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Data You Can Admire

By CITRIS Newsletter
July 1, 2009
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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

Ma wants users of his tools to be able to "visualize the process of visualization itself," noting that "if we can convey what has been done to the data to generate the image they're working with — not just the information loss but also the important mapping done to the data to get the image — then the user can have much greater control."

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