SEPTEMBER 22, 2021 - The UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory&rsquo;s (EVL) long-time collaborator, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, to start October 2021, to Enhance and Sustain their CHASE-CI project. As part of EVL&rsquo;s ongoing commitment to this research effort, EVL will host GPU resources and data servers to enhance and extend UCSD&rsquo;s Pacific Research Platform (PRP) Nautilus Hypercluster through 2021-2024. 
In 2017, UCSD received an NSF award for CHASE-CI, the Cognitive Hardware And Software Ecosystem - Community Infrastructure, which initially provided a community of Computer & Information Science and Engineering researchers doing Machine Learning and Computational Media applications with a distributed cluster containing 256 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This cluster - named Nautilus - was originally distributed across 10 California campuses and built on PRP. The NSF-funded PRP project focused on integrating California&rsquo;s high-speed regional research & education network (for fast data transfers among campuses) with DTNs, or Data Transfer Nodes, which are specialized storage systems located at each campus edge, optimized to quickly send and receive large data flows. 
Early on, EVL was among 50 UCSD partners to connect to PRP, thanks to UIC&rsquo;s high-bandwidth connectivity (100 Gigabits per second) to national research and education networks via the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility in downtown Chicago. At that time, UCSD provided EVL with the campus&rsquo;s first DTN, which has since been integrated into the Nautilus cluster, providing 192 Terabytes (TB) of data storage for Big Data applications. More recently, as part of its ongoing PRP award, UCSD is providing EVL with an additional 216 TB of data storage. 
Over the past 5 years, Nautilus has grown. Since PRP interoperability with national and international research and education networks creates a high-capacity data-centric &ldquo;freeway system&rdquo; now stretching across the nation and across oceans that moves Nautilus data among DTNs located at other research institutions. UCSD&rsquo;s Nautilus cluster contains hundreds of GPUs and many Terabytes of storage. While 25% of the computational hardware and data resources are provided by the UCSD CHASE-CI award, 75% is provided by other researchers and institutions who voluntarily contribute resources, building a shared platform that they jointly own and control. EVL has contributed some of its own GPU nodes to Nautilus, with plans to federate more of its GPU resources over time. However, any Computer & Information Science and Engineering researcher can get an account on Nautilus, whether or not they contribute resources. 
This new CHASE-CI Enhance and Sustain award aims to enhance and sustain Nautilus&rsquo;s user community. EVL, as a UCSD partner institution, will receive an 8 GPU Nautilus Machine Learning node, to be integrated with Nautilus, to provide the community with additional GPUs and data services. While EVL currently has substantial computing facilities to support the needs of UIC College of Engineering faculty who require GPUs and data storage, being part of the CHASE-CI Enhance and Sustain grant and integrating the Lab&rsquo;s resources with Nautilus expands faculty and student access to national (and international) scale community computational and data resources. 
NSF award #2120019 to UCSD, ENS: CHASE-CI, 2021-2024 
NSF award #1730158 to UCSD, CHASE-CI, 2017-2020 
NSF award #1541349 to UCSD, PRP, 2015-2022

EVL Continues UCSD Collaboration to Enhance and Sustain CHASE-CI

Construction activities for the new $117.8 million, 135,000-square-foot Computer Design Research and Learning Center to be located at 900 W. Taylor St. is underway. The CDRLC will support the Department of Computer Science&rsquo;s growing student enrollment with 16,000 square feet of classroom space for collaborative teaching and learning environments, as well as 35 labs for faculty research activities in the computer science and engineering disciplines. 
The CDRLC will be the new home for the Electronic Visualization Laboratory featuring the latest technological and computing innovations to support research in advanced visualization, networking and collaborative environments. 
Read more about the CDRLC groundbreaking in the <a href="https://today.uic.edu/uic-breaks-ground-on-new-computer-design-research-and-learning-center">July 15th issue of UIC Today.</a> 
See a live webcam of the building&rsquo;s progress via the <a href="https://webcampub.multivista.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=aPublicWebcam.embed&WebcamPublicEmbedUID=5D4DCF05-AB2B-4770-A090-D79BE467F958">Multivista Construction Documentation webcam.</a>

