Interactive Visualization - Getting Insight from Complex Datasets

Speaker:	Professor Thomas ERTL
		University of Stuttgart
		Germany

Title:		"Interactive Visualization - Getting Insight
		 from Complex Datasets"

Date:		Monday, 28 February 2011

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

During the last 20 years visualization has developed into a scientific
discipline of its own at the crossroads of computer graphics,
human-computer interaction, and data analysis. Today, interactive
visualization techniques play a crucial role in the process of
understanding the huge datasets resulting from simulations, sensor
measurements, and information systems. The talk will look at the current
state of the field which is characterized by the fact that by now
elaborate algorithms and efficient GPU implementations exist for many
classical visualization problems dealing with 3D scalar and vector data
sets. Therefore, it has become obvious that future visualization research
cannot only concentrate on optimizing standard techniques for well-known
benchmark data sets. A closer cooperation with application domains very
often leads to real-life problems with data size and dimensionality
requiring new approaches combining known techniques into innovative tools.
In this context the talk will present some of the recent research results
of the visualization group at the University of Stuttgart in the areas of
visualization of higher-order finite element data, molecular dynamics and
systems biology simulations, patent databases and video streams.


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Biography:

Thomas Ertl received a master's degree in computer science from the
University of Colorado at Boulder and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics
from the University of Tuebingen. Since 1999 Dr. Ertl is a full professor
of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany and the head
of the Visualization and Interactive Systems Institute (VIS) and the
Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart (VISUS). His
research interests include visualization, computer graphics and human
computer interaction in general with a focus on volume rendering, flow
visualization, parallel and hardware accelerated graphics, large datasets
and interactive steering, visual analytics of scientific data and text,
user interfaces and navigation systems for the blind.  Dr. Ertl is
coauthor of more than 300 scientific publications and he served as a
reviewer for most of the conferences and journals in the field. He has
been a member of many program committees (e.g. SIGGRAPH, Eurographics) and
a papers co-chair for several conferences (e.g. IEEE Visualization,
EG/IEEE EuroVIS, PacificVis, Volume Graphics, IEEE VAST). He was
Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics
2007-2010 and he is the current chairman of the Eurographics Association.
He received the Outstanding Technical Contribution Award of the
Eurographics Association and the Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE
Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee  in 2006. He was elected as
a Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2007 and
he received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Vienna
in 2011.