Communications of the ACM
Data You Can Admire
This visualization of a jet flame is based on a simulation performed on the Cray XT4 Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National laboratory and at the Sandia National Laboratories.
Credit: Kwan-Liu Ma
The University of California, Davis' Visualization and Interface Design Innovation lab, run by professor Kwan-Liu Ma, seeks to render massive data sets into insightful visualizations that are explorable and workable. "By employing our visualization techniques we are able to let researchers see the full extent of their data at the highest possible resolution and in both three-dimensional space and the temporal domain," Ma says. "So scientists can begin to visualize things they just couldn't see in the past."
In some instances the data has such a high level of detail that visualizations such as Ma's must be used prior to the validation of hypotheses. In other cases, the visualizations permit researchers to see relationships they may be unaware of.
Ma says his team devised a user interface that enables researchers to move between different spaces so they can analyze the interaction between different factors at different levels. Ma's visualization software lets scientists zoom in on feature surfaces and move closer and further away from the surfaces, studying these different features at different scales.
 "By employing our visualization techniques we are able to let researchers see the full extent of their data at the highest possibleresolution," says UC Davis Professor Kwan-Liu Ma. Credit: UC Davis |
From CITRIS Newsletter
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2009 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
No entries found