Scientific Visualization and Modeling

Description

Driven by scientific applications, research in this area centers around toolsmithing — creating, building, and evaluating computational and visualization tools for science. Problem areas include visualization of time-varying 3D vector- and tensor-valued data, information visualization, image processing, classification and segmentation, biological modeling, load balancing in a distributed environment, and distributed finite element mesh refinement. To attack these problems, we develop new user interface environments and metaphors, look for inspiration from art to create new visual representations, and develop new numerical approaches to model complicated scientific data and physical phenomena computationally and visually. Active collaborations with systems biologists, fluids researchers, neurosurgeons, developmental biologists, medical imaging researchers, orthopaedic surgeons, bioengineers, perceptual psychologists, and evolutionary biologists help to motivate, guide, and evaluate the research. The many application areas help ensure that the computational and visualization tools are broadly useful. Research in this area is coupled with other areas in the department, in particular Computer Graphics, Computational Neuroscience, Computational Biology, and User Interfaces and Virtual Reality.