The editors of "Communications of the ACM" (CACM) created a special January 2008 issue of the magazine to celebrate CACM's 50th anniversary, and invited long-time contributors Jason Leigh and Maxine Brown of UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) to submit an article that reflects EVL's past achievements and future directions in visualization and networking.

"Cyber-Commons: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds" describes the advancements EVL has made over several decades -- from networked CAVE virtual environments to networked "cyber-commons" collaboration spaces. Cyber-Commons spaces enable remote colleagues to better understand complex systems by facilitating the creation of "cyber-mashups" from multiple terabyte data stores, which are then collaboratively viewed and analyzed on ultra-high-resolution tiled display walls.

EVL envisions Cyber-Commons as a community resource for scientists as well as for students, providing a powerful and easy-to-use information-rich environment for scientific discovery and education.

This article can be retrieved from the ACM Digital Library, made available by the UIC Library http://portal.acm.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/dl.cfm/
Click on MAGAZINES, then COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, and then on VOLUME 51, ISSUE 1.