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

National Institutes of Health: National Cancer Institute has awarded UIC funding to continue research in head and neck cancer therapy. UIC PI, EVL faculty and Computer Science associate professor Liz Marai in conjunction with co-PI Xinhua Zhang are joined by collaborators from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Dave Fuller, PI) and the University of Iowa (Guadalupe Canahuate, PI) to develop a longitudinal decision support tool to assist clinicians in selecting treatments that balance survival and side-effects responses to cancer therapy. The project will lead to better insights into the biological and therapeutic factors related to cancer survival and toxicity, allowing personalization of care at the individual level. 
Title: Longitudinal Spatial-Nonspatial Decision Support for Competing Outcomes in Head and Neck Cancer Therapy 
PI: G. Elisabeta Marai, Co-PI: Xinhua Zhang 
Sponsor: National Institutes of Health: National Cancer Institute 
Dates: March 1, 2021 - Feb 28, 2026 
Amount: $2,797,868 
Grant Number: 1 R01 CA258827-01

NIH Awards &ldquo;Longitudinal Spatial-Nonspatial Decision Support for Competing Outcomes in Head and Neck Cancer Therapy&rdquo;

Join us in congratulating EVL faculty and School of Design professor Daria Tsoupikova who has been named the SIGGRAPH 2021 Art Papers Chair. Each year, hundreds of computer graphics researchers, professionals and technologists contribute their scientific innovations, technical achievements, and artistic accomplishments to the SIGGRAPH Art Papers venue. This is a juried and peer reviewed event, which comprises an unparalleled, collaborative experience that is one of the world&rsquo;s largest and most influential events at the intersection of art, science, and technology. 
Find out more about all of the SIGGRAPH Programs and join us online next summer for <a href="https://s2021.siggraph.org/">SIGGRAPH 2021</a>.

Daria Tsoupikova Named SIGGRAPH 2021 Art Papers Chair

EVL alumnus Marco Cavallo was awarded with the UIC College of Engineering Outstanding Young Achievement Award in Computer Science for 2020. The award identifies alumni who, through their achievement in their field of engineering, have significantly enhanced the industry and who inspire and help to instill a sense of pride among the alumni, students, faculty and staff of UIC. Marco is among the 15 alumni award honorees in engineering and computer science who have used their UIC education to establish rewarding, productive, and high-impact careers.<bra> 
Marco currently works as a senior research engineer in Apple&rsquo;s technology development group, where he is in charge of creating data visualization tools and machine learning infrastructure to foster the development of new computer vision algorithms for augmented reality. 
He graduated with a dual master&rsquo;s degree in computer science and engineering from Politecnico di Milano in Italy and the University of Illinois Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on augmented reality while working at UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory. 
Congratulations Marco! 
See the award winner video on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oskk1icFSvE&feature=youtu.be">YouTube</a>.

EVL and UIC Computer Science Alumnus Marco Cavallo Honored with Outstanding Young Achievement Award

For the Supercomputing (SC20) Conference this year, a research community partnership was formed to design an international networking testbed using existing facilities, with several international extensions. Demonstrations and experiments were conducted prior to the conference with results discussed during a SC20 virtual forum. &ldquo;The Forum For Experiments and Demonstrations Showcasing Innovations In Large-Scale, Data-Intensive-Science Networking&rdquo; was organized by Research Consortium for Data-Intensive Science Networking to communicate: a) the motivation behind these experiments and demonstrations, b) their design, c) technologies used, d) results and e) future research in these areas. 
EVL senior research programmer, Lance Long participated to discuss EVL&rsquo;s research in Composable Infrastructure, specifically MRI: Acquisition of a Composable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning & Visualization (COMPaaS DLV) funded under NSF Award #CNS-1828265. Items discussed included the benefits of composable infrastructure, implementation for deep learning in an academic research environment, operating systems, dynamic workflows, orchestration middleware, current use cases and future work. 
Other participants included: Ciena Research Lab, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Naval Research Laboratory, iCAIR/Northwestern, StarLight, UCSD, FNAL, CalTech, SURFnet.

