&ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; is coming to the Chicago Children&rsquo;s Theater March 24-26th. Written by Jo Catell and developed by Daria Tsoupikova, Sai Priya Jyothula, Andrew Johnson, Arthur Nishimoto and Lance Long at EVL, this experience is described as collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) for tele-Immersive interactive theater. &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; performances provide the opportunity for people to experience the show in two different ways: as a VR participant wearing a head-mounted display and interacting with the environment, or as an observer watching participants perform! 
A gutsy teen has to outsmart her mother&rsquo;s narcissistic boss and survive dangerous new technology in hummingbird: a live, immersive adventure that transforms theatrical storytelling utilizing cutting-edge, virtual reality technology1 
Free Performances: Fri 3/24 @ 6:30pm, Sat 3/25 @ 2:30pm & 4pm, Sun 3/26 @ 2:30pm & 4pm 
Recommended For Ages 10 & Up 
Run Time:50 minutes 
See the Chicago Children&rsquo;s Theater <a href="https://chicagochildrenstheatre.org/event/hummingbird/">web posting</a> for more information. 
&ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; performances are made possible with the support from the National Endowment for the Arts grant for art projects, Illinois Arts Council, Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), and the University of Illinois Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts. 
See <a href="https://hummingbirdvr.com/"> https://hummingbirdvr.com/</a>

&ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; Performances Scheduled at the Chicago Children&rsquo;s Theater

The First Environmental Justice Workshop, entitled &ldquo;Generating a Discussion Between Communities and Industries: Data Collection, Analytics, Policy, and Tools&rdquo; was held at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory's Continuum environment on March 15, 2023. In many cities across the United States, many communities are located close to an excessive number of environmentally polluting industrial facilities. From an environmental justice viewpoint, the fact that the environmental burden is not shared across all populations living in a city is unfair. The aim of the environmental justice workshop is to bring together different stakeholders such as industries and southwest Chicago communities to get their perspective, identify and discuss pressing environmental justice challenges across Chicago, share current work across disciplines, and brainstorm solutions. 
Among topics for discussion were posing questions to participants such as - What are the fundamental concepts of environmental justice? How do environmental issues disproportionately impact certain communities? What environmental injustices exist in different communities? Are there any organizations working to create awareness about environmental justice? How can we use interactive visualization to access environmental justice issues? 
Workshop organizers include: 
Apostolis Sambanis, Health Policy and Administration, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Fabio Miranda, Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Federica Fusi, Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Marisol Becerra, Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Michael Cailas, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Michael D Siciliano, Public Policy, Management, and Analytics, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Phillip A. Boda, Special Education, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Sanjana Srabanti, Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago 
Sybil Derrible, Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois, Chicago

The First Environmental Justice Workshop Held at EVL

&ldquo;Where the sidewalk ends&rdquo; in <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2023/open-source-tool-mapping-sidewalks-0315">MIT News</a> discusses how Miranda along with researchers from MIT, University of Sao Paulo, and New York University have built an open-source tool that uses aerial imagery and image-recognition to create complete maps of sidewalks and crosswalks. The tool, called TILE2NET can help planners, policymakers, and urbanists who want to expand pedestrian infrastructure. 
The research team used computerized image-recognition techniques to build a tool that will visually recognize sidewalks, crosswalks, and footpaths. To do that, the researchers first used 20,000 aerial images from Boston, Cambridge, New York City, and Washington - places where comprehensive pedestrian maps already existed. By training the image-recognition model on such clearly defined objects and using portions of those cities as a starting point, they were able to see how well TILE2NET would work elsewhere in those cities. 
<a href="https://news.mit.edu/2023/open-source-tool-mapping-sidewalks-0315">Read the full MIT News article.</a> 
For additional information regarding this research see the Computers, Environment and Urban Systems publication <a href="https://www2.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2703">&ldquo;Mapping the walk: A scalable computer vision approach for generating sidewalk network datasets from aerial imagery&rdquo;</a>.

EVL Faculty Member Fabio Miranda&rsquo;s TILE2NET Collaborative Research Featured in MIT News

Three UIC faculty members, including Professor Daria Tsoupikova and Assistant Professor Fabio Miranda from UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), and the School of Design&rsquo;s Professor Sharon Oiga, can see their work on display nightly, as part of a larger-than-life public art installation downtown - <a href="https://artonthemart.com/chicago-design-through-the-decades/">Art on theMART</a>. 
The display referred to as Chicago Design Through the Decades is a journey through the last hundred years of the history of Chicago design and is based on the collection of the <a href="https://chicagodesignarchive.org/">Chicago Design Archive (CDA)</a>, a permanent online record of design in the city. The historical imagery is assembled using machine learning algorithms provided by Miranda, which is a tribute to Chicago as the home of neural networks. The final imagery is projected across the Chicago River onto the Merchandise Mart for a spectacular digital art experience. The display runs through December 30th nightly at 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. 
Stay tuned for the possibility of student collaboration on another Art on theMART display or similar public digital art project given the new undergraduate <a href="https://cs.uic.edu/undergraduate/cs-and-design/">CS + Design</a> major, which debuted Fall 2022. UIC is the only public university that currently offers this degree, and prospects are bright for students to participate in innovative digital art projects such as Chicago Design Through the Decades in the future. 
<a href="https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/larger-than-life-cs-faculty-participate-in-public-art-project-in-downtown-chicago/">Read Andrea Poet&rsquo;s full article</a>.

