Call for Papers 
--------------- 
There is widespread lack of accessibility in built environments, from roads and housing to public buildings and spaces. Such inaccessible urban infrastructure not only contributes to and further reinforces systemic exclusion of people with disabilities but also impacts public health, physical activity, and quality of life for all. To improve the design of our cities and to enable new accessibility-infused analytic tools and interactive maps, we need new data collection techniques, data standards, policies, and planning tools focused on the quality and accessibility of pathways, transit ecosystems, and buildings. 
The goal of our &ldquo;The Future of Urban Accessibility&rdquo; workshop is to bring together a community of scholars and practitioners across disciplines, disability identities, cultures, and geographies to discuss the state of urban accessibility and the role of interactive technologies therein. We invite short papers, including experience reports, position papers, vision pieces, demonstrations, pictorials, or research summaries up to 2,000 words on this topic (references excluded). Papers should not be anonymized and, in addition to their primary content, should include a bio of each author and rationale for attending the workshop. Papers will be reviewed and selected by the co-organizers to balance topics, geographies, and communities of focus. Accepted authors will be required to register and virtually attend the workshop via Zoom on Mon, Oct 17th. 
Please submit your papers/artifacts by Thu, Sep 1 at 11:59PM AoE. We are using Microsoft&rsquo;s Conference Management Toolkit to handle submissions <a href="https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/UrbanAccess2022/Submission/Index">(https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/UrbanAccess2022/Submission/Index)</a> 
Our overarching goal is to identify open challenges, share current work across disciplines, and spur new collaborations. As a secondary goal, we aim to synthesize and publish our discussions together in a jointly authored report perhaps to the SIGACCESS Newsletter or beyond. 
Please join us. We welcome your contributions! Email questions to: <a href="mailto:urbanaccess2022@cs.uw.edu">urbanaccess2022@cs.uw.edu</a>. 
Important dates 
--------------- 
Thu, Sep 1, 2022 (11:59PM AoE): Workshop submission deadline 
Fri, Sept 16, 2022: Acceptance notifications out 
Wed, Sept 28, 2022: Workshop camera ready deadline 
Mon, Oct 10, 2022: Accepted workshop content posted 
Mon, Oct 17, 2022 (tentative): Virtual workshop via Zoom 
Lead workshop organizers: 
--------------- 
Jon E. Froehlich, Computer Science, University of Washington 
Yochai Eisenberg, Disability & Human Development, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Maryam Hosseini, Urban Systems, Rutgers / NYU 
Fabio Miranda, Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Full list of organizers: <a href="https://accessiblecities.github.io/UrbanAccess2022/#organizers">https://accessiblecities.github.io/UrbanAccess2022/#organizers</a>

The 1st <a href="https://accessiblecities.github.io/UrbanAccess2022/">ASSETS&rsquo;22 Workshop</a> on The Future of Urban Accessibility

July 19th - 22nd, EVL hosted the SAGE3 research and development team to discuss the past year&rsquo;s major activities, significant results, key outcomes, other achievements, and future developments. Meeting topics include current SAGE3 usage patterns, user interface assessment and refinement, documentation improvements, future development requirements, as well as the dissemination of research results to the SAGE user community. 
&ldquo;SAGE3: Smart Amplified Group Environment for Harnessing the Data Revolution&rdquo; has been funded by the NSF CSI program to continue and advance its efforts on the SAGE collaboration and visualization framework. SAGE3 - Smart Amplified Group Environment - is the next-generation, &ldquo;human-in-the-loop&rdquo; collaboration platform with artificial intelligence (AI) enabled services that serve as a user’s &ldquo;co-pilot&rdquo; to autonomously manage and link disparate datasets and orchestrate services. Its predecessors, SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) in 2004 and second-generation SAGE2 (Scalable Amplified Group Environment) in 2013, are today&rsquo;s de facto operating systems to manage Big Data on tiled display walls, enabling users to collaborate locally and remotely and access, display, share and manipulate documents and visualizations. 
SAGE3 is being developed by renowned cyberinfrastructure experts from the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications (LAVA) and the Hawaii Data Science Institute (HI-DSI) at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa (UHM), the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics (Sanghani) at Virginia Tech (VT).

