Director Emeritus, EVL Distinguished Professor of Computer Science

Thomas A. DeFanti

Director Emeritus, EVL Professor, Computer Science

Jason Leigh

MS Graduate, 2001

Naveen Krishnaprasad

MS Graduate, 2000

Nikita Sawant

MS Graduate, 2005

Chris Scharver

MS Graduate, 1995

Jon Goldman

Ben Goldstein

Abhinav Kapoor

Trina Roy

MS &amp; MFA Graduate, 1997

Marcus Thiebaux

MS Graduate

Rafael Vilasuso

Bo Yuan

PhD Graduate, 2008

Charles Zhang

PhD Graduate, 2009

Venkatram Vishwanath

MS Graduate, 2007

Nicholas Schwarz

Saleha Rizvi

PhD Graduate, Spring 2008

Xun Luo

EVL Affiliated Faculty Professor, Computer Science Dean College of Engineering

Peter C. Nelson

Visiting MS Graduate Student, Istituto Politecnico di Milano (Italy)

Filippo Galgani

PhD Student Research Specialist, 2011-2013 MFA Graduate, 2011

JD Pirtle

MS Graduate, 2014

Alex Simes

New Media Arts Graduate, 2013

Joshua Albers

PhD Graduate, 2015

Huy A. Bui

MS Graduate, 2017

Kyle Almryde

Postdoctoral Research Associate 2014-2016

Tuan Dang

EVL&rsquo;s exhibit at Supercomputing &rsquo;93 focused upon experiential science in the CAVE Virtual Reality Theater. Applications demonstrations included Astrophysics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Math, Meteorology and Genetic Programming. Applications were run in one or two modes: locally on the SGI/CAVE and/or distributed between the CM-5 and the SGI/CAVE. 

In local mode, CAVE participants explore pre-computed datasets. In distributed computing mode, participants may interactively steer their simulation codes on the CM-5. This ability enables CAVE users to explore and experiment with visualizations of pre-computed datasets, identify an area they want to enhance, and then invoke simulation codes on the networked supercomputer to compute new datasets. The CM-5 generates new data, which is then transferred to the SGI workstations for rendering and display in the CAVE. 

Scientific simulation codes are typically large and complex, and require HPCC resources - massively parallel processors, vector processors, massive datastores, large memories, or high-speed networks - to run efficiently. Depending on the datasets and type of analysis the scientists want to do, they set up their simulation codes to calculate greater detail, a different time step, or a different state defined by new parameters. In some instances, codes can be executed locally but take longer to run, so supercomputers are used to provide faster interaction. 

CAVE experiences enable researchers to interactively explore their scientific domains, play &ldquo;what if&rdquo; games by modifying their codes, and view the resulting visualizations in close-to-real-time. Virtual reality is recognized as an intelligent user interface to the emerging National Information Infrastructure, that will enable computational scientists and engineers to access HPCC enabling technologies and that will put the human in the loop for timely data analysis and understanding.

Supercomputing &rsquo;93

EVL took a leadership role at ACM / IEEE Supercomputing &rsquo;95 in the organization of the conference&rsquo;s Information Architecture. This involved the integration of electronic audio / visual support with local and national networking, and the transmission and delivery of information to conference attendees. It prioritized the linking of datasets, computers and VR display devices over long distances, and trouble-shot the problems of dealing with varying bandwidths, protocols, and routing and switching technology. 

The most extensive of the networks installed at the conference was the Information Wide Area Year (I-WAY), which was designed to provide the backbone for all high-end networking activities. The I-WAY was a working model for a proposed national-scale, applications-focused, community-based ATM network. 

Thomas A. DeFanti and Maxine D. Brown were co-chairs of a special conference event, the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Testbed, designed to provide applications to test the feasibility of the I-WAY. Contributors developed large-scale simulations on dozens of this country&rsquo;s fastest computers, linked by the I-WAY, and presented their virtual-reality and scientific-visualization output on a CAVE, I-Desk, or I-Wall. 

EVL&rsquo;s goal was to encourage the development of teams, tools, hardware, system software, and human interface models on an accelerated schedule to enable national-scale, multi-site collaborations to facilitate solutions to National Challenge and Grand Challenge problems. The resulting applications demonstrated new paradigms for networking and scalable computing interoperability and optimization, as well as methods for graphical user interaction.

Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Testbed

Demonstrations of advanced Internet applications hosted by <a href="http://www.internet2.edu/">Internet2</a> and Highway 1 were the highlight of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) member spring meeting held in Washington D.C. 
 
EVLers demonstrated the following tele-immersive applications onsite using an ImmersaDesk networked to various remote locations including Old Dominion University, NCSA and EVL:
<ul>
<li>Cave5D demonstrated with Virtual Chesapeake Bay (Old Dominion University)</li>
<li>Video Avatars in The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Virtual Environment (EVL)</li>
<li>Networked Virtual Director (NCSA)</li>
</ul>

Still from Mercantile Exchange

Internet2 - Advanced Applications Demonstrations

The National Computational Science Alliance <a href="http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/index.alliance.html">(Alliance)</a> is a partnership among computational scientists, computer scientists, and professionals in education, outreach, and training at more than 50 U.S. universities
and research institutions working to prototype the computational and information infrastructure of the next
century. 

EVL, as a partner of the National Computational Science Alliance, participated in its annual meeting held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Assembly Hall. The meeting&rsquo;s research exhibition included demonstrations run on ten ImmersaDesks. Andy Johnson and Jason Leigh gave a tutorial on <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern">CAVERN</a>. 

EVL&rsquo;s VR demonstrations included: 
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;PartnerBall&rdquo; - A Dual View ImmersaDesk (Duodesk) Application (2 simultaneously tracked participants)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/~cave5d/homepage.html">Cave5D</a> using CAVERNsoft networking</li>
<li>Networked <a href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VR/grants">Virtual Director</a></li>
<li>Tele-Immersive Design Review with General Motors</li>
<li>Caterpillar&rsquo;s Industrial Design Review networked to EVL / Chicago</li>
</ul>

Assembly Hall, UIUC

Alliance &rsquo;98

The following papers were presented by EVL faculty and students at the IPT Conference.
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;Deploying VR in an Elementary School - Pipe Dreams and Practical Realities.&rdquo; (Johnson)</li>
<li>&ldquo;Developing the PARIS: Using the CAVE to Prototype a New VR Display.&rdquo; (Johnson, Sandin, DeFanti, Dawe, Pape, Qiu, Thongrong, Plepys)</li>
<li>&ldquo;Exploiting Multiple Perspectives in Tele-Immersion&rdquo; (Park, Kapoor, Scharver, Leigh)</li>
<li>&ldquo;The Tele-immersive Data Explorer: A Distributed Architecture for Collaborative Interactive Visualization of Large Data-sets.&rdquo; (Sawant, Scharver, Leigh, Johnson)</li>
<li>&ldquo;Video-Based Measurement of System Latency.&rdquo; (He, Liu, Pape, Dawe, Sandin)</li>
</ul>

Immersive Projection Technology Workshop (IPTW) 2000

The International Grid (iGrid) 2000 exhibit, jointly sponsored and organized by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology at Indiana University (IU), University of Tokyo and Keio University, provided global connectivity to collaborators from Canada, Germany, Greece, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, USA and the CERN institute. 

iGrid 2000 was composed of 24 application demonstrations requiring high-speed networks, with emphasis on distributed computing, tele-immersion, large datasets, remote instrumentation, collaboration, cultural heritage, digital video, streaming media and high-definition television. An additional 3 proposals represented video teleconferencing enhancements. 

EVL and IU, members of NCSA&rsquo;s National Computational Science Alliance partnership, are working to advance the development of the International Technology Grid. The Grid is a prototype 21st century computational and information infrastructure, integrating high-performance computers, visualization environments, remote instruments, and massive databases via high-speed networks to support advanced applications. iGrid 2000 was a direct outgrowth of these efforts.

The International Grid (iGrid) 2000

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was named a recipient of the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. Their award winning proposal, the National Computational Science Alliance, calls for the creation of a partnership of centers of excellence, hereafter called the &ldquo;Alliance&rdquo;, to prototype a computational infrastructure for the Nation for the 21st century. EVL is an Alliance partner and will work with other institutions to further develop collaborative tele-immersive virtual reality tool, techniques and methodologies.

National Computational Science Alliance

The international meeting, Science, Culture, and Education over Internet2, April 4 - 6, 2001 will be held at the Universidad T&eacute;cnica Federico Santa Mar&iacute;a, located in the historical city of Valpara&iacute;so, Chile. 

Integrating the scientific and university communities with applications of the next generation Internet are the central goals of Science, Culture, and Education over Internet2. 

The meeting will be broadcast in simultaneous time to the videoconference rooms of seven of the nine universities of REUNA Consortium that are part of Universidad Virtual (U. Austral de Chile, U. de Atacama, U. de Concepci&oacute;n, U. de La Serena, U. del B&iacute;o B&iacute;o, U. Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educaci&oacute;n and U. Tecnol&oacute;gica Metropolitana). 

EVLers, Brenda Silva, Javier Girado, and Greg Dawe will demonstrate Tele-immersion applications using an ImmersaDesk2 from the international meeting in Chile to UIC. Applications will include:
<ul>
<li>The Virtual Temporal Bone G2, Manipulation of Volumetric Patient Data in a Distributed Virtual Reality Environment, <a href="http://www.sbhis.uic.edu/VRML/">Virtual Reality in Medicine Laboratory</a>, UIC (Fred Dech)</li>
<li>Earthquake Hypocenters, Earthquake Tomography, Space Physics / Space Weather, EVL / UIC (Jason Leigh), <a href="http://160.94.61.144/dept/">Geology and Geophysics Department</a>, University of Minnesota (Paul Morin), <a href="http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/">Geology Department</a>, University of Michigan (Peter van Keken)</li>
</ul>

Science, Culture and Education over Internet2

Started in 1998, the biennial iGrid (International Grid) event showcases application advancements and middleware innovations enabled by globally connected, high-performance networks. This year, iGrid 2002 challenges scientists and technologists to optimally utilize 10Gbps experimental networks, with special emphasis on e-Science, Grid and Virtual Laboratory applications. 

Grid and Virtual Laboratory technologies are crucial prerequisites to a future, flexible e-Science infrastructure. Grid computing is increasingly perceived as the main enabling technology for facilitating multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaborations, enabling researchers to share unique resources and to have uniform and ubiquitous access to these facilities. Grid technologies are enabling the development of Virtual Laboratories, or science portals, for distributed analysis in applied scientific research. Groups worldwide are collaborating on Virtual Laboratory / Grid research projects, creating experimental platforms upon which e-Science and large-scale distributed-computing experiments can take place. 

iGrid 2002 will showcase demonstrations of 10Gbps applications and will also hold two one-day Topical Meetings (Symposia), with invited keynote speakers on e-Science and Virtual Laboratory / Grid developments.

iGrid2002, The International Virtual Laboratory

Workshop General Chairs: 
Larry Smarr and William Parker 
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] 
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) 
University of California, Irvine (UCI) 

Program Committee Chairs: 
Maxine Brown and Tom DeFanti 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
University of Illinois at Chicago 

Background Material: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/activity/NSF/index.html">NSF CISE Grand Challenges in e-Science Workshop Report</a> 

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR) Division. Hosted by Cal-(IT)2, UCI.

NSF ANIR Workshop

EVLer Atul Nayak and Paul Morin (University of Minnesota) are taking the AGAVE / GeoWall to the 14th Annual IRIS Workshop to show how the AGAVE can be used to visualize seismic activity. The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (<a href="http://www.iris.edu">IRIS</a>) is a university research consortium dedicated to exploring the Earth&rsquo;s interior through the collection and distribution of seismographic data. Support for IRIS comes from the National Science Foundation, other federal agencies, universities, and private foundations. 

Traditionally seismologists look at 2D X-Y plots of a timeseries of the displacement of a seismometer in the North-South, East-West and Up-Down directions. The 3D nature of the data is ideal for visualization on the AGAVE. Atul will use Immersaview to display data recorded by a network of seisometers spread across the world when an earthquake hit Turkey (August 17, 1999, Magnitude 7.6 Richter scale). 

At each of the 20-30 stations, you can see three wiggles and a particle zipping by rapidly. Each wiggle represents one of the three components of the seismicity - so the red wiggle is the displacement of the seismometer in the Up-Down direction, the green wiggle is the North-South displacement and the white wiggle is the motion in the East-West direction. The latest data is displayed at the location of the station and the previous samples gradually travel out along the three directions. A yellow particle moves around the station leaving behind a trace of the velocity of a particle in the Earth. This is significant because it is the first time seismologists can actually playback in stereo how the Earth moved at the station as the seismic waves hit it. 

Another event that will be demonstrated is the earthquake that struck Anza, Southern Calfornia (31 October 2001, Mag:5.1). The visualization includes a simultaneous display of the motion of a particle at more than 30 seismometers on the IRIS / USGS network. So seismologists can simply choose the event and stations that want to look at, pull data off the IRIS server and feed it to the program. 

Immersaview is software developed by the CAVERN group at EVL. It allows you to interact with 3D content on the AGAVE / GeoWall. 

Related links: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave/immersaview">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave/immersaview</a> 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave</a> 
<a href="http://www.iris.edu">www.iris.edu</a> 
<a href="http://geowall.org">geowall.org</a>

Fourteenth Annual IRIS Workshop

In conjunction with Global Grid Forum 6 being held in Chicago, EVL is hosting an open house on Monday, October 14, from 4-6 PM. 

StarLight&#8480; -enabled demonstrations will be run throughout the EVL facility and in the SEL CAVE&trade; as part of a self-guided tour of the lab. 

The purpose of the demos are to educate the global Grid community about StarLight&#8480; as an enabling facility to large-scale global Grid applications. 

Featured applications will include: 
TeraScope: Visual Tera Mining (EVL), Kites Flying In and Out of Space (NCSA / UIUC &amp; EVL), High Performance Data Webs (LAC / UIC), Photonic TeraStream (iCAIR &amp; Northwestern University).

EVL Hosts Open House for GGF6

A combination of new projection technology, fast graphics cards and linux PCs have made it possible to provide a stereoscopic projection system that is much more affordable for Earth Science classrooms and research labs. The <a href="http://geowall.geo.lsa.umich.edu">GEOWALL</a> project makes use of these projection systems to visualize structure and dynamics of the Earth in stereo to aid the understanding of these spatial relationships. 

Dr. Jason Leigh and Atul Nayak presented new development in Geowall technology in conjunction with the Fall 2002 Seminar Series conducted by Dr. Eric Frost at the Department of <a href="http://www.geology.sdsu.edu">Geological Sciences</a>, San Diego State University. The talk comprised a description of the current state of the Geowall and how it was used in research labs and classrooms to explore the structure and the dynamics of the Earth&rsquo;s interior. Faculty, staff, and students at SDSU were also introduced to the next generation of the Geowall - the Geowall 2.0. This will be the advanced display system for the various endpoints in the bandwidth-dominated computing environment created by the OptIPuter. As part of this effort Geowalls are currently being deployed at the <a href="http://igpp.ucsd.edu">Institute of Geology and Planetary Physics</a> (UCSD) and the Departments of Geological Sciences and <a href="http://www.engineering.sdsu.edu/electrical/">Computer Engineering</a> at SDSU. Geo-scientists will use the GeoWall 2.0 to steer simulations and create visualizations to aid their research.

Jason Leigh and Atul Nayak Present GeoWall Research at SDSU

iGrid 2000, the International Grid, demonstrates how the power of today&rsquo;s research networks enables access to remote computing resources, distribution of digital media, and collaboration with distant colleagues. 

The concept of connecting geographically distant computing resources and people seamlessly, efficiently and routinely over high-performance networks is itself a major research topic, as computer scientists and application scientists worldwide prototype the 21st-century advanced computational infrastructure, or &lsquo;grid&rsquo;. 

iGrid highlights both the achievements in grid architecture development, and the advancements it enables in science, engineering, cultural heritage, art and architecture, media communications and distance education. 

iGrid features 24 applications from 14 regions Canada, CERN, Germany, Greece, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom and the United States with emphasis on tele-immersion, large datasets, distributed computing, remote instrumentation, collaboration, human / computer interfaces, streaming media, digital video and high-definition television. 

Applications are presented on impressive display technologies: the CAVE&trade; virtual-reality theater developed by the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Super-High Definition movie system from NTT Network Innovation Laboratory, and the Access Grid presentation environment developed by Argonne National Laboratory. Two ImmersaDesks&trade; as well as plasma displays also showcase applications in virtual-reality (stereoscopic) or large-screen (monoscopic) mode. 

iGrid is connected to the JGN, the WIDE Project Network (in cooperation with NTT, TTNet and PNJC), APAN and the APAN / TransPAC (100 Mbps) link to STAR TAP&#8480; - the international, interconnection point in Chicago, Illinois.

Blue Window Pane II

iGrid2000 Empowering Global Research Community Networking

Increased cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh, it turns out, are correlated with the periodic rising water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, the weather pattern called El Nino. 

After reading a scientific paper that proposed such a connection, Robert Grossman downloaded climatic data from a computer managed by meteorologists in Colorado, and he accessed health statistics in a database maintained by the World Health Organization in Switzerland. Using information from the two databases, Grossman documented the connection between El Nino and Bangladesh cholera outbreaks. 

&ldquo;If you like working with numbers, you can use data to find relationships that help you make decisions,&rdquo; said Grossman, director of advanced computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In a world where everything is connected, new networking technology may be our best hope to understand what&rsquo;s going on around us. That&rsquo;s the goal of Chicago-area computer scientists who are devising ultrafast superbroadband connections that they say will transform the way scientists do research and the way people do business. The current Internet, with origins as a medium of military and scientific communications a generation ago, is a document-based network, said Grossman. The new superbroadband network he envisions will be data-based, requiring optical networks that run at speeds thousands of times faster than today&rsquo;s Web. 

&ldquo;We want to make the data alive,&rdquo; said Grossman, who is also chairman of <a href="http://www.magnify.com">Magnify Inc.</a>, a Chicago-based data mining firm. &ldquo;When you get data embedded in a document, it&rsquo;s like getting a fax. You can&rsquo;t go into a fax and change things or pull out individual items.&rdquo; Getting access to databases that contain mountains of statistics requires extreme speeds. Today&rsquo;s networks typically take hours to move 1 trillion bits of data, while advanced networks being built in Chicago move that much in a few minutes. 

Several optical networks are already running, with more set to light up this year. The various networks cover different service areas, ranging from the Chicago metro region to overseas, and they all are interconnected in a building on Northwestern University&rsquo;s Chicago campus. This is the nerve center for the next generation of superbroadband, and scientists can locate their equipment in Northwestern&rsquo;s building to plug directly into the various supernetworks, said Joe Mambretti, director of Northwestern&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.icair.org">International Center for Advanced Internet Research</a>. &ldquo;Soon, we&rsquo;ll have high-speed connections to the campuses and hospitals where researchers are located,&ldquo; Mambretti said. 

A project of the City of Chicago called CivicNet will lay fiber to all the schools, libraries, and police and fire stations in the city, taking high-speed links into every neighborhood, Mambretti said. There will be extra fiber laid with the expectation that private operators will find a way to make broadband links available to residences. Superbroadband networks come at a critical time for researchers. New technology enables scientists to gather information at an ever- increasing pace, with the mapping of the human genome being the prime example. In biology and many other fields, the amount of data generated each year is as great as all the data previously available. &ldquo;Data grows exponentially,&rdquo; said Grossman, &ldquo;but the number of people available who can look at it is constant. So almost none of it gets looked at, and discoveries go unfound.&rdquo; Using a superfast data-based Web, scientists will make discoveries in new ways, he said. Instead of doing new experiments to test their ideas, many scientists will mine existing data to find valuable information already lurking there. Chicago area leads way 

The Chicago region is at the forefront of building the necessary networks in part because of its history as a transportation crossroads, but also because of a local culture of cooperation among scientists here. Computer scientists at Northwestern, <a href="http://www.mcs.anl.gov">Argonne National Laboratory</a> and the U. of I. campuses in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign have long worked with each other to advance networking technology. &ldquo;Chicago is one of the few places in the country where people from different institutions and different disciplines work so closely as a team on infrastructure research,&rdquo; said Aubrey Bush, director of advanced networking infrastructure research at the <a href="http://www.cise.nsf.gov/div/anir/index.html">National Science Foundation</a>, which funds much of work on supernetworks. 

Local scientists have also tapped into state funding to get long- term leases on unused fiber, called dark fiber, that telecom carriers own. The computer scientists are using their own equipment to light the dark fiber and building networks that can carry up to 10 billion bits a second. These speeds, called 10 gigabits, link computers in different locations as tightly as if they were all components of a single computer. &ldquo;When you&rsquo;re connected at 10 gigabits, you&rsquo;re exchanging information at the same speeds that occur within a computer,&rdquo; said Thomas DeFanti, director of the software technology research center at UIC. 

Hooking individual computers across North America and in foreign countries at these speeds to computer servers containing mountains of raw data will give scientists the ability to share their work and make discoveries. It will also provide people working for businesses the ability to get needed information more easily, said Grossman. By getting long-term leases on dark fiber, researchers not only get to design their own advanced networks, but they also get a huge discount because of a glut of available fiber, said DeFanti. &ldquo;We can spend $30,000 to buy a segment of dark fiber for 20 years,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Spending $30,000 to buy that much bandwidth as a finished product from Ameritech would cover about three months.&rdquo; 

Setup is no easy task 
There is much more to setting up superbroadband networks than merely linking lots of computers together with really big information pipes, said Rick Stevens, director of Argonne&rsquo;s math and computer science center. &ldquo;Networks are a shared resource,&rdquo; said Stevens. &ldquo;You have to allocate resources, reserving channel space for a certain use at a specific time. You have to be adaptive as conditions change.&rdquo; Stevens is leading an effort to devise new protocols for advanced networks and to write software to make them work. 

Computer researchers in Amsterdam have built a mirror facility to the one based at Northwestern and are connected to it. Because networks by their nature must be connected to operate, working with partners in Europe, Canada and California will speed the progress of developing ultrafast networks that are highly reliable, said Mambretti. Networking technology is poised to achieve leaps of speed that will surpass the computing rule of thumb, called Moore&rsquo;s Law, that computer chips double their processing power every 18 months, said Thomas Greene, a senior program director for the National Science Foundation. &ldquo;Network capabilities are changing twice as fast as Moore&rsquo;s Law,&rdquo; said Greene. &ldquo;Moore&rsquo;s Law has already penetrated into daily life, but people are only beginning to feel the impact of networking possibilities.&rdquo; 

Jon Van| Tribune staff reporter

Changing Science At Light Speed; Superbroadband Gives Researchers Easy Data Access

In a truly &lsquo;hands on&rsquo; demonstration, a haptics-enhanced virtual reality device now on exhibit at SC&rsquo;02 in Baltimore, shows how surgeons and medical modelers working together in a virtual space can produce precise fitting, pre-fabricated surgical implants without costly molding, casting or sculpting steps. 

Using PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System), a projection-based &lsquo;augmented&rsquo; virtual reality display developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), a surgeon and medical modeler can view a three-dimensional model of a patient&rsquo;s computed tomography (CT) data, and collaboratively review, sculpt and &lsquo;virtually&rsquo; build an implant using their hands. 

PARIS is optimized to allow users to interact with the environment using a variety of tactile input devices. An authentic sensation of the implant sculpting process is achieved using SensAble Technologies&rsquo; PHANTOM force-feedback device. The PARIS display has excellent contrast and variable lighting that allows a user&rsquo;s hands to be seen immersed in the imagery. 

A medically advanced, albeit labor-intensive and costly method for designing and building pre-surgical implants in virtual reality was developed and implemented at UIC in 1996. This process can correct traumatic head injuries and restore normal facial appearance. Although it revolutionized the still-widely practiced method of fashioning implants in the operating room using heat producing and potentially tissue damaging acrylics, it exists largely as a cost prohibitive option in most patient cases. 

The digital, networked, collaborative modeling environment aims to eliminate many time-consuming steps and make the surgical procedure widely available. The digital model of the implant can be exported directly to a variety of rapid-prototyping manufacturing modalities, making &lsquo;hands on&rsquo; sculpting, molding, and casting steps unnecessary, and allowing the use of new, state-of-the-art implant materials. 

The current PARIS prototype employs the Christie Mirage 2000 DLP projector and a double mirror-fold to compactly and brightly illuminate an overhead black screen. Images projected on the black screen are reflected on a half-silvered mirror positioned over the user&rsquo;s desk. Putting his or her hands under the mirrored area, the user can see and interact with the virtual image, or the physical haptic device and/or keyboard. The configuration is well suited to the lighting conditions of a typical office environment, and the device can be easily packed, moved and deployed. The half-silvered mirror display can be raised and lowered over the desktop, so users can either work at their desk or in the virtual-reality space without leaving their offices. PARIS uses EVL-developed collaboration and networking software CAVERNsoft and Quanta, which enable real-time interactions over very-high-speed networks. 

EVL has been working in cooperation with UIC&rsquo;s Virtual Reality in Medicine Laboratory and Department of Neurosurgery, to develop the collaborative augmented reality environment to provide a precise method to construct and revise pre-surgical cranial implant designs. 

&ldquo;We want to take a precise procedure and allow medical professionals to consult worldwide,&rdquo; said UIC medical modeler and application collaborator Ray Evenhouse. &ldquo;The tools to model implants in a digital environment are in place. Given the right networking conditions, we could begin routinely produce implants using this method within two years.&rdquo; 

The PARIS system is on exhibit in the Fakespace Systems booth at SC&rsquo;02 in Baltimore. Fakespace commercializes the EVL-developed CAVE&reg; and ImmersaDesk&reg; systems. EVL receives major funding for PARIS development from National Science Foundation&rsquo;s Major Research Instrumentation and Research Infrastructure awards, and the Department of Energy Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Visual Interactive Environment for Weapons Simulation (VIEWS) program. PARIS is a registered trademark of University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

PARIS&trade; Debuts at SC&rsquo;02 with Haptic Medical Demo

Among the hot buzzwords being heard on the SC2002 show floor this week in Baltimore, those prefixed by Lambda are increasingly ubiquitous. 

In networking parlance, Lambda refers to lightpaths, or more broadly, optically-enabled technology, tools and protocols. A variety of Lambda-enabled technologies are behind the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory&rsquo;s TeraScope demonstration, now going on in the Project DataSpace booth. 

TeraScope is a set of information visualization tools to query, correlate and visualize terabytes of data - in this case, atmospheric data collected and maintained by the National Center for Atmospheric Research&rsquo;s (NCAR) Community Climate Model (CCM3). It also explores one aspect of the emerging OptIPuter architecture called LambdaRAM, which harnesses all the memory on a cluster to provide a high-speed data cache to minimize the impact of latency over long distance optical networks. 

The National Science Foundation-sponsored OptIPuter is a powerfully distributed infrastructure that tightly couples computational, storage and visualization resources over parallel optical networks using the Internet Protocol (IP) communication mechanism. In short, the OptIPuter paradigm treats distributed computer clusters as a single giant computer where the dedicated optical network acts as the system bus. 

TeraScope is a framework and suite of tools for interactively browsing and visualizing large terascale datasets. Terascope&rsquo;s goal is to provide visualization tools that allow scientists to generate meaningful visual summaries (TeraMaps) of terabytes of data, from which relevant subsets (TeraSnaps) can be visualized on modest systems. The rapid derivation of TeraScope&rsquo;s visual summaries is what requires the caching techniques of LambdaRAM. The goal is to let scientists fluidly work with massive data sets as interactively as one would work with a spreadsheet on a laptop, said EVL Senior Research Scientist Jason Leigh. 

In the OptIPuter model, computer clusters are referred to as LambdaNodes because they are connected by multiples of light paths in an optical network. Each computer in a LambdaNode is referred to as a nodule, and collections of LambdaNodes form a LambdaGrid. The data LambdaNodes used in the TeraScope project consist of UIC&rsquo;s Laboratory for Advanced Computing&rsquo;s (LAC) Project Data Space clusters. 

Project Data Space provides the software infrastructure to allow researchers to publish data on the Web in the same way they would publish documents, using a transport protocol (DSTP) analogous to HTTP for the Web. Data retrieved from DSTP servers are streamed at the maximum capacity of the network using an aggressive data transmission scheme called SABUL (Simple Available Bandwidth Utilization Library) which is based on enhancing UDP to provide reliable data transmission, while overcoming the bottlenecks of TCP. 

LambdaRAM is based on the concept of Network Memory, or NetRAM. Prior work in NetRAM has focused on local or system area networks, simply because there has never been sufficient bandwidth over a wide-area network to carry data from memory to memory at rates that are close to memory access rates. The unique difference on the OptIPuter is that the high-speed optical network that interconnects its components makes NetRAM over wide areas practical. 

The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. It will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. Led by Cal-(IT)2 Director Larry Smarr, the project is a joint venture of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). They will lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, and University of California-Irvine [a partner of UCSD in Cal-(IT)2]. 

Co-PIs on the project are UCSD&rsquo;s Mark Ellisman and SDSC&rsquo;s Philip Papadopoulos, and UIC&rsquo;s Thomas A. DeFanti, Jason Leigh, and Project Manger Maxine Brown. 

For more information on the OptIPuter project see: <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/optiputer">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/optiputer</a>

TeraScope Demo at SC&rsquo;02 Previews OptIPuter Capabilities

EVLers Jason Leigh, Andrew Johnson and Atul Nayak are presenting Wiggleview at the American Geophysical Union 2002 Fall Meeting. Using the AGAVE / GeoWall, the Wiggleview version exhibited in the IRIS booth at AGU will display real-time seismic data retrieved from the CORBA server in Seattle, Washington. The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (<a href="http://www.iris.edu">IRIS</a>) is a university research consortium dedicated to exploring the Earth&rsquo;s interior through the collection and distribution of seismographic data. Support for IRIS comes from the National Science Foundation, other federal agencies, universities, and private foundations. 

Wiggleview is a tool developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) for visualizing seismic data. Data for seismic events is obtained from repositories maintained by IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) at the Data Management Center (DMC) in Seattle, Washington. 

The Wiggleview visualizations consist of a topographical map and 2D North / South (green lines), East / West (white lines) and vertical (pink lines) seismic traces recorded at each station in a worldwide network of seismometers. In addition, yellow 3D particle traces integrate the three components, and depict the actual tremors occurring at the instance of an event. 

The tool&rsquo;s strength lies in being able to depict as many as 60 channels of waveforms and 20 traces of particle motion on a single display. This allows one to watch the seismic wave field expand about a source and see how it differs from place to place. It can also assist in understanding surface wave multipathing and anisotropy. The 3D nature of the images enhances depth perception, thus allowing a better understanding of attenuation due to distance and earth structure, source directivity and seismic hazard estimation. 

Related links: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/atul/wiggleview">www.evl.uic.edu/atul/wiggleview</a> 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave/immersaview">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave/immersaview</a> 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave</a> 
<a href="http://www.iris.edu">www.iris.edu</a> 
<a href="http://geowall.org">geowall.org</a>

Wiggleview Demonstrated at AGU2002

Jason Leigh, Senior Research Scientist at EVL presented research efforts in the development of tele-immersive collaborative applications / environments distributed over Lambda Grids at this year&rsquo;s VizGRID Symposium. The presentation focused upon EVL&rsquo;s current research in Amplified Collaboration Environments for the Lambda Grid. 

Research is moving from locally-connected, processor-centric environments to distributed-computing environments that rely on optical connections, where the networks are faster than the resources they connect. Recent, major technological and cost breakthroughs in networking technology have made it possible to send scores of lambdas (Lambda refers to a fully dedicated wavelength of light, each capable of bandwidth speeds from 1-10 gigabits/second.) on a pair of customer-owned or leased optical fiber, making the terabit network of the future conceivable. Researchers are moving from grid-intensive computing to LambdaGrid-intensive computing, in which computational resources are connected by multiple lambdas. 

LambdaGrid-intensive computing will become the main enabling technology for facilitating multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary advanced collaborations, enabling researchers to share unique resources and to have uniform and ubiquitous access to these facilities. 

In turn, this will enable the development of Virtual Laboratories, or science portals, for distributed analysis in applied scientific research. Groups worldwide are collaborating on major research projects, creating experimental platforms upon which future e-Science and large-scale distributed computing experiments can take place.

Leigh Presents EVL Research at VizGRID Symposium 2002

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $13.5 million over five years to a consortium led by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The funds will support design and development of a powerful distributed cyber &ldquo;infostructure&rdquo; to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. Initial application efforts will be in bioscience and earth sciences research, including environmental, seismic and remote sensing. It is one of the largest Information Technology Research (ITR) grants awarded since the NSF established the program in 2000. 

Dubbed the OptIPuter - for optical networking, Internet Protocol, and computer storage and processing - the envisioned infostructure will tightly couple computational, storage, and visualization resources over parallel optical networks using the IP communication mechanism. 

&ldquo;The opportunity to build and experiment with an OptIPuter has arisen because of major technology changes in the last five years,&rdquo; said principal investigator Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2], and Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD&rsquo;s Jacobs School of Engineering. 

&ldquo;Optical bandwidth and storage capacity are growing much faster than processing power, turning the old computing paradigm on its head: we are going from a processor-centric world, to one centered on optical bandwidth, where the networks will be faster than the computational resources they connect.&rdquo; 

The OptIPuter project will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. 

Designing and deploying the OptIPuter for grid-intensive computing will require fundamental inventions including software and middleware abstractions to deliver unique capabilities in a lambda-rich world. (A lambda, in networking parlance, is a fully dedicated wavelength of light in an optical network, each already capable of bandwidth speeds from 1-10 gigabits/second). 

The researchers in southern California and Chicago will focus on new network-control and traffic-engineering techniques to optimize data transmission; new middleware to bandwidth-match distributed resources; and new collaboration and visualization to enable real-time interaction with high-definition imagery. 

UCSD and UIC will lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, University of Southern California and University of California-Irvine [a partner of UCSD in Cal-(IT)2]. Co-PIs on the project are UCSD&rsquo;s Mark Ellisman and Philip Papadopoulos of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD, who will provide expertise and oversight on application drivers, grid and cluster computing, and data management; and UIC&rsquo;s Thomas A. DeFanti and Jason Leigh, who will provide expertise and oversight on networking, visualization, and collaboration technologies. 

&ldquo;Think of the OptIPuter as a giant graphics card, connected to a giant disk system, via a system bus that happens to be an extremely high-speed optical network,&rdquo; said DeFanti, a distinguished professor of computer science at UIC and co-director of the university&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory. 

&ldquo;One of our major design goals is to provide scientists with advanced interactive querying and visualization tools, to enable them to explore massive amounts of previously uncorrelated data in near real time.&rdquo; The OptIPuter project manager will be UIC&rsquo;s Maxine Brown. SDSC will provide facilities and services, including access to the NSF-funded TeraGrid and its 13.6 teraflops of cluster computing power distributed across four sites. 

The project&rsquo;s broad multidisciplinary team will also conduct large-scale, application-driven system experiments. They will be carried out in close conjunction with two data-intensive e-science efforts already underway: NSF&rsquo;s EarthScope, and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They will provide the application drivers to ensure a useful and usable OptIPuter design. 

Under co-PI Ellisman, UCSD&rsquo;s National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) is driving the BIRN neuroscience application, with an emphasis on neuroimaging. Under the leadership of UCSD&rsquo;s Scripps Institution of oceanography&rsquo;s Deputy Director and Acting Dean John Orcutt, Scripps&rsquo; Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics is leading the EarthScope geoscience effort, including acquisition, processing and scientific interpretation of satellite-derived remote sensing, near-real-time environmental, and active source data. 

The OptIPuter is a &ldquo;virtual&rdquo; parallel computer in which the individual &ldquo;processors&rdquo; are widely distributed clusters; the &ldquo;memory&rdquo; is in the form of large distributed data repositories; &ldquo;peripherals&rdquo; are very-large scientific instruments, visualization displays and/or sensor arrays; and the &ldquo;motherboard&rdquo; uses standard IP delivered over multiple dedicated lambdas. Use of parallel lambdas will permit so much extra bandwidth that the connection is likely to be uncongested. &ldquo;Recent cost breakthroughs in networking technology are making it possible to send multiple lambdas down a single piece of customer-owned optical fiber,&rdquo; said co-PI Papadopoulos. &ldquo;This will increase potential capacity to the point where bandwidth ceases to be the bottleneck in the development of metropolitan-scale grids.&rdquo; 

According to Cal-(IT)2&rsquo;s Smarr, grid-intensive applications &ldquo;will require a large-scale distributed information infrastructure based on petascale computing, exabyte storage, and terabit networks.&rdquo; A petaflop is one-thousand-times faster than today&rsquo;s speediest parallel computers, which process one trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops). An exabyte is a billion gigabytes of storage, and terabit networks will transmit data at one trillion bits per secondsome 20 million times faster than a dialup 56K Internet connection. 

The southern California- and Chicago-based research teams already collaborate on large-scale cluster networking projects and plan to prototype the OptIPuter initially on campus, metropolitan and state-wide optical fiber networks (including the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California&rsquo;s experimental developmental network CalREN-XD in California, and the Illinois Wired / Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education [I-WIRE] in Illinois). 

Private companies will also collaborate with university researchers on the project. IBM is providing systems architecture and performance help, and Telcordia Technologies will work closely with the network research teams to contribute its optical networking expertise. &ldquo;The OptIPuter project has the potential for extraordinary innovations in both computing and networking, and we are pleased to be a part of this team of highly qualified and experienced researchers,&rdquo; said Richard S. Wolff, Vice President of Applied Research at Telcordia. Further, the San Diego Telecom Council, which boasts a membership of 300 telecom companies, has expressed interest in extending OptIPuter links to a variety of public- and private-sector sites in San Diego County. 

The project will also fund what is expected to be the country&rsquo;s largest graduate-student program for optical networking research. The OptIPuter will also extend into undergraduate classrooms, with curricula and research opportunities to be developed for UCSD&rsquo;s new Sixth College, whose inaugural freshman class in Fall 2002 will be the first to benefit from the college&rsquo;s commitment to the use of ubiquitous connectivity technologies. Younger students will also be exposed to the vision of the OptIPuter, with field-based curricula concentrated on Lincoln Elementary School in suburban Chicago, and UCSD&rsquo;s Preuss School (a San Diego City charter school for grades 6-12, enrolling low-income, first-generation college-bound students).

EVL Receives NSF Grant For OptIPuter Research

EVL participated in this year&rsquo;s All-Hands Meeting with presentations and demonstrations highlighting contributions to the Scientific Workspaces of the Furture (SWOF) and Modeling Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (MEAD) Expeditions. 

The demonstrations consisted of streaming video over the Gigabit ethernet network (GigE) between EVL / Chicago and Beckman Institute / Urbana, using EVL&rsquo;s TeraVision technology and the GeoWall to display climate and biological studies. A large eddy simulation of a 3D supercell storm was visualized with Vis5D and captured on a TeraVision box in Chicago, then received and displayed on a TeraVision box in Urbana. Though two sites were involved in the Alliance demonstration, TeraVision can be used to easily distribute simulations to multiple sites. The streamed simulation yielded very realistic storm features and wind fields observed in real thunderstorms. 

Visualization data provided by data Bob Wilhelmson, UIUC.

NCSA Tiled Display

EVL&rsquo;s Alliance Expedition Activities Presented at the 2003 All-Hands Meeting

Glimmerglass and University of Illinois at Chicago Join Forces to Develop New LambdaGrid Applications 

Streaming computing applied to lambda multicasting to improve application richness for Grid computing 

Hayward, Calif., and Chicago, Ill - Glimmerglass, a supplier of Transparent Connectivity solutions, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) today announced a partnership to support the development of a new class of compute-intensive applications running on high-performance computers configured into grids that are interconnected with fiber-optic links. Glimmerglass is providing a System 300E Layer 1 Fiber Switch configured with Photonic Multicasting&trade; to EVL, and the partners are collaborating on grid related application research, proofs of concept, technical publications, and presentations. Additionally, the partners will demonstrate applications of transparent connectivity and Glimmerglass Photonic Multicasting&trade; technology at the SC 2003 conference, in the National Center for Data Mining at UIC booth (#R2935), to be held in Phoenix Arizona, November 15-21, 2003. 

The partnership recognizes the potential associated with the convergence of two new technologies, grid middleware and affordable lambda networks, which is leading to the creation of LambdaGrids. Lambdas are wavelengths of laser light used to send parallel streams of data over a single optical fiber. These links are the superhighways, over which information between Grid computing nodes flows. 

The Glimmerglass System 300E enables &ldquo;streaming computing,&rdquo; the streaming of information, whether high-resolution imagery or massive databases, among the elements of the LambdaGrid with little or no latency. Grid developers, such as EVL, will experiment with the Glimmerglass system to dynamically offload large data-communications flows over optical networking test-beds. Because the Glimmerglass system switches lambdas transparently without detection and signal regeneration, it is &ldquo;future-proof,&rdquo; able to support any transmission speed or protocol, such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond, including standards not yet available today. 

Lambda Multicasting is a Key Innovation 
Using streaming computing, Glimmerglass and EVL will investigate the potential benefits of the System 300&rsquo;s Photonic Multicasting&trade;, in which the Glimmerglass system replicates and transmits a lambda-stream carrying data to multiple computing resources on the LambdaGrid network. Separate, correlated operations can thus be simultaneously performed on each lambda-stream copy, such as a stereo rendering of image data. The Glimmerglass system can efficiently generate and transmit exact, synchronized copies of any lambda-stream without relying on higher layer protocols, such as TCP / IP or SONET. 

&ldquo;We are excited to partner with Glimmerglass on developing new Transparent Connectivity applications,&rdquo; said Tom DeFanti, Director of EVL. &ldquo;The use of the System 300E with Photonic Multicasting will enable new levels of scalability and flexibility, and keep the control of the network applications-centric. In addition to costing one to two orders of magnitude more than a Glimmerglass system, traditional network elements such as routers are not appropriate to our application, as they introduce latency and are inherently nondeterministic in data transmission.&rdquo; 

Immersive Collaboration Applications and Database Intrusion Detection 
EVL expects a paradigm shift in high-performance networks as applications move to new Grid-based system architectures, such as the OptIPuter, where the optical network acts like an enormous systems bus, connecting various data, computing, and visualization components that are distributed globally. &ldquo;The functional richness of elements like the Glimmerglass system is increasing all the time,&rdquo; said Jason Leigh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at EVL. Features such as Glimmerglass Photonic Multicasting technology should make it easier to advance my research on Amplified Collaborative Environments (ACEs), which are &ldquo;war rooms&rdquo; for distributed teams that share high-resolution immersive data visualizations. 

&ldquo;Streaming computing&rsquo;s lambda multicasting capability being developed by the EVL / Glimmerglass partnership have strong implications for my work on petabyte databases,&rdquo; said Robert Grossman, an EVL collaborator and Director of the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago. &ldquo;With this technology, we can create virtual data warehouses on the fly from distributed databases by using lambda-streaming to do &lsquo;streaming joins.&rsquo; As a first application, we will use streaming joins to improve distributed intrusion detection systems. This could be very important since distributed intrusion detection systems today produce so much data that a centralized data warehouse is no longer practical for real-time intrusion detection.&rdquo; 

Interoperability and Application Control 
EVL and Glimmerglass will collaborate to integrate their proof-of-concept investigations into applications-centric network middleware, enabling application developers to access advanced transparent connectivity capabilities of future LambdaGrids, thereby facilitating the adoption of these advanced micro-photonics products. &ldquo;Our Glimmerglass System 300 was designed to be an easy-to-deploy solution for information-intensive applications such as those running on the LambdaGrid,&rdquo; said Mark Housley, President and CEO of Glimmerglass. &ldquo;We are committed to accelerating the Grid&rsquo;s growth, and believe our virtues of simplicity, transparency, reliability, and openness are important for its success.&rdquo; 

About Glimmerglass 
Glimmerglass develops and manufactures the smallest, highest performing, and most reliable transparent connectivity solutions that manage light at the physical fiber, waveband, and individual wavelength levels. Glimmerglass delivers transparent connectivity technologies to the defense, intelligence, super-computing, test &amp; measurement, Internet infrastructure, enterprise, video production, cable and telecommunications industries. Founded by a team of micro-photonics veterans in 2000, and headquartered in Hayward, California, Glimmerglass is funded by top venture capital firms including Mobius Venture Capital, Onset Ventures, CDP Capital-Technology Ventures, Applied Materials Ventures, Ashford Capital Management, Inc. and Anthem Venture Partners. See: <a href="http://www.glimmerglass.com">www.glimmerglass.com</a>, send email to info @ glimmerglass.com, or call +1 510-780-1800. 

About the Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is a graduate research laboratory specializing in virtual reality and real-time interactive computer graphics over advanced optical networks; it is a joint effort of UIC&rsquo;s College of Engineering and School of Art and Design, and represents the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country offering graduate degrees to those specializing in visualization. Having received recognition for developing the CAVE&reg; and ImmersaDesk&reg; virtual-reality systems, EVL&rsquo;s current research focus is tele-immersion - having users in different locations around the world collaborate over high-speed networks in shared, virtual environments as if they were together in the same room. Major funding is provided by the National Science Foundation. 

Glimmerglass and Photonic Multicasting are trademarks of Glimmerglass Networks, Inc. CAVE and ImmersaDesk are registered trademarks of the University of Illinois&rsquo; Board of Trustees. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective holders.

Glimmerglass and EVL Join Forces to Develop New LambdaGrid Applications

Portable, Augmented, and Autostereo: EVL&rsquo;s Next Generation of Virtual Reality Displays 

In March 2004, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory hosted an open house in conjunction with the IEEE VR 2004 conference. On exhibit were various scientific and artistic applications running on EVL-invented display systems, including PARIS, GeoWall, C-Wall and a 2000 lumen projector CAVE (shown here). 

The EVL open house event will also mark the debut of the Varrier autostereo system. Presentations on laboratory research projects will run concurrently. 

University of Illinois at Chicago, Engineering Research Facility(ERF) 
842 W. Taylor Street, Chicago, IL 

For a map and directions, see: www.evl.uic.edu/info/locat.php3 

The IEEE VR Open House was sponsored in part by the generous contributions of <a href="http://www.fakespace.com">Fakespace Systems</a>, <a href="http://www.force10networks.com">Force10 Networks</a>, <a href="http://www.reasonco.com">Reason</a>, and <a href="http://www.vrco.com">VRCO</a>.

The C-Wall and a 2000 lumen projector CAVE on display at the EVL Open House for IEEE VR 2004.

IEEE Virtual Reality 2004 :: Open House at EVL

Those who attended the exhibition of VROOM at the proceedings of Siggraph &rsquo;94, experienced the possibilities of scientific visualization in computational science and engineering with emphasis on interactive, collaborative problem-solving. Virtual environments enabled participants to view, enter and interact with massive datasets. They could become smaller than an atom or larger than the universe; stand in the middle of a thunderstorm or travel through the human bloodstream. 

Over 40 projects were exhibited during four days of demonstrations, involving more than 200 researchers. The demonstrations used CAVE and BOOM technologies, transmitted over local high-speed networks, using massive datastores, superworkstations, supercomputers, and scientific instrumentation. The primary goal of VROOM was to encourage the development of teams, tools, hardware, system software, and human interface models. New interaction paradigms for virtual environments, tuned to science and engineering emerged. 

Attendees gained a vision of the 90&rsquo;s scientific &ldquo;cyberworkspace&rdquo;. VR experiences enable researchers to interactively explore their scientific domains, play &ldquo;what if&rdquo; games by modifying their codes, and view the resulting visualizations. VR is recognized as an &ldquo;intelligent user interface&rdquo; to the emerging National Information Infrastructure, that will enable computational scientists and engineers to access HPCC enabling technologies and put the &ldquo;human in the loop&rdquo; for timely data analysis and understanding. 

Additional EVL applications are as follows (also see &lsquo;related research&rsquo; links below): 
CitySpace 
Computational Modeling for Crash-Worthiness 
Simulation of a Grinding Process 
Visualization of Casting Process 
Using VR for Machine Design 
Scientific Visualization of Gyrofluid Tokamak Turbulence 
Getting Physical in Four Dimensions 
Topological Surface Deformation 
Detour 
The Virtual Eye 
Weakly Electric Fish Electric Organ Discharge 
JASON Interactive Mapper 
Post-Euclidean Walkabout

VROOM - The Virtual Reality Room :: Exhibition at Siggraph

Jason Leigh, Andy Johnson, Luc Renambot and students Nicholas Schwarz and Arun Rao attended the 2004 GeoWall Summit at Scripps Institution of Oceanography on the University of California San Diego campus. 

They demonstrated ImmersaView and JuxtaView on EVL&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/research/res_project.php3?indi=267">Personal GeoWall2</a> (PG-2). The Personal GeoWall2 is a smaller, hybrid visualization system that provides passive stereo and high-resolution LCDs panels.

Proceedings of the Geowall Summit

EVL at the GeoWall Summit 2004

Graduate student Arun Rao visited Florida State University (<a href="http://www.fsu.edu">FSU</a>) to demonstrate EVL&rsquo;s prototype CoreWall application to members of the Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility (<a href="http://www.arf.fsu.edu/">AMGRF</a>) , Antarctic Drilling Program (<a href="http://andrill-server.unl.edu/">ANDRILL</a>) and The Shallow Drilling along the Antarctic Continental Margin project (<a href="http://www.arf.fsu.edu/shaldril.cfm">SHALDRIL</a>). 

The purpose of the workshop was to demonstrate technologies to assist AMGRF scientists, as their core repository from the land and surrounding waters of Antarctica is nearing capacity. 

CoreWall runs on EVL&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/research/res_project.php3?indi=267">Personal GeoWall-2</a>, a tiled LCD display system driven by a single PC. CoreWall allows the user to view geologic cores at full resolution along with related data. The CoreWall application loads high resolution images of core sections, organizes them by drilling location, loads / displays multi-sensor log data, and interactively slides core section images along horizontal tracks. 

CoreWall, still in development, will be a collaborative, interactive core visualization tool for geoscientists. Future work includes integrating the <a href="http://www-odp.tamu.edu/database/">JANUS Ocean Drilling Program</a> database at Texas A&amp;M. 

Related links: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/pg2/">The Personal GeoWall2 project</a> 
<a href="http://www-odp.tamu.edu/database/">JANUS at Texas A&amp;M</a>

The CoreWall prototype running on the Personal GeoWall-2

New CoreWall Technology for the Personal GeoWall-2 Displayed at Florida State University

The Collaborative Visualization Center (CVC) at the University of California San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering, Cal-(IT)2 opens Wednesday, September 22nd, 4:00 - 7:00pm. 

The new facility is designed and modeled after EVL&rsquo;s &ldquo;Continuum&rdquo; project (advanced collaborative environment) - equipped with a state of the art display system, coupling a graphics workstation with high resolution projectors for active stereo 3D visualization. Advanced, high quality A/V components, a smartboard, video and audio teleconferencing units, and wireless data capture systems allow for flexible reconfiguration of the space to create a &ldquo;living lab&rdquo; for experimentation in visualization research to a diverse user community. 

Opening demonstrations will include a collaborative session between EVL and CVC, using the Immersaview software to share 3D data on immersive displays, while incorporating electronic whiteboards, audio and video transmissions. 

CVC is a joint Cal-(IT)2 and Jacobs School research and presentation facility for artistic, scientific, and engineering disciplines.

Continuum at TRECC

Opening of the Collaborative Visualization Center at Cal-(IT)2 , Jacobs School of Engineering, UCSD

The OptIPuter annual All Hands Meeting is a three-day meeting, to be held January 26-28, during which participants from all 11 NSF-funded and affiliate academic partners sites from across the U.S. and Europe will meet to discuss the OptIPuter&rsquo;s third year&rsquo;s progress and update work plans, timelines, and deliverables. 

The OptIPuter is a powerful distributed cyberinfrastructure to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. It has two application drivers the NIH Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the NSF EarthScope where scientists are generating multi-gigabytes of 3D volumetric data objects that reside on distributed archives that they want to correlate, analyze, and visualize. 

The OptIPuter is being designed as a &ldquo;virtual&rdquo; parallel computer in which the individual &ldquo;processors&rdquo; are widely distributed clusters; the &ldquo;memory&rdquo; is in the form of large distributed data repositories; &ldquo;peripherals&rdquo; are very-large scientific instruments, visualization displays and/or sensor arrays; and the &ldquo;motherboard&rdquo; uses standard IP delivered over multiple dedicated lambdas. 

PEOPLE INVOLVED: 

Principal Investigator: Larry Smarr, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) 

Co-Principal Investigators: Tom DeFanti and Jason Leigh, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Mark Ellisman and Philip Papadopoulos, UCSD 

Project Manager: Maxine Brown, UIC 

System Software Architect: Andrew Chien, UCSD 

INSTITUTIONS INVOLVED 

Partner institutions: 
University of California, San Diego 
University of Illinois at Chicago 
Northwestern University 
San Diego State University 
Texas A&amp;M University 
University of California, Irvine 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) 
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute 

Affiliate Partner institutions: 
USGS Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDC) 
University of Amsterdam (UvA) 
NASA 

Corporate Partners: 
Big Bangwidth 
Calient Networks 
CANARIE 
Chiaro Networks 
Cisco 
Glimmerglass Networks 
HP 
IBM 
Level (3) Communications 
Lucent Technologies 
Sun Microsystems 
Telcordia 

The OptIPuter receives major funding from the National Science Foundation, cooperative agreement SCI-0225642 to UCSD.

OptIPuter All Hands Meeting 2005

EVL alumnus and Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study of the University at Buffalo, Dave Pape collaborated with artist Jackie Matisse on &ldquo;Art Flying In &amp; Out of Space&rdquo;,now on exhibit at <a href="http://www.zonechelsea.org">ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts</a>, through June 24, 2005. The piece appears along with other Jackie Matisse works spanning 20 years, including her famous hand-made kites and kite tails, mobiles, collages, assemblages, and graphic works. Also on exhibit are video presentations of her collaborative projects, including &ldquo;Tailing a Dream&rdquo; with composer David Tudor and film maker Molly Davies. 

Matisse&rsquo;s &ldquo;Kites Flying In &amp; Out of Space&rdquo; was originally developed in collaboration with NCSA, EVL / UIC, and Virginia Tech as a CAVE application for iGrid2002 in Amsterdam. It explored the physical properties of flying kites in virtual reality whose movements were driven by the bandwidth usage of several collaborative applications running over high-speed networks. 

Matisse&rsquo;s &ldquo;Art Flying In &amp; Out of Space&rdquo; is a flat-screen, interactive stereoscopic installation, which continues her experimental work in supercomputing and virtual reality. 

The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 26th, from 6:00pm - 8:00pm Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00am - 5:00pm. 

To learn more about this exhibition please contact the gallery at (212) 255 2177 or by email: info @ zonechelsea.org

Jackie Matisse: New Art Volant

Daniel J. Sandin is director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and an adjunct professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). His early interest in real-time computer graphics / video image processing and interactive computing environments motivated his pioneering work in video synthesizers and continues to influence his research interests. 

As co-director of EVL, Sandin also directs research in: virtual environments, digital libraries, scientific visualization, new methodologies for informal science and engineering education, paradigms for information display, tele-visualization (distributed graphics over networks), algorithm optimization for massively parallel computing, sonification, human / computer interfaces, and abstract mathematical visualization. He also is receiving recognition, along with EVL co-director Tom DeFanti, for conceiving the CAVE virtual reality theater in 1991. 

Sandin&rsquo;s computer / video art has been exhibited at conferences and museums worldwide, and he has received many awards. Sandin has received many grants and fellowships from such distinguished organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and, his work is included in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Presentation: 
The techniques and poetics of a SHD (Super High Definition) quaternion Julia set animation. 

Dan will speak about the mathematics of Julia set and quaterions, SHD format, abstract mathematical visualizations and animation time structure. 

Related URL: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/hypercomplex/">www.evl.uic.edu/hypercomplex/</a>

Quaternion Julia Sets

Daniel Sandin - EVL Seminar Presentation

Glimmerglass Switches To Be Featured in Upcoming iGrid 2005 Conference 

Glimmerglass, a provider of automated fiber management solutions, announced today that the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter project has purchased its intelligent optical switch to cross-connect all single mode fiber connections in the OptIPuter 10Gb/s optical network backbone, connected to the National LambdaRail (NLR). 

The Glimmerglass switch, already in place in OptIPuter&rsquo;s University of Illinois facility, has been mirrored in the project&rsquo;s University of California, San Diego facility (UCSD). The OptIPuter project, named for its use of optical networking, Internet Protocol, as well as computer storage, processing and visualization, was created to explore and implement &ldquo;supernetworks&rdquo; in which the central architectural element is optical networks, not computers. 

The Glimmerglass switch at UCSD supports 128x128 (input x output fibers) and will serve in featured demonstrations at iGrid 2005, an international grid conference, September 26 - 29 in San Diego, Calif. Demonstrations will include real-time, multi-scale brain data assembly, acquisition and analysis between collaborative but geographically dispersed centers; parallel interactive 3D visualization of earth science interest; and use of global lambdas for particle physics analysis. 

&ldquo;The Glimmerglass optical switches allow us to automatically control extremely large, extremely complex networks and to pre-configure different network architectures that can be called and loaded on demand,&rdquo; said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a partnership of UCSD and UC Irvine, and principal investigator on the OptIPuter project. &ldquo;We can dynamically re-allocate a light path in seconds. This is a huge time-saver for us and critical for conducting important network tests.&rdquo; 

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m very impressed with the innovative work from Larry and his OptIPuter team,&rdquo; said Robert Lundy, Glimmerglass CEO. &ldquo;Grid technology and the OptIPuter project are giving us all a glimpse into what&rsquo;s possible using massively parallel, dynamically reconfigurable optical networks. We&rsquo;re proud to be part of it.&rdquo; 

About OptIPuter 
The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. It will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. UCSD and UIC lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, and UC Irvine, with multiple industry partners. For more information, go to the OptIPuter website at <a href="http://www.optiputer.net">www.optiputer.net</a>. 

About Glimmerglass 
Glimmerglass offers a new approach to managing fiber infrastructure. Its customers achieve an ROI in just a few months rather than over several years as with conventional equipment. Glimmerglass&rsquo; intelligent optical switch enables customers to automatically, remotely and instantly monitor and manage fiber optic connections in a wide range of applications. For more information about Glimmerglass, visit <a href="http://www.glimmerglass.com">www.glimmerglass.com</a>. 

About iGrid 2005 
The International Grid ( iGrid) collaborative event showcases ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks. The iGrids are organized every two or three years by institutions, organizations, consortia and National Research &amp; Education Networks who also participate in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). Overall planning responsibilities for iGrid 2005 are being handled by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, in cooperation with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, SURFnet, University of Amsterdam, and CANARIE. For more information, see <a href="http://www.igrid2005.org">www.igrid2005.org</a>. 

Media Contacts: 
Pam Crowley: 
Crowley Communications: 
408.529.9655: 
pamc @ crowleypr.com: 

Doug Ramsey: 
UCSD / Calit2 / iGrid: 
858.822.5825: 
dramsey @ ucsd.edu: 

Glimmerglass is a trademark of Glimmerglass Networks, Inc.: 
All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective holders.

Glimmerglass/iGrid2005

Glimmerglass Optical Switch to Power 10Gb/s Connections on OptIPuter&rsquo;s Local and National Supercomputing Network

The International Grid (iGrid) collaborative event showcases ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks. The iGrids are organized every two or three years by institutions, organizations, consortia and National Research &amp; Education Networks who also participate in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility. 

The numerous press releases, articles, and related documentation chronicle applications, technologies, symposia, and general iGrid 2005 successes at <a href="http://www.igrid2005.org/media/press.html">www.igrid2005.org/media/press.html</a>

iGrid 2005 &amp; GLIF Meeting a Tremendous Success

EVL participates at SC|05 as an OptIPuter partner in the National LambdaRail booth (#6003), showcasing hardware and software developed with major support from the National Science Foundation. 

H A R D W A R E 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/optiputer/geowall2.html">GeoWall2</a> 
The GeoWall2 is a portable, high-resolution (8000 x 3600 pixels) 15- tile LCD system powered by a 10-node OptIPuter 64bit cluster. Applications of GeoWall2 include the visualization of large remote sensing data, scientific volume rendering imagery, mapping, seismic interpretation, museum exhibits and other applications that require a large collaborative screen area. 

The GeoWall2 was designed and built at the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory with funding from the National Science Foundation. The GeoWall2 on display at SC|05 is on loan from OptIPuter partner USGS / EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. 

Varrier Auto-Stereoscopic Virtual Reality Display 
Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas A. DeFanti, Jinghua Ge, Javier Girado, Robert Kooima and Tom Peterka 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) 
Contact: dan @ evl.uic.edu 

Varrier is a high-resolution, head-tracked autostereoscopic display system that produces a virtual reality immersive experience without requiring the user to wear any encumbrances. Varrier refers to both the display system, and the computational method used to produce the autostereoscopic imagery through a combination of a physical parallax barrier and a virtual barrier. Camera-based head tracking with artificial neural networks is used to track user head position at interactive frame rates. 

Varrier was designed and built at University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory with funding from the National Science Foundation. It is a 35-panel tiled display that produces a wide field of view, head-tracked virtual reality experience. The Varrier system at SC|05 is a single 30 panel display. 

Networked and local application demonstrations include: a U.S. Geological Survey topological map of Crater Lake; a live 3D teleconferencing session from EVL in Chicago, Illinois; Mars Rover data; photon-beam tomography by Marcus Thi&eacute;baux, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California; and animated microscopy imaging by Steve Lamont, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego. 

S O F T W A R E 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage">Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)</a> 
Luc Renambot, Jason Leigh, Byungil Jeong, Andrew Johnson, Nicholas Schwarz and Venkatram Vishwanath 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) 

The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is a graphics streaming architecture for supporting collaborative scientific visualization environments with potentially hundreds of megapixels of contiguous display resolution is a distributed computing architecture that supports easy migration of visualization tools between computing environments. SAGE addresses both heterogeneity and scalability by decoupling graphics rendering from graphics display, and uses high bandwidth networking to bridge them. 

The SAGE architecture consists of numerous rendering resources connected over a high-speed network to a scalable frame buffer. The hardware is built from commodity hardware components that can be arranged to scaled to manage any resolution of display screen. Using SAGE, multiple datasets applications can be visualized simultaneously on a large tiled display. This is achieved by executing multiple instances of an application, then comparing lets the user compare and analyze multiple the datasets, or multiple views of the same dataset. SAGE application windows can be moved, resized and overlapped like any standard desktop window manager. 

SAGE streaming capabilities currently enable users to visualize remotely stored datasets from several distributed clusters over wide area networks and display them on the local tiled display. SAGE is now being extended to support distance collaboration with multiple endpoints, by streaming pixels to all the participants using either traditional router-based multicasting or photonic multicasting. This will allow, once the multicasting capability is added to SAGE, distributed collaborators using different displays to effectively share the same visualization data without wasting network bandwidth. 

EVL is also developing LambdaRAM middleware, new streaming protocols and real-time compression modules to improve SAGE&rsquo;s pixel streaming capabilities. Ultimately, SAGE will be extended to stream other graphics data types to support a wider range of applications, and SAGE applications will rely on LambdaRAM to access large datasets. 

LambdaRAM allows applications to seamlessly access very large remote datasets over high-bandwidth networks, and overcome the large latencies that are characteristic of long haul networks. LambdaRAM harnesses the memory of multiple distributed wide-area clusters and presents a single global memory abstraction to the application. It also employs aggressive pre-fetching heuristics based on access patterns to cache data for applications. This helps tremendously to overcome latency - a critical requirement in large remote data visualization and data mining. 

At SC|05, SAGE is supporting the following applications on the GeoWall2: HDTV live streaming from EVL in Chicago; JuxtaView (UCSD/ NCMIR microscopy data and USGS Urban Area datasets); Magic Carpet (New Orleans, San Diego and Blue Marble datasets); and UIUC / NCSA and EVL HD animations.

GeoWall2

EVL Showcases Research in NLR Exhibit at SC &rsquo;05

RESEARCH EXHIBITS 
Calit2 and Center for Earth Observations and Applications (booth 6107) 
Transforming Scientific Discovery Through Telecom and IT 
UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Center for Earth Observations and Applications 
Contact: Atul Nayak, anayak @ ucsd.edu 

OptIPuter Education &amp; Outreach 
UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography 
Contact: Debi Kilb, dkilb @ epicenter.ucsd.edu 

Dutch Consortium Booth (booth 2444) 
Technology for Optical Pixel Streaming (TOPS) 
SARA Computing and Networking Services (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Paul Wielinga, wielinga @ sara.nl, Axel Berg, axel @ sara.nl 

Resource Brokering: Your Ticket into NetherLight 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

StarPlane (poster) 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

National Center for Data Mining (booth 2430) 
Exploring Remote and Distributed Data Using Teraflows 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research 
CERN 
Kyushu Institute of Technology (Japan) 
Queen&rsquo;s University (Canada) 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu, Joe Mambretti, j-mambretti @ northwestern.edu 

From Federal Express to Lambdas: Transporting SDSS Data Using UDT 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Johns Hopkins University 
Chinese Academy of Science, Department of Astronomy (China) 
Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Korea) 
Max Plank Institut fuer Plasmaphysik (Germany) 
National Astronomical Observatory (China) 
University of Tokyo, School of Science (Japan) 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (booth 1639) 
High Definition Stereo Streaming 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
Contact: Donna Cox, cox @ ncsa.uiuc.edu, Bob Patterson, robertp @ ncsa.uiuc.edu 

National LambdaRail (booth 6003) 
Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
SARA Computing and Networking Services (The Netherlands) 
UCSD National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research 
Contact: Jason Leigh, spiff @ evl.uic.edu, Luc Renambot, luc @ evl.uic.edu 

Personal Varrier 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
Contact: Dan Sandin, dan @ uic.edu 

Nortel Networks (booth 540) 
International Optical Multicast 
Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research 
Nortel Networks 
SARA Computing and Networking Services 
SURFnet6 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Joe Mambretti, j-mambretti @ northwestern.edu 

The Virtual Machine* 
Nortel Networks 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Laboratory 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

Token-Based Networking* 
Nortel Networks 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

* Application presentations taking place in the Dutch Consortium booth. 

University of Southern California (USC) (booth 652) 
Grid Visualization Toolkit with SCEC Data USC Information Sciences Institute 
USC Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) 
Contact: Marcus Thiebaux, thiebaux @ isi.edu 

STORCLOUD 
Interactive Remote Visualization of Large High-Resolution Time-Varying Geophysical and Biological Datasets: LambdaRAM and LambdaStream 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
Contact: Venkatram Vishwanath, venkat @ evl.uic.edu 

TECHNICAL PAPERS 
Supporting Configurable Congestion Control in Data Transport Service 
Yunhong Gu, Robert Grossman 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Contact: Yunhong Gu, Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

MASTERWORKS 
The Strategic Future of Data and the Mining of Massive Data Sets - Part 1 
Robert Grossman 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

TUTORIALS 
A Tutorial Introduction to High Performance Analytics 
Robert Grossman, Vipin Kumar and Steve Eick 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
University of Minnesota 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

GRID 2005: 6th IEEE / ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing 
Web Services and Grid Security Vulnerabilities and Threats Analysis and Model (poster) 
Yuri Demchenko, Leon Gommans, Cees de Laat, Bas van Oudenaarde 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

The OptIPuter 

A Powerful Distributed Cyberinfrastructure to Support Data-Intensive Scientific Research and Collaboration 
<a href="http://www.optiputer.net">www.optiputer.net</a> 

Academic Partners 
Calit2 (California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology): University of California, San Diego and University of California, Irvine Northwestern University 
San Diego State University 
Texas A&amp;M University 
University of Southern California&rsquo;s Information Sciences Institute 
University of Illinois at Chicago 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 

Affiliate Partners 
NASA 
US Geological Survey, National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science 
CANARIE 
SARA Computing and Networking Services (The Netherlands) 
University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) 
KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) (Korea) 
AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology), (Japan) 

Industrial Partners 
Big Bandwidth 
Calient Networks, Inc. 
Chiaro Networks, Inc. 
Glimmerglass Networks, Inc. 
IBM 
Lucent Technologies 
Sun Microsystems
Telcordia Technologies 

Collaborators 
CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California) 
Centro de Investigaci&oacute;n Cientifica y de Educaci&oacute;n Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) 
National LambdaRail 
San Diego Telecom Council

TeraVision Streams Displayed on Tiled Display

OptIPuter Exhibited at SC05

EVL Graduate Research Assistant, Javid Alimohideen participates in the CHI2006 Workshop on Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques Across Multiple Displays. 

Two position papers &ldquo;PAVIS: Pervasive Adaptive Visualization and Interaction Service&rdquo; and &ldquo;Collaborative Visualization using High-Resolution Tiled Displays&rdquo; will be presented.

CHI 06 Workshop - Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques Across Multiple Displays

* All of the information contained below, along with more in-depth information on the event, is also avaliable on the iGrid 2005 website, which can be accessed by clicking the link above. 

iGrid 2005, the 4th community-driven biennial International Grid event, is a coordinated effort to accelerate the use of multi-10Gb international and national networks, to advance scientific research, and to educate decision makers, academicians and industry researchers on the benefits of these hybrid networks. This year, iGrid showcases more than four-dozen real-time application demonstrations from 20 countries, as well as a symposium with 25 lectures, panels and master classes on the applications, middleware, and underlying cyberinfrastructure. 

The emergence of a global LambdaGrid cyberinfrastructure is leading e-science from a bandwidth-constrained to a bandwidth-rich world. In this new LambdaGrid architecture, it&rsquo;s possible to access scientific data anywhere in the world over optical networks with almost the same immediacy as if the data were stored on a local hard disk! We see at iGrid a few pioneering researchers who are showing us how this transformed cyberinfrastructure allows them to carry out a new level of science and discovery, using persistent high-performance collaboration on a planetary scale that allows global teams to interactively obtain, analyze, and share vast amounts of distributed data. 

Global Lambda Integrated Facility / <a href="http://www.glif.is">www.glif.is</a> 

GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, is an international virtual organization that supports persistent data-intensive scientific research and middleware development on LambdaGrids. 

The GLIF community shares a common vision of building a new grid-computing paradigm to support this decade&