Professor Jian Chen received a research award from the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) Measurement Science and Engineering research grant program to discover new immersive metrology, visualization, and analysis tools for interacting with and understanding multi-valued volumes of large scientific data in immersive display environments.

The research will explore new approaches to integrate scientific and information visualization, optimize information access and precise measurement to recommend good default visualization, study natural and intuitive input modalities including gestural and handheld 3D inputs, and synthesize visualizations to address complex data analysis workflow. The efficacy and insights of these scientific methods will be validated in close collaboration with engineering scientists at NIST.

The research is significant because the methods will be able to address problems in three independent scientific applications at NIST: suspension rheology, body area network and tissue engineering. It will also make possible new forms of scientific research by developing new immersive analysis capabilities, integrating new approaches into experimental research, and for the first time, creating new human-computer interaction techniques to query both scientific and information visualizations to leverage human intelligence.

The award will provide nearly $440,000 over the next five years to support Professor Chen and her students in the DaVinCI (Data Visualization, Computing, and Interaction) lab working on the project.