When he retired this week from Howard County’s fire service, as the department’s deputy chief for operations, Charles Sharpe told the Baltimore Sun that his favorite part of the job was training new emergency responders on special-operations work, which he first studied at UMBC 20 years ago.

Sharpe says his training in water and rope rescues “truly proved to be of tremendous value” during his work as a search manager responding to Hurricane Katrina. He still returns to UMBC’s Emergency Health Services department annually to instruct students in a three-day search and rescue training program, a tradition which he plans to continue this year.

Interactive visual computing for knowledge discovery
in science, engineering and training

Dr. Jian Chen
University of Southern Mississippi

1:00pm Wednesday 7 March 2012, ITE 325b UMBC

Advances in simulations and lab experiments are producing huge datasets at unprecedented rates, and deriving meanings from these data will have far-reaching impacts on our lives in many areas of science, engineering, and medicine. Visualization and interactive computing provide great tools for exploiting these data in scientific discovery and engineering innovations. A limiting factor in the scientific use of visualization tools is the lack of guiding principles to identify and assess visualization methods that are helpful in scientific tasks. In this talk, I present research designed to advance knowledge discovery through the design and evaluation of interactive visualizations. Experiments on image illumination and density are described that successfully address this limitation in brain imaging for medical diagnoses. I also present the theoretical foundations that have led to the various choices in visualization design. In the second part of the talk, I argue that most existing tools designed for scientific discovery fail to address the dynamic nature of the discovery workflow. I present a new visualization tool, VisBubbles, that integrates programming, visualization, and interaction in one environment to create fluid workflows in which new hypotheses can be tested efficiently. VisBubbles augments interactive computing and analysis of time-varying motion data of bat flights by enabling dynamic displays, thus facilitating scientists' quest for new knowledge. I present the design methods we have followed in our long-term collaboration with biologists and engineering scientists on motion analysis. Finally, I present future work I envision in interactive visualization that will be critical in developing future visualization tools for science, engineering, and training.

Jian Chen is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the founder and director of Interactive Visual Computing Lab. Her research is in the broad area of interaction and visualization, with current focuses on the emerging field of scientific visualization theory and workflow analysis. She has published numerous articles in top journals and international conferences. Her panel on combining human-centered computing and scientific visualization received honorable mention at the 2007 IEEE Visualization Conference. She was a postdoc at Brown University with Drs. David H. Laidlaw (CS) and Sharon Swartz (BioMed) from 2006 to 2009. She has a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and Master’s degrees in both Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. Her research has been funded by DHS and NSF.

Host: Penny Rheingans

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