EVL Hosts SAGE3 2022 All Hands Meeting

APLU&rsquo;s Council on Academic Affairs (CAA) provosts, chief academic officers, and senior vice presidents for academic affairs of APLU member institutions and systems visited EVL for presentations and CAVE2 virtual reality experiences during their 2022 Summer Meeting, July 18th. The annual meeting was hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago July 17 - 19. This event provides a unique opportunity for senior leaders to meet in a private setting to network and discuss important topics of current interest. This year, the meeting focused on the pandemic&rsquo;s impact on faculty and student performance and engagement as well as their mental health issues, preparing students for the current and future workforce needs, and emerging uses of AI in higher education. 
See the detailed program <a href="https://web.cvent.com/event/fa3fc6ed-582b-413b-a6b0-0ca84442b020/websitePage:16f39142-8fd2-4e65-9685-e11be7fd120c">Agenda.</a>

APLU&rsquo;s Council on Academic Affairs (CAA) Visit EVL

A collaboration of the UIC, Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Design Archive (CDA), the &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo; project is a swift exciting journey through the history of Chicago design over the last one hundred years with content based on resources from the collection of the CDA. Following engaging characters and textual tidbits found in design works held in the archive, the journey begins in the 1920s with the era&rsquo;s painterly and illustrative techniques, evolves through the decades, and ends in the 2010s with digital rendering using AI and machine learning (ML)-technologies becoming increasingly prevalent in the contemporary landscape. At once nostalgic and whimsical, both humorous and sobering moments abound through the decades. 
The project will be showcased as part of <a href="https://artonthemart.com/">Art onTheMart</a> with previews this summer and an official opening on November 17th. 
The Chicago Design Archive is an exclusive and permanent online record of Chicago design currently holding over 3200 examples of work by over 1100 designers. 
As designers and educators, Daria Tsoupikova, Sharon Oiga and Guy Villa Jr lead a team of creators and archivists whose overarching goal is to increase the understanding and appreciation of Chicago design history and to contribute to the recognition of Chicago as an international modern design center through their use of innovative technologies. 
The project team consists of the following individuals: 
Daria Tsoupikova, UIC School of Design & EVL 
Sharon Oiga, UIC School of Design & CDA 
Guy Villa Jr, Columbia College Chicago 
Krystofer Kim, NASA 
Fabio Miranda, UIC Computer Science & EVL 
Jack Weiss, CDA 
Cheri McIntyre, CDA 
Lauren Meranda, CDA 
Louis Schwadron, Sky White Sound

Chicago Design Through the Decades

Save the date for June 11th for the preview of the &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo; project on the <a href="https://artonthemart.com/">Art ontheMART</a> at the Merchandise Mart Chicago. A collaboration between the Chicago Design Archive and EVL and School of Design professor Daria Tsoupikova and EVL assistant professor Fabio Miranda, who created the AI/ML visualization for the last contemporary decade - 2010s. 
The exhibition will showcase works from the Chicago Design Archive taking viewers on a journey that begins in the 1920s with the era&rsquo;s painterly and illustrative techniques, evolves through the decades, and ends in the 2010s with digital rendering using AI and machine learning (ML)-technologies becoming increasingly prevalent in the contemporary landscape. 
This preview will be held for one day only to align with the opening of the NeoCon Design Conference to be held at the Merchandise Mart June 13-15. This is a FREE OUTDOOR public event to be held at the corner of West Wacker Drive and North Orleans Streets on the Riverwalk.

Art ontheMart Features &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo;

Computer Science assistant professor and EVL faculty Fabio Miranda&rsquo;s research in visualization is featured in the <a href="https://hebdenbridgenews.com/mapping-cities-health-and-environment-at-uics-electronic-visualization-lab/">HEBDEN BRIDGE NEWS</a>, &ldquo;Mapping cities, health and environment at UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Lab&rdquo;. Miranda&rsquo;s work focuses on urban planning, but touches upon a broad range of problems, including accessibility and mobility, environmental pollution, extreme climate. He uses computer simulation and visualization to address urban and real-life problems.

