, high dimensional data and the use of the human visual processing system to this end. The central part of his talk offered "Ten Lessons Learned from the Human Perceptual System". These rules-of-thumb, with illustrations and examples, are a must-read for practitioners in the field and their students. They bring to mind the comment from Pat Hanrahan and others that visualization could use "little red books" espousing central principles for different aspects of the field, which would be handy for students, designers, practitioners, and users. Chuck Hansen focused on The Future of Large-Scale Scientific Visualization, returning to the still-vital roots of visualization. He called for renewed vigor in pursuing the grand challenge of integrating visualization and physical simulation in order, for example, to look at biological systems over all scales and be able to embrace and understand individual variability (e.g., among human organs) rather than just using canonical models. Chuck thus offers a general framework in which Arie Kaufman's approach fits. He also emphasizes again the importance of careful shadowing, lighting, and silhouette effects, issues that reflect the computer graphics and rendering foundation for much of data visualization. Illustrated by examples from his own work, Chuck's talk also shows how beautiful these visualizations can be, with some of the renderings having an almost a renaissance-like clarity and aesthetic purity.

Finally, Kent Larson shows how different types of visualizations can be combined-drawings, plans, and photorealistic renderings-to provide intellectual, aesthetic, and visual insights into works of architecture. Through this means the Unbuilt Masterworks of Louis Kahn are related to his constructed works to illuminate the process and purpose of architectural creation. In this context, the exacting renderings of light, reflection, shape, texture, and atmosphere are revelatory. Although this is an exercise in architectural aesthetics, it also subtly indicates the place for aesthetics, design, and creative expression in visualization.

Also included in this video archive is a panel on Other Thoughts on the Future of Visualization, with comments and discussion by Fred Brooks, Larry Hodges, and Agus Sudjianto. This panel brought together leaders from outside the field of visualization (i.e., virtual reality and the banking business) who also have a stake in visualization and its applications. The idea was to offer a different perspective, sharp insights, and even perhaps points of view that were at odds with some expressed in the invited talks. The panel succeeded admirably in meeting these goals.

Embodying the future of visualization are 4 new, young faculty members from the VisCenter. They made shorter presentations on their current work and future plans, which gave real immediacy to what is being done at the cutting edge of visualization, and beyond. Archived here are the presentations by Robert Kosara, Aidong Lu, Zachary Wartell, and Jing Yang. We will be hearing a lot more from them.

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Symposium Online Content

Intro	Introductory Remarks by Chancellor Dubois and Professor Ribarsky
	Stu Card, Senior Research Fellow at PARC, "Using Vision to Think"
	Jim Foley, Steven Fleming Professor at Georgia Tech, former Director of Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, "Just Another Pretty Visualization? or The What, Where, When, Why, and How of Evaluating Visualization"
	Pat Hanrahan, Canon USA Professor at Stanford University, "Towards Automating Graphic Design"
	Chuck Hansen, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, "The Future of Large-Scale Scientific Visualization"
	Arie Kaufman, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Stony Brook, "Virtual Colonoscopy"
	Daniel Keim, Chair of Information Processing, University of Konstanz, "Scalability in Visual Data Exploration: Learning from Human Information Processing"
	Kent Larson, Director, Changing Places, MIT Media Lab and College of Architecture, "Visualizing Unbuilt Architectural Masterworks"
	William Ribarsky, Bank of America Endowed Chair and Director of the Charlotte Visualization Center, "Knowledge Visualization"
	Jim Thomas, Laboratory Fellow, Pacific Northwest National Lab, and Director of the National Visualization and Analytics Center, "Visual Analytics: a Grand Challenge in Science - Turning Information Overload into the Opportunity of the Decade"
Panel	"Other Thoughts on the Future of Visualization" with Fred Brooks, Kenan Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Larry Hodges, CS Department Chair at UNC Charlotte, and Agus Sudjianto, Senior Vice President in charge of Risk Management at Bank of America.

Presentations by Some Future Leaders

	Robert Kosara, Assistant Professor at UNC Charlotte
	Aidong Lu, Assistant Professor at UNC Charlotte
	Zachary Wartell, Assistant Professor at UNC Charlotte
	Jing Yang, Assistant Professor at UNC Charlotte