New Computer Design Research and Learning Center Breaks Ground

The IBHE has approved the request for a Bachelor&rsquo;s of Science (BS) degree in both Computer Science and Design effective for the Fall 2022 admissions and course cycle. This interdisciplinary degree officially culminates in EVL&rsquo;s long standing mission to support collaborative work between artists, scientist, engineers and technologists going back over 40 years. Electronic visualization and electronic art design have been the foundation of EVL&rsquo;s work since its inception in 1973, established by founding co-directors Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. 
We are extremely pleased for UIC to offer an official BS in CS and Design.

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Design Approved by the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE)

G. Elisabeta Marai and collaborators are recognized with the 10-years Test of Time award at ISMB 2021, the flagship conference for computational biology, for the most impactful paper on biovisualization, awarded by the BioVis ISMB COSI (a COSI is a main track at the ISMB conference). The award was made to: Smith AM, Xu W, Sun Y, Faeder JR, Marai GE. &ldquo;RuleBender: integrated modeling, simulation and visualization for rule-based intracellular biochemistry.&rdquo; BMC Bioinformatics. 2012 Dec;13(8):1-6. This research was originally presented at the 2011 Conference, and is listed a later year due to the journal publication model. RuleBender is a system for the rule-based visualization, modeling and simulation of intracellular biochemistry. 
Beyond the impressive citation record, which shows that this work informed both bioinformatics research and data visualization research, RuleBender is alive and well. It has been remarkably stable over the past ten years, it is still downloaded and used, averaging about 1000 downloads per year in the past five years alone. It has been adopted at over 40 institutions as a research and educational tool. It has been used by at least hundreds of computational biologists to do real and high impact research all over the world, from Ghana to Canada. 
Co-authors Adam, Wen and Yao were Marai&rsquo;s Masters students in 2011 and are now senior software engineers at Argo AI, Microsoft, and Amazon. Jim was a collaborator in Systems Biology at Pitt/CMU.

&ldquo;RuleBender&rdquo; Recognized with Test of Time Award

<ahref="https://today.uic.edu/uics-hummingbird-play-a-union-between-design-engineering-and-theater-in-virtual-reality?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today%2B06.29.21">UIC Today</a> covers the &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; project, a collaboration between UIC and the Goodman Theatre that blends VR storytelling and theatrical performance with the goal of encouraging stronger theatrical engagement with a tech-savvy younger generation audiences. It is an immersive play that was the brainchild of Daria Tsoupikova, professor in the school of design, Jo Cattell, an award-winning theater director, and members of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), including Andrew Johnson, interim director and director of research. 
Workshop performances of &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; were held at EVL June 18th through the 20th with a theatrical premiere planned for this coming fall.

&ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; Among UIC Today&rsquo;s Top Stories

Since receiving an <a href="http://sage3.sagecommons.org/">NSF award for SAGE3</a>, the Smart Amplified Group Environment, in May 2020, the SAGE3 Team has been hard at work designing and developing SAGE3. An alpha version of the SAGE3 remote collaboration platform is being developed, and the Team will give a Zoom-based SAGE3 presentation and demonstration as part of the CineGrid organization&rsquo;s Summer Community Forum series. All are welcome to attend! 
Jason Leigh and Luc Renambot will be presenting next-generation SAGE3 along with the rest of the Team. Jason and Luc are CineGrid founding members and SAGE/SAGE2/SAGE3 inventors and architects. The CineGrid organization previously focused on the use of advanced networks for digital media processing, analysis, transformation and preservation, but more recently it is focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its relevance to digital media. 
SAGE3 is being designed to integrate AI technologies with applications, visualization workflows and collaboration services. SAGE3 takes advantage of major technological and sociological changes that have occurred since SAGE2 was introduced in 2013. Notably, web browsers and languages are maturing; scientific communities are relying on notebooks; science workloads incorporate AI programs and programmable infrastructure; and, given the pandemic, the workplace is changing to hybrid office/home environments that require not just video-teleconferencing but data-driven tools for largely distributed groups. 
All are welcome to attend the CineGrid Community Forum. There will be two SAGE3 sessions to accommodate international audiences; both sessions will present the same content, though the audience and questions may vary. 
* Tuesday, June 22 at 4:30pm - 6:00pm PDT 
* Wednesday, June 23 at 10am - 11:30am PDT 
Registration is required for each session, but there is no cost. To register, <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cinegrid-community-forum-june-tickets-156005222821">click here</a>. 
This event has been recorded and available on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyE09TxwhPE">CineGrid Community Forum archive website</a>. 
SAGE3 is being developed by the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications (LAVA) and the Hawaii Data Science Institute (HI-DSI) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (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). SAGE3 receives major funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, awards #2004014 (UHM), #2003800 (UIC) and #2003387 (VT). SAGE, SAGE2 and SAGE3 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

Introducing SAGE3 - Zoom event hosted by the CineGrid Community Forum

Congratulations to Daria Tsoupikova in collaboration with award winning theater director Jo Cattell and their team, including application developers - EVL PhD candidates Arthur Nishimoto and Sai Priya, Computer Science professor / EVL interim director Andrew Johnson, and project network engineering lead Lance Long! The theater team and actors include Denise Savas (stage manager), Devonte Washington (actor/assistant stage manager), Stephanie Shum (lead actor), Liviu Passare (videographer). 
The following story appears in the <a href="http://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=2f768537-b6cd-42bd-af70-f5fa419357fe">Chicago Tribune, June 22, 2021</a>. 
Erratum: The article lists funding sources but incorrectly identifies the amounts of funding received. Hummingbird received the UI Presidential Award for Art and Humanities in 2019 for $150,000, the UIC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Creative Activity award in in 2020 for $10,000, and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2021 for $20,000. 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
Virtual-reality play: 
UIC debuts &rsquo;Hummingbird,&rsquo; allowing audience to participate in the story 
BY DARCEL ROCKETT CHICAGO TRIBUNE 
June 22, 2021 
Live theaters have yet to reopen as much of the state has, but when they do, take comfort in the fact that there are people working on taking the traditional theater-going experience to the next level. 
A group of designers and developers from the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory in collaboration with award-winning theater director Jo Cattell, are making theater more participatory with virtual reality. The goal was realized this past weekend, June 18-20, when a variety of people ranging from preteen to retirement age were invited to partake in the immersive play &ldquo;Hummingbird.&rdquo; 
&ldquo;The whole idea here is moving in space and doing things together,&rdquo; said Daria Tsoupikova, a professor in the School of Design at UIC. &ldquo;You’re not just passive observer, you&rsquo;re actively participating.&rdquo; 
The approximately half-hour event took place in the Engineering Research building with a group of willing participants, including this Chicago Tribune reporter. Upon entering, each guest dons a lab coat and fills out a questionnaire about their soul: How old is it? When&rsquo;s the last time it was fed/replenished? After name tags are given, the group is introduced to a main character in the play, Aya, the teenage daughter of Demi, a Gerard Corp. employee. Aya is a bit antsy, but speaks her own mind; she is our guide along the experience. 
Participants follow Aya into a room where everyone is outfitted with their own Oculus Quest, an untethered virtual-reality headset with embedded tracking and touch controllers that enable multi-user interaction. At this time, the group is introduced to Gerard, a more contemporary version of Max Headroom, with better makeup, blond wig and more sass. Gerard is a floating head that talks back to Aya in real time. Gerard built Gerard Corp. to create Hummingbird technology, and he captured Demi, the talented scientist and mom of Aya. 
What follows is a collaborative team effort to escape Gerard&rsquo;s world of Zen gardens, flashlight-esque stalactites, moving statues, talking fauna and rocks by finding clues to lead us out and save Aya&rsquo;s mom. There&rsquo;s underground work, underwater work and even aerial work. As avatars, we all have different colors and stick-figure faces. The only thing that doesn&rsquo;t change is the participants&rsquo; voices. We all can talk to one another to communicate, do tasks together and problem solve. The colors, the sound design and camaraderie with strangers keeps everyone engaged with the play and one another. 
The project was designed for Goodman Theater New Stages 2020, showcasing experimental and groundbreaking theater works. The goal: to have participants attend tele-immersive, real-time performances running concurrently at the Goodman Theatre&rsquo;s Alice Rapport Center and at UIC, allowing for untethered social interaction and collaborative exploration of the plot lines through avatars. 
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s supposed to be totally immersive, it&rsquo;s supposed to be in real time, and the group at the Goodman and the group in here, they meet with each other and collaboratively explore the virtual space in co-located events, but inside virtual reality,&rdquo; Tsoupikova said. 
It&rsquo;s a meeting of art, science and live theater, where professional actors from the Goodman join with UIC faculty and students from the Department of Computer Science, School of Design and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory. The lab is known around the world for having introduced CAVE VR theater to the world In 1992 and in 2012, the CAVE2 VR theater. 
Tsoupikova says &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; is to be conducted in more than one location simultaneously. The production targets youth, ages 11 and older, in under-served Chicago communities who lack access to the performing arts within their schools. 
&ldquo;We want to engage underrepresented Chicago youth - a tech-savvy younger audience through the use of
technology to engage them in the theater, because the theater attendance rates among youth are dropping,&rdquo; Tsoupikova said. &ldquo;We really want to show them that this is the future of storytelling, this is how it can be, and the theaters that productions through collaborative design like this is possible.&rdquo; 
According to Tsoupikova, the multi-user theatrical performance was conceptualized in 2018 and supported by a UI Presidential Award for Art and Humanities and an Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Creative Activity award. A 2019 six-figure grant from the National Endowment of the Arts also helped with the development of the technology, creation of virtual scenes, scripted audience tracks, stage sets and professional actors. With the Goodman being the first major nonprofit Chicago theater to return to live performances on July 30, Tsoupikova hopes &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; will open at Goodman Theatre this fall. 
&ldquo;My son hasn&rsquo;t been able to play with anyone, given the pandemic for 15 months, and for him to be so excited to be in a room with four other kids and suddenly to be interacting with people was like a dream come true,&rdquo; said &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; director and writer Cattell. &ldquo;That was something nice to see, and (to) be able to give him a controlled environment where he can play with people again. I hope that continues - kids being really excited to be in a situation where it’s a different type of playground, it&rsquo;s a technical playground, because that&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;re really trying to create: a playground for everyone to play in.&rdquo;

Virtual-reality play: UIC debuts &rsquo;Hummingbird,&rsquo; allowing audience to participate in the story

EVL hosts the pilot performances of &ldquo;HUMMINGBIRD&rdquo; the multiuser theatrical work that merges real and virtual worlds, engaging tech-savvy youth with a highly interactive virtual reality experience. This innovative project combines elements of traditional theater with virtual storytelling where participants collaborate to traverse virtual worlds and accomplish goals while being led by actors throughout their experience. 
EVL, the Department of Computer Science, and the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts faculty and students in collaboration with award-winning Immersive Theatre Director Jo Cattell are organizing the pilot performance on June 18-20. This ambitious project involves a large team of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, Goodman Theater Directors, actors, producers, a professional music composer, sound engineer, and many other contributors. This project is supported by the University of Illinois Presidential Award for Art and Humanities, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Creative Activity Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 
The project team consists of School of Design professor, Daria Tsoupikova, award-winning theater director Jo Cattell, application developers and PhD candidates Arthur Nishimoto and Sai Priy Jyouthua, professor and EVL interim director Andrew Johnson, and project network engineering lead Lance Long. The theater team and actors include Denise Savas (stage manager), Devonte Washington (actor/assistant stage manager), Stephanie Shum (lead actor), Liviu Passare (videographer). 
Pilot performances are by invitation only. Stay tuned for the upcoming premiere this fall hosted by EVL and Goodman Theatre&rsquo;s Alice Rapport Center.

Pilot Performances of &ldquo;HUMMINGBIRD&rdquo; Collaborative Virtual Reality for Tele-Immersive Interactive Theater

EVL faculty member and computer science associate professor Liz Marai has been appointed to co-chair the full papers session at the 23rd edition of EuroVis 2021. The EuroVis conference objective is to create and strengthen connections between visualization researchers and practitioners, to foster collaborations, and to draw more researchers into the rapidly growing area of visualization research. EuroVis has an expanded its scope to include all areas of visualization towards more wide-spread visibility and impact. 
EuroVis 2021 will be hosted by the University of Zurich in collaboration with FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg and ETH Zurich. EuroVis is the annual Visualization Conference organized by the Eurographics Working Group on Data Visualization. This year&rsquo;s conference will be held virtually June 14 - 18, 2021. 
Liz joins Rita Borgo, King&rsquo;s College London, UK and Tatiana von Landesberger, University of Rostock, Germany to co-chair the full papers session focusing on bu not limited to visualization techniques, systems, applications & design studies, evaluation & empirical research, and theory. 
Congratulations, Liz on this prestigious role and your tireless work as an ambassador for visualization research!

Associate Professor Liz Marai co-Chairs Full Papers Session for EuroVis21

EVL alumnni Khairi Reda&rsquo;s and Mike Papka&rsquo;s paper entitled &ldquo;Color Nameability Predicts Inference Accuracy in Spatial Visualizations&ldquo; will be awarded the Best Paper award at EuroVis&rsquo;21. Reda will present their research Tuesday June 15th 8:00AM CST. The conference registration is free for all non-presenters see <a href="https://www.eurovis.org/index.php/for-attendees/program/">https://www.eurovis.org/index.php/for-attendees/program/</a> to register. 
Khairi received his PhD at EVL in 2014, and Mike Papka got his MS at EVL in 1994. 
&ldquo;Color Nameability Predicts Inference Accuracy in Spatial Visualizations&rdquo; 
Authors: Reda, K., Salvi, A.A., Gray, J., Papka, M.E. 
Abstract: 
Color encoding is foundational to visualizing quantitative data. Guidelines for colormap design have traditionally emphasized perceptual principles, such as order and uniformity. However, colors also evoke cognitive and linguistic associations whose role in data interpretation remains underexplored. We study how two linguistic factors, name salience and name variation, affect people&rsquo;s ability to draw inferences from spatial visualizations. In two experiments, we found that participants are better at interpreting visualizations when viewing colors with more salient names (e.g., prototypical &rsquo;blue&rsquo; &rsquo;yellow&rsquo;, and &rsquo;red&rsquo; over &rsquo;teal&rsquo;, &rsquo;beige&rsquo;, and &rsquo;maroon&rsquo;). The effect was robust across four visualization types, but was more pronounced in continuous (e.g., smooth geographical maps) than in similar discrete representations (e.g., choropleths). Participants&rsquo; accuracy also improved as the number of nameable colors increased, although the latter had a less robust effect. Our findings suggest that color nameability is an important design consideration for quantitative colormaps, and may even outweigh traditional perceptual metrics. In particular, we found that the linguistic associations of color are a better predictor of performance than the perceptual properties of those colors. We discuss the implications and outline research opportunities. The data and materials for this study are available at <a href="https://osf.io/asb7n">https://osf.io/asb7n</a>.

EVL Continues UCSD Collaboration to Enhance and Sustain CHASE-CI

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