UIC CS News Features &ldquo;Larger than life: CS faculty participate in public art project in downtown Chicago&rdquo;

PhD Student: Sai Priya Jyothula 
Committee: 
Dr. Andrew Johnson, Advisor and Chair 
Dr. Steve Jones 
Dr. Debaleena Chattopadhyay 
Dr. Joseph Michaelis 
Dr. Venugopal Vasudevan (Procter and Gamble) 
Location: 2068 ERF 
Date and time: Monday, December 12, 10 AM - 11:30 AM CST 
Zoom link: <a href="https://uic.zoom.us/j/87006131464?pwd=c1MxVmIvc1VTSW9RU2xYdFZOTUl1Zz09
">https://uic.zoom.us/j/87006131464?pwd=c1MxVmIvc1VTSW9RU2xYdFZOTUl1Zz09</a> 
Abstract: 
Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are shared virtual spaces that bring users together and allow them to interact with each other and virtual objects. In asymmetric CVEs, users have varied roles, interaction capabilities, perspectives, and device configurations, which can be leveraged to further user objectives. The major objective of my research is to use these asymmetric virtual environments as a means to augment people and enable them to transcend their physical, sensory and cognitive limitations. Specifically, I focus on facilitating rehabilitation training for the body and accessing deeper metaphors of the mind. The research work outlined in this document is divided into two sections. In the first section, I discuss the design and implementation of asymmetrical virtual environments that I developed for patient rehabilitation in collaboration with ShirleyRyan AbilityLab, Chicago. Then, I present the iterative improvements that I made to the environments based on the feedback from the physical therapists and propose a user study to evaluate the systems. Understanding the usage context helps to design guidelines for future systems that not only focus on the efficiency of the system individually but also consider how the system augments human capabilities. In the second section, I discuss the research techniques that map the mental models and elicit unconscious latent thoughts, such as photo-elicitation and Zaltman&rsquo;s Metaphor Elicitation Technique. Next, I explain the implementation of an exploratory study I performed to evaluate the effectiveness of utilizing asymmetrical virtual environments to augment metaphor elicitation. Finally, I analyze the results and challenges that I encountered during the pilot study and propose future research to improve the prototype system and the metaphor elicitation process.

PhD Prelim Announcement: Supporting Motor-Rehabilitation and Metaphor Elicitation in Asymmetric Virtual Environments

Computer Science assistant professor and EVL affiliated faculty Nikita Soni showcases her research and the newly installed interactive spherical display housed in EVL on Friday, November 2, 2022, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 2036 ERF. The display purchased from Pufferfish, Ltd. is currently being used for a UIUC-subaward / NASA-funded project investigating how touchscreen interactions enable deep learning experiences, particularly in Earth Science classrooms. 
Please join us in celebrating and demonstrating this exciting new device and innovative interactive applications!

Interactive Spherical Display Open House at EVL

Guadalupe Canahuate, Associate Professor from The University of Iowa presents an EVL colloquium Wednesday, November 30, 2022, Room 2068 ERF (Continuum). 
<strongLAbstract: The concept of similarity is used as the basis for many data exploration and data mining tasks. Nearest neighbor (NN) queries identify the most similar items, or in terms of distance the closest points to a query point. Similarity is traditionally characterized using a distance function between multi-dimensional feature vectors. However, when the data is high-dimensional, traditional distance functions fail to significantly distinguish between the closest and furthest points, as few dissimilar dimensions dominate the distance function. Localized similarity functions, i.e. functions that only consider dimensions close to the query, quantize each dimension independently and only compute similarity for the dimensions where the query and the points fall into the same bin. These quantizations are query-agnostic and there is potential to improve accuracy when a query-dependent quantization is used. In this work we propose a query dependent dynamic quantization method for high-dimensional similarity searches that does not only improve the quality of the distance metric, but also improves query time performance by filtering out non relevant data. We propose a distributed indexing and query algorithm to efficiently compute this novel quantization and evaluate the scalability of the approach in relation to the number of dimensions, and the number of compute nodes. 
Bio: Guadalupe Canahuate is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include machine learning, large scale data management, data compression and indexing, and big-data. indexing, and big-data. Dr. Canahuate obtained her Ph.D degree from the Computer Science and Engineering department at The Ohio State University in 2009; and her M.Sc. Degree from the Computer and Information Science department in 2004. Her work includes precision medicine approaches for outcome risk modeling of radiotherapy oncologic patients, distributed indexing and query optimization, high-dimensional data analysis, and semantic-based searches. Before joining academia, Dr. Canahuate worked as a software developer and a certified database administrator in her home country Dominican Republic.