Fabio Miranda&rsquo;s Research Garners Media Coverage

School of Design and EVL professor Daria Tsoupikova has been recognized with the UIC Award for Creative Activity for 2022-2023. Daria is among 42 faculty members awarded to continue their pursuits of creative scholarship and activities at UIC. Daria will use this award to further enhance and showcase &ldquo;Hummingbird: Collaborative Virtual Reality for Tele-Immersive Interactive Theater
Virtual Reality&rdquo; developed in collaboration with Chicago&rsquo;s Goodman Theatre. This innovative work merges real and virtual worlds for tele-immersive interaction with the goal of encouraging stronger theater engagement with tech-savvy younger audiences. Participants follow the story&rsquo;s protagonist into an immersive virtual world reminiscent of Japanese paintings. This tele-immersive, interactive experience reimagines theatrical storytelling. 
The project bridges art, science and live theater through a collaborative research effort between computer science and design faculty and students at EVL and Chicago&rsquo;s Goodman Theatre. 
<a href="https://today.uic.edu/uic-awards-for-creative-activity-2?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today%2B05.24.22">See UIC News for more information.</a>

Daria Tsoupikova Awarded with UIC Award for Creative Activity

Professor and EVL interim director and director of research, Andrew Johnson participated with Matt Bubabla and Judy Pielach on their radio <a href="https://post.futurimedia.com/wlsam/playlist/listen-12063.html">show WLS-AM 890</a> to discuss UIC&rsquo;s involvement on the first &ldquo;Star Wars&rdquo; movie. In 1976, California artist Larry Cuba was hired by George Lucas to produce the special effects for the film&rsquo; s &rsquo;Trench Scene&rsquo;. Exploring possibilities for the scene, Cuba sought out the expertise of experimental computer graphics artists Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin, co-directors of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory of the University of Illinois Circle Campus, as it was named at the time. Cuba proceeded to use EVL computer graphics technology to digitize the &rsquo;Death Star&rsquo;, which was later converted to film for the movie. Presently, the computer technology used to produce the scene is still functioning and archived by long-time EVL collaborator Steve Heminover.

May the 4th be with you!

Candidate: Juan Trelles Trabucco 
Date: Friday, April 29, 2022 
Time: 11 am CT 
Committee Members: Dr. G. Elisabeta Marai, Dr. Andy Johnson, Dr. Wei Tang, Dr. Steven Drucker, Dr. Cecilia Arighi 
Abstract: 
Biomedical researchers need to search over an increasing number of publications to find knowledge. Among these researchers, biocurators specialize in identifying relevant publications and extracting information to populate structured databases. Efforts from biocuration groups benefit a much larger community who access this curated information daily. To effectively deal with the extensive collection of documents, the biocuration workflow uses text-mining approaches to automate tasks, such as predicting the relevance of a publication. While exploiting patterns in text data has yielded significant breakthroughs for biocuration, images in publications contain important cues to determine the document's relevance. Still, integrating these image content with textual features is underexplored due to difficulties collecting images, defining classification schemes, and having access to domain experts for data labeling. 
Rooted in a years-long collaboration with text-mining researchers and biocurators, I propose strategies for harvesting labels from biomedical publications and modeling image classifiers to support biocuration. First, I present two approaches for training image classifiers with deep learning for small and unbalanced datasets. Then, I characterize the labeling task in biocuration and introduce a labeling system tailored for domain experts. Next, I build on lessons from this labeling system to develop a labeling approach for model builders by combining visual analytics and machine learning techniques. These works provide the building blocks for the future design of search interfaces that leverage text- and image-based data for biomedical experts. In addition, it supports the development of novel multi-modal approaches for detecting publication's relevance and interpreting these predictions.

PhD Prelim Announcement: Integrating Image Features to Support the Biocuration Workflow

Long-time EVLer and PhD candidate Arthur Nishimoto has been recognized by the UIC College of Engineering with the 2022 Exceptional Research Promise Award.  Arthur began his work with EVL in 2009 as a Research Experience Undergraduate developing virtual reality and visualization applications for collaborative research between EVL and NASA.  After graduating with his bachelorette degree, Arthur pursued a MS in computer science with focus on advanced visualization, virtual reality and real-time interactive application development.  Since 2014, Arthur has been working towards his PhD (expected Summer 2022), has been an incredibly prolific and valued member of EVL.  Arthur is well-deserving of this honor.  We look forward to seeing him continue his exceptional research over his career.

The 1st ASSETS’22 Workshop on The Future of Urban Accessibility

Contact