Lance Long Presents EVL&rsquo;s Composable Infrastructure Research at SC20

After six years at the helm as EVL director and twenty-six years as an associate director, Maxine Brown retires effective October 1, 2020. Over the years, Maxine has led and been instrumental in EVL&rsquo;s interdisciplinary research and development specializing in collaborative visualization, virtual reality, visual data science, and advanced computing and networking infrastructure. 
Most notable, during Maxine&rsquo;s tenure as director, EVL invented the CAVE2&trade; hybrid-reality environment, developed the Continuum Smart Environment and collaborative middle-ware SAGE&trade; scalable adaptive graphics environment, as well as the SAGE2&trade; scalable amplified group environment. In collaboration with Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, Maxine managed the EVL team to create STAR TAP (1997), Ithe research and education network connection facility for international traffic located in downtown Chicago. STAR TAP was followed by StarLight (2001), which is still the largest research and engineering advanced networking facility in the world. 
Maxine&rsquo;s contributions to EVL are numerous and significant. She will be sorely missed by faculty, staff, students and many colleagues worldwide. Andrew Johnson, EVL director of research and professor of Computer Science assumes the role of EVL&rsquo;s interim director. 
<a href="https://engineering.uic.edu/news-stories/maxine-brown-director-of-uics-electronic-visualization-laboratory-retires-after-34-years/">Read the complete College of Engineering article.</a>

Maxine Brown EVL Director Retires

October 19, 2020 - - Fabio Miranda joins the EVL faculty as an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science. Miranda interests include developing techniques that allow for the interactive visual analysis of large-scale data, combining methods from visualization, data management, machine learning, and computer graphics. Of particular concern is how visual data analytics can help address different problems cities face by integrating data on different resolutions and from different sources. 
Miranda&rsquo;s research in data science, human-computer interaction and visualization include: visual data analysis, data structures and indexing techniques for big data visualization, urban analytics, harnessing data sets of different types (images, land use information, 3D building geometry, etc.) to address concrete city problems, and machine learning. He has worked closely with domain experts from different fields, from urban planning to occupational therapy, and the outcome of these collaborations include not only research published in leading visualization, database, HCI, and AI venues, but also systems that were made available to experts in academia, industry, and government agencies. 
Miranda received his Ph.D. from New York University (2018).

Fabio Miranda Joins EVL Faculty

UIC Computer Science Professors Andy Johnson (PI) and Barbara Di Eugenio (co-PI) have been awarded a $333,000 NSF grant entitled &ldquo;CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Articulate+ - A Conversational Interface for Democratizing Visual Analysis&rdquo; project period October 2020 to September 2022. Dr. Moira Zellner, now of Northeastern University will also participate as co-PI on this grant. This project is part of a larger overall award of $500,000 that also includes Jason Leigh at University of Hawaii at Manoa. 
&ldquo;Articulate+&rdquo; continues EVL&rsquo; research in Natural Language Processing and Visualization also sponsored by NSF for the last 5+ years. See <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2522">Articulate+ - A Conversational Interface for Democratizing Visual Analysis</a> for more information on this project. 
NSF Award Number (FAIN): 2007257

NSF Grant &ldquo;CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Articulate+&rdquo; Awarded

October 1 - - EVL Director of Research Andrew Johnson has been named Interim Director of EVL following Maxine Brown&rsquo;s retirement from UIC. Johnson now assumes the responsibility of heading EVL - overseeing EVL&rsquo;s overall mission in education, research, development, and technology transfer. 
For over 23 years, Johnson has been a valued EVL faculty member (Professor of Computer Science) and researcher who has focused upon interaction and collaboration using advanced visualization displays and the application of those displays to enhance discovery and learning. 
His areas of expertise include visualization, virtual and augmented reality, natural language processing, visual analytics, and high-performance networking. 
Over the years, Johnson has been instrumental in the development of EVL instrumentation and systems, including the Continuum smart environment, CAVE2&trade;, LambdaVision high-resolution tiled displays, LambdaTable tabletop touch system, GeoWall portable geoscience display environment, PARIS augmented reality and ImmersaDesk virtual reality systems. He has overseen the development of numerous visualization and virtual reality applications across diverse domain disciplines from science and engineering to the humanities and art. Johnson is a highly regarded mentor and educator to EVL&rsquo;s graduate students and undergraduates alike. 
Johnson retains his position as Director of Research while leading EVL&rsquo;s future initiatives and innovations as Interim Director.

Andrew Johnson Named Interim Director, EVL

EVL alumna (MFA 2004) Brenda Lopez Silva is among four UIC faculty members who have been selected as Fulbright scholars for 2020-21. They are among 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the flagship international educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government. 
Brenda López Silva, a research and development specialist with the Learning Sciences Research Institute at UIC, will use her Fulbright award to teach in Portugal, where she will lead a course on problem-based learning for storytelling with the design of virtual reality environments. She is scheduled to teach at the Polytechnical Institute of Lisbon beginning in March 2021. 
Join us in congratulating Brenda on this well-deserved recognition! 
See the full article in <a href="https://today.uic.edu/four-uic-scholars-earn-fulbright-awards-for-research-teaching?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today%2B09.29.20">UIC Today.</a>

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

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