Scalable high-dimensional similarity searches using a query driven dynamic quantization

&ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo; by UIC Design and EVL Professor Daria Tsoupikova, Sharon Oiga, and Guy Villa Jr. will be on view at Art of theMart: 
Friday, November 18 - Friday, December 30, 7:30 & 8:00 p.m. 
Best viewed on The Chicago Riverwalk between Wells and Lake Streets. 
<a href="https://artonthemart.com/programming/">Art on theMART</a> is the largest permanent digital art projection in the world, projecting contemporary artwork across the 2.5 acre river-façade of theMART. Art on theMART provides a public platform for moving image work by renowned local, national and international multi-disciplinary artists. The program is the result of a 30-year commitment by theMART owner Vornado Realty Trust, in close collaboration with the City of Chicago, with the shared goal to provide public access to innovative contemporary artwork for the thousands of visitors traversing the Chicago Riverwalk each day. 
Join us in celebrating the work of our colleagues and collaborators for the exhibition opening Friday, November 18th at 7:30 p.m.!

November 18th Opening of &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo; on the Art on theMART

SAGE3 beta version software and documentation will be introduced next week at the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing (SC22) conference in Dallas, Texas, USA, November 13-18, 2022. The SAGE User Community is invited to attend the SC22 Birds of a Feather (BOF) meeting and participate in ongoing SAGE3 demonstrations in the SC22 Exhibition. 
Attend the &ldquo;SAGE 12th SC BOF: Smart Amplified Group Environment Enhanced with Artificial Intelligence for Global Collaboration&rdquo;: 
 * Tuesday, November 15, 2022 
 *12:15PM - 01:15PM CST 
 * Room: D168, Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas 
 * <a href="https://sc22.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof141&sess=sess312">https://sc22.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof141&sess=sess312</a> 
Join us for SAGE3 demonstrations in the StarLight research booth # 2847 on the exhibition floor, Tuesday-Thursday. 
SAGE3, the Smart Amplified Group Environment, is the next-generation, &ldquo;human-in-the-loop&rdquo; collaboration platform, providing HPC users with the tools to access, explore, discover, publish, share, integrate, and reuse complex datasets. SAGE3 supports today&rsquo;s hybrid work/home environments (laptops, single monitors and display walls), and interfaces with a variety of computational infrastructures, workflows, notebooks, and analytics software through Artificial Intelligence-enabled services and orchestration services. It lowers the barrier of entry into AI for non-expert users, democratizing access to disruptive technologies for those with varying skills. 
The BOF will not be streamed. SAGE3 software and documentation will be available for download on the SAGE3 website. The SAGE3 team plans to hold SAGE3 educational webinars, starting next year. 
REMINDER: SAGE3 / SAGE2 COMMUNITY USER FORUMS are now hosted on Slack. To join, go to the <a href="https://sage3.sagecommons.org/">SAGE3 website</a> and click on the Support menu. 
 * For SAGE3, subscribe to the sage3-support channel. 
 * For SAGE2, subscribe to the sage2-support channel. 
Thank you for your longstanding support of SAGE and we look forward to continued collaborations. 
Maxine Brown 
SAGE team member 
<a href="mailto:maxine@uic.edu">maxine@uic.edu</a> 
SAGE3 is being developed by the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications (LAVA) and the Hawaii Data Science Institute (HI-DSI) at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM), the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and the InfoVis Lab at Virginia Tech (VT). SAGE3 receives major funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), awards #2004014 (UHM), #2003800 (UIC) and #2003387 (VT). 
SAGE2 received major NSF support, award #ACI-1441963, to UHM and UIC. 
SAGE, SAGE2 and SAGE3 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

INTRODUCING SAGE3 at the SC22 - Tuesday, November 15, 12:15pm - 1:15pm

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a $2.6 million grant to lead institution Northern Illinois University and sub-recipient the University of Illinois Chicago for classroom training and research opportunities in computational high energy physics. 
EVL faculty and Computer Science professor Mike Papka, and EVL director of research, professor Andy Johnson will lead the computational and high-performance computing aspect of this project. They will collaborate with UIC Physics professor Richard Cavanaugh to mentor students in computational high-energy physics education. 
The 5-year award will provide two dozen master&rsquo;s-level students in physics and computer science stipends, tuition reimbursement, and distinctive research experiences in the HEP domain. 
Dr. Cavanaugh specializes in Particle Physics and holds a joint appointment with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FermiLab). As the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director, Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Dr. Papka has unprecedented experience in high-performance computing. They will provide students a unique opportunity to collaborate with scientists at the DOE&rsquo;s ANL and FermiLab. 
See the full announcement in the <a href="https://newsroom.niu.edu/2-6m-doe-award-will-support-training-in-computational-high-energy-physics/">Northern Illinois University Newsroom</a>.

“Hummingbird” Performances Scheduled at the Chicago Children’s Theater

Contact