Why It Is Important

Data will only grow at faster rates demanding a new approach to data management and analysis. Visualization, which transforms raw data into vivid pictures conveying the most essential information in the data, has proven to be a very effective tool for understanding and explaining large, complex data sets.

Our Approach

By working with domain scientists, we will create high-resolution, interactive, data-driven visualizations, providing new insight into scientific data and social media data to serve as a central point of access to advanced technology. The Center of Excellence for Visualization will also develop unique cyber infrastructure; which includes visualization, interface and display technologies that can inspire faculty to develop new research and teaching methods. We will also develop custom visualization solutions for selected campus research units and convert promising prototype systems and tool-kits into products targeting niche markets, while teaching students advanced visualization and analysis techniques.

Impacts & Highlights

The Center has been made good progress on existing projects while establishing new collaborations (particularly in the biological sciences), pursuing new grants, creating new research infrastructures and expanding its outreach effort.

• Enabled comparison of patterns of brain region activity correlations between a large collection of subjects and between multiple scan sessions
• Conducted a comparative study on the visualization of evolving chromosomes based on HCI principles. Paper discussing this work has been accepted by 2016 IEEE Information Visualization Conference.
• Received the best paper award at the 23rd Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization
• Developed collaborations with the Exploratorium and MIT
• Research highlighted on Anderson Cooper 360 in September 2015

 Team

Kwan-Liu Ma	Professor of Computer Science
Ramsey Badawi	Associate Professor of Radiology
Robert Faris	Assistant Professor of Sociology
Thomas Turrentine	Project Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies
Susan Verba	Associate Professor of Design
Jai-Kai Chou	Postdoc of Computer Science
Yi-Ling Chen	Postdoc of Computer Science
Chris Bryan	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Takanori Fujiwara	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Chuan Wang	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Kelvin Li	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Tsai­‐Ling Fung	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Jacqueline Chu	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Tan Huu Nguyen	Graduate Student of Computer Science
Sridatt Bhamidpati	Undergraduate Student of Computer Science
Brian Becker	Undergraduate Student of Computer Science

For more information on this program, please contact Christine Parks at ceparks@ucdavis.edu.