The Goodman Theater New Stages Festival will showcase &ldquo;HUMMINGBIRD&rdquo; December 3-6, 2021to be held at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC. 
&ldquo;HUMMINGBIRD&rdquo; is a multi-user theatrical performance merging live theater and virtual reality into an immersive experience that smashes together storytelling, gaming and virtual reality. Audiences go beyond observing the performance on a physical stage by meeting on a virtual stage inside the play itself, interacting with each other, the story, and the performers. 
The performance features a gutsy teen outsmarting her mother&rsquo;s narcissistic boss, surviving dangerous new technology in Hummingbird: a live, immersive adventure that transforms theatrical storytelling utilizing cutting-edge, virtual reality technology. 
Created by Daria Tsoupikova, Jo Catell, Sai Priya Jyothula, Andrew Johnson, Arthur Nishimoto and Lance Long with the support from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), the University of Illinois Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Art Project.

Goodman Theater New Stages Announces Staging of &ldquo;HUMMINGBIRD&rdquo;

EVL alumna (MFA 2000) and associate professor of Media Study at the University of Buffalo, Josephine Anstey continues her creative endeavors with the launch of her animated short, &ldquo;Pik and Etty in Progressive Taxation&rdquo; at the <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/yeswecannibal">Yes We Cannibal Salon</a> on November 21, 2021 at 5pm EST/4pm CST. 
Pik and Etty are economic commentators and re-enactors. With a rich cast of other clay figures they feature in short animations inspired by radical economist Thomas Piketty. Between 1900-1980 the &ldquo;ninety percent&rdquo; got richer and the &ldquo;ten percent&rdquo; got poorer. This <a href="https://yeswecannibal.org/encounters/meat-meet-35-josephine-anstey/">second Pik and Etty video</a> discusses the role of taxation in spreading the wealth. 
<a href="https://yeswecannibal.org/">Yes We Cannibal</a> is an anti-profit institution for experimental art and social practice. 
<a href="http://www.josephineanstey.com">Josephine Anstey&rsquo;s</a> career has been concept and project-driven, engaging with a wide variety of media practices and technologies. Experiments with narrative & dramatic forms and questions of identity & consciousness have been constant themes. Currently, she is making animations with clay figures Pik and Etty about economics and writing a scifi/ecofiction novel. Other projects include interactive drama, virtual and mixed reality, intermedia performance, video-art, radio documentary, web and prose fiction. Her VR and video works have shown widely in the US, in Europe, South America and Asia, and she has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria.

EVL Alumna Josephine Anstey Introduces Her Animated Short &ldquo;Pik and Etty in Progressive Taxation&rdquo;

Thanks to new NSF support, beginning May 2020, the SAGE team has been hard at work designing and developing SAGE3, the Smart Amplified Group Environment. This new funding enables us to take SAGE2, introduced in 2013, to a new level, integrating Artificial Intelligence technologies with applications, visualization workflows and collaboration services. The team demonstrated an early version of SAGE3 at two webinars this summer, hosted by the CineGrid and PRAGMA organizations (information below). 
In the past, we have looked forward to seeing old users and meeting new users at the annual Supercomputing (SC) conference, though team members will not be attending this year. However, we continue to be hard at work on SAGE3 and are planning a number of exciting announcements for early December. 
1. A new SAGE3 website. 
2. An &ldquo;alpha release&rdquo; of SAGE3, which is an early, first release of the software, for user testing and feedback. 
3. A &ldquo;how-to&rdquo; video explaining current SAGE3 features. 
4. A new user forum hosted on Slack (tinyurl.com/sagecommunity). 
Given SAGE3 is in an early prototype phase, we expect our users to continue using SAGE2 for work, meetings, classes, etc. We will continue to answer support questions for SAGE2 for the foreseeable future, but will not introduce new releases. 
Stay tuned for SAGE3 news updates as they become available !! 
Maxine Brown 
SAGE team member 
<a href="mailto:maxine@uic.edu">maxine@uic.edu</a> 
<a href="https://youtu.be/PyE09TxwhPE">SAGE3 presentation at CineGrid, June 2021</a> 
<a href="https://youtu.be/UprsquVI6yo">SAGE3 presentation at PRAGMA, August 2021</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.

Exciting SAGE3 announcements planned for early December

EVL faculty member and professor of Design Daria Tsoupikova will represent UIC at the 6th Annual International CAAV Conference to be held as a hybrid event at Purdue University on November 1 - 4, 2021. Tspoupikova will participate in a panel discussion on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, (DEI) and Accessibility, scheduled Wednesday, November 3rd at 1:30 pm EST. 
Tsoupikova is currently involved in several DEI activities, in particular a long-term project with Chicago&rsquo;s Goodman Theater on a virtual-reality-based theater experience to inform some of Chicago&rsquo;s youth who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods on the value of theater by making it experiential and relevant. She will discuss her projects and experiences in affecting DEI.

Daria Tsoupikova Participates in CAAV 2021

EVL in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) hosted a satellite event for VIS2021 featuring a presentation from invited speaker Dr. Alan Keahey, VP for Data Science Visualization at Conversant Media, student lightning talks, a conference virtual watch party, followed by a reception near UIC on Tuesday, October 26, 2021. 
Due to COVID, the IEEE VIS conference was held virtually, complemented by local satellite in-person events to promote face-to-face networking between academic and professional VIS communities. 
Watch a <a href="https://youtu.be/mYEysIVb9Vc">video synopsis on EVLTube</a>. 
<a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/vis-chicago/">More information on the IEEE VIS2021 Chicago Satellite Event.</a> 
This event is being organized by Fabio Miranda (EVL) and Victor Mateevisti (ANL).

EVL Hosts Satellite Event for IEEE VIS2021

For the last several years EVL faculty member and CS associate professor Liz Marai has been collaborating with the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Iowa to develop tools to help oncologists make better assessments for treating cancer patients. More recently, Liz Marai and co-investigator Xinhua Zhang also from UIC have been developing a scalable artificial intelligence system based on real patient data to serve as a decision support tool for physicians treating head and neck cancer patients. This research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute Award #3R01CA258827-01S1, entitled &ldquo;Longitudinal Spatial-Nonspatial Decision Support for Competing Outcomes in Head and Neck Cancer Therapy&rdquo; with principal investigators from UIC, the University of Texas, and the University of Iowa. 
See the full article in the <a href="https://engineering.uic.edu/about/coe-news/rise/fall-2021/better-ai-for-better-decisions/">College of Engineering&rsquo;s CEO News.</a>

EVL Artificial Intelligence Research Featured in COE News

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. 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.

Goodman Theater New Stages Announces Staging of “HUMMINGBIRD”

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