Recent trends in scientific visualization

by Gustav Taxén (VIC-Sthlm, School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH.)

Friday 15 Jan 2010, 10:30 → 12:00 Europe/Stockholm

FA31

Visualization is the activity of representing data in one or several modalities (such as images, moving images, sound, tactile feedback, olfactory feedback, etc.) so that it can be interpreted by a human analyst. As a research topic, visualization is highly interdisciplinary and incorporates both theoretical (e.g., how do human beings interpret and understand a certain way of representing data?) and applied aspects (e.g., what type of representation is suitable for a certain data set?). Most methods of visualization falls into two broad categories: In scientific visualization, the data set usually suggests a core representation - the data may have been measured at certain points in 3D space, for example, in which case it is natural to present the measurements as symbols at the corresponding locations in a virtual 3D space. Information visualization, however, deals with data that is abstract (such as stock values) or non-numerical data (such as the relationships between individuals in a social network). In such cases, the core representation must be constructed and is, to some extent, arbitrary. This seminar discussion will focus on scientific visualization. I will give an overview of common methods of representing scalar and vector data measured at points in 3D space and provide some examples of useful software packages. I will also describe current trends of research in scientific visualization and outline the state of the art. I will also describe the VIC-Sthlm visualization knowledge arena, our goals and organization, as well as mention some of our recent and upcoming activities.