EVL faculty and Computer Science (CS) Assistant Professor Fabio Miranda (PI) and Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering (CME) Professor Sybil Derrible (co-PI) have been awarded $1.75 million NSF grant entitled: "Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Cyberinfrastructure to Catalyze and Sustain the Urban Computing Community.” Also known as <a href="https://oscur.org/">&ldquo;The Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing Research&rdquo; (OSCUR)</a>, the grant is part of an overall $5 million project that is collaborative with the University of Washington and NYU. Here at UIC, the overall effort includes the departments of CS, CME, and the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA). The grant will run from September 2024 to August 2029. 
Project Overview: 
Cities are the loci of resource consumption, economic activity, and innovation; they are where our looming sustainability problems were born and where those problems must be solved. Given our increasing ability to collect, transmit, store, and analyze data, we have the opportunity to go beyond today&rsquo;s imperfect and often anecdotal understanding of cities to enable better operations, better planning, and better policy. To understand cities, we must analyze the data exhaust from their components - infrastructure, environment, and people - and how they interact over space and time. While there are already troves of open data about cities, their potential remains largely untapped due to unique challenges related to diversity, scale, and complexity of both urban data and computations required to obtain insights from these data. In this project, we aim to democratize data-driven and data-intensive approaches in urban computing to empower a broad range of stakeholders to analyze urban data at scale and tackle problems from different domains, including transportation, accessibility, and disaster management. We will address two critical obstacles to greater progress in urban computing: the lack of documented, robust, well-engineered tools and open computing platforms, and a dispersed community of researchers and developers. At the core of our proposal is the development of a cyberinfrastructure that integrates methods and tools for the exploration of urban data that are scalable, reusable, interoperable, and offer solutions to common challenges, including data cleaning, management, and visualization. We will deploy an integrated suite of tools in a collaborative cloud environment, enabling users from different domains to easily reuse existing methods across domains to ensure sustainability, facilitate collaboration between researchers and developers, and develop a cohesive community. 
Keywords: urban data, urban science, big data

UIC Researchers Join National Project to Turn Urban Data into Healthier Cities

The Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing Research (OSCUR) will create a cohesive ecosystem of tools and resources designed to transform city data into actionable knowledge. This multi-institutional collaboration is supported by a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, with $1.75 million allocated to UIC. 
The project includes researchers from UIC's College of Engineering and College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs who will collaborate with investigators from New York University and the University of Washington. UIC will leverage its expertise in visual data analysis, civil engineering, and government and community partnerships to design accessible computational tools focused on environmental justice, transportation, and other public priorities.

OSCUR

The &ldquo;Curio: A Dataflow-Based Framework for Collaborative Urban Visual Analytics&rdquo; paper was accepted to IEEE VIS 2024. Curio is a framework for collaborative urban visual analytics that uses a dataflow model with multiple abstraction levels (code, grammar, GUI elements) to facilitate collaboration across the design and implementation of visual analytics components. Curio allows users to build and iterate on dataflows with reusable modules, supporting collaborative design and tracking changes. We evaluated Curio with domain experts on urban accessibility, climate, and sunlight access. 
Video overview, source code, examples, and tutorials are available here: <a=href"https://urbantk.org/curio/">https://urbantk.org/curio/</a> 
The paper was led by PhD student Gustavo Moreira under EVL faculty and Computer Science assistant professor Fabio Miranda.

&ldquo;Curio&rdquo; Paper Accepted to IEEE VIS 2024

&ldquo;Assessing the Landscape of Toolkits, Frameworks, and Authoring Tools for Urban Visual Analytics Systems&rdquo; has been accepted for publication by Science Direct (Elsevier) in the Computer Graphics 2024 Journal. In this paper, researchers reviewed 135 works to assess the extent to which current open-source toolkits, frameworks, and authoring tools can effectively support the development of components tailored to urban visual analytics, identifying strengths and limitations in addressing the unique challenges posed by urban data. 
Project Overview 
The creation of visual analytics systems focused on urban issues has seen a notable surge. These systems simplify intricate urban analysis workflows into intuitive, interactive visual representations, enabling users to explore, understand, and derive insights from large, complex data. Examples of these datasets include street-level imagery, street networks, and building geometries. Developing urban visual analytics systems, however, is a challenging task that necessitates
significant programming expertise to handle several critical aspects, such as: (1) visualization to allow for data exploration in urban environments, (2) data management to integrate diverse urban data types and sources, (3) data analytics to highlight patterns and trends, and (4) system performance to ensure interactive response times. Furthermore, such development requires collaboration between stakeholders from different disciplines, including urban planning, public policy, public health, and climate sciences. The complexity involved and the tendency for these efforts to occur within the framework of one-off collaborations often lead to the creation of monolithic and isolated prototypes that are rarely made publicly available. Such a situation, with a notable lack of emphasis on interoperability as a design requirement, makes it difficult to extend existing systems and integrate discrete components into other tools.
The paper was led by PhD student Leonardo Ferreira under the advisement of EVL faculty and Computer Science assistant professor Fabio Miranda.

Urban Visual Analytics Systems Research Published in Computer Graphics 2024 Journal

A special screening of the Chicago Design Milestones 1920–2019 project will be exhibited on Monday, August 5 at 2pm at 150 Media Stream Chicago. The installation visualizes the evolution of Chicago design by its examination and presentation of historic characteristics of design works in the Chicago Design Archive (CDA) collection over the last 10 decades. 
Join us in congratulating EVL and Design professor Daria Tsoupikova and her colleagues on this seminal, creative work! 
August 5, 2024, 2pm 
150 N Riverside Plaza (lobby) 
Chicago, IL 60606 
Chicago Design Milestones was developed as a collaboration of CDA, the University of Illinois Chicago School of Design & Electronic Visualization Laboratory, and Columbia College Chicago. It is part of the ongoing research of this collaboration aiming to highlight the role of Chicago as a major national design center through the use of new technologies. 
150 Media Stream, the largest media screen (3,000+ sq ft) in Chicago, is comprised of 89 LED blades stretching 150 ft long and rising 22 ft high, located in the lobby of a downtown Chicago riverfront building. It is the only structure of its kind dedicated to showcasing Chicago artists, culture, and history alongside renowned and emerging artists from around the world. 
Links: 
<a href="https://150mediastream.com/about/">150MediaStream</a> 
<a href="https://chicagodesignarchive.org/essay/chicago-design-milestones">Chicago Design Milestones</a> 
<a href="https://150mediastream.com/archive/">MIlestones 150MediaStream Archive</a> 
Creators: 
Daria Tsoupikova (UIC), Sharon Oiga (UIC/CDA), Guy Villa Jr (CCC), Jack Weiss (CDA), Cheri Gearhart (CDA), Wayne Stuetzer (CDA), Krystofer Kim (NASA), Ali Khan (UIC) 
Grant funding support: 
Riverside/150 Media Stream, Columbia College Chicago, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts 
Curated by Yuge Zhou

Chicago Design Milestones 1920–2019 Showcased at 150 Media Stream

EVL PhD candidate Ke Fan has been named a recipient of the 2024 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analytics using the most powerful computers that are currently available. The fellowship is named after George Michael one of the founders of the Supercomputing Conference. 
Read the <a href="https://www.acm.org/media-center/2024/august/george-michael-fellowship-recipients-2024">AMC news release</a>. 
Join us in congratulating Ke and her advisor Computer Science Assistant Professor and EVL faculty Sidharth Kumar on this exceptional distinction!

EVL PhD Candidate Ke Fan Named 2024 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship

The July 2024 issue of IEEE Computing Edge magazine&rsquo; section on Data Visualization features the contrail visual computing digital twin work conducted by EVL graduate students Nafiul Nipu, and Carla Floricel, along with their advisor professor G. Elisabeta Marai. This research was done in collaboration with professor Roberto Paoli (MIE). 
Contrails are condensation trails generated from emitted particles by aircraft engines, which perturb Earth's radiation budget. Simulation modeling is used to interpret the formation and development of contrails. These simulations are computationally intensive and rely on high-performance computing solutions, and the contrail structures are not well defined. We propose a visual computing system to assist in defining contrails and their characteristics, as well as in the analysis of parameters for computer-generated aircraft engine simulations. The back end of our system leverages a contrail-formation criterion and clustering methods to detect contrails&rsquo; shape and evolution and identify similar simulation runs. The front-end system helps analyze contrails and their parameters across multiple simulation runs. The evaluation with domain experts shows this approach successfully aids in contrail data investigation.

EVL Researchers&rsquo; Contrail Digital Twin Work Featured in IEEE CS Magazine

The first Creative Coding Community Workshop brought together a diverse group of Chicago public high school students ranging in age from 13 to 15 to introduce students to the basics of coding, interactive 3D, typography and game design. Hosted at the University of Illinois Chicago&rsquo;s (UIC), Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and organized by professor Daria Tsoupikova, participating students productively conquered a steep learning curve to learn the basics of coding, - starting from ground zero to produce interactive Virtual Reality (VR) projects for a public exhibition – all within 2 weeks! Their projects investigated critical global concepts such as global warming, air and water pollution, migration, and mental health in immersive dimensions of Computer Science + Design. Several projects were featured in the CAVE2 Hybrid Reality Environment VR exhibition after the Workshop. The Workshop was a tremendous success and very well received by participants and organizers. 
Congratulations to all participants and good luck with your future pursuits in Computer Science and Design! 
Special thanks to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-nishimoto-55a61047/">Arthur Nishimoto</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/farah-kamleh-aa8b41248/">Farah Kamleh</a>. 
<a href="https://youtu.be/8YZdeWj8uA4">See a video documenting the Workshop.</a> 
This Workshop was made possible through support from EVL and UIC.

UIC&rsquo;s First Creative Coding Community Workshop a Tremendous Success!

EVL affiliated faculty and assistant professor of Computer Science Wei Tang has been appointed by Science Direct as associate editor of the journal &ldquo;Pattern Recognition&rdquo;.  The journal publishes developments in the fields of computer vision, image processing, text and document analysis, and neural networks. Dr. Tang&rsquo;s expertise in these fields makes him the perfect candidate for this position.  We congratulate Dr. Tang on his appointment.

Wei Tang Appointed Associate Editor for &ldquo;Pattern Recognition&rdquo;

EVL is that connection! The Laboratory has a long and rich history in the computer graphics - visualization discipline. Founded in 1973 by co-directors Thomas A. DeFanti and Daniel J. Sandin, EVL&rsquo;s foundation has been in innovation and collaboration, which attracted animator Larry Cuba to the lab. Hired by George Lucas to create the briefing room sequence animation for &ldquo;Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope&rdquo;, Cuba contracted with EVL to produce the animation using EVL tools over a three month period at UIC. The Star Wars connection is but one of EVL&rsquo;s many accomplishments and inventions. 
Read the full UIC <a href="https://emails.uofi.uic.edu/newsletter/25/1974977825.html">Honors College E-News</a> article, which includes a historic interview on the project with Tom DeFanti.

UIC Researchers Join National Project to Turn Urban Data into Healthier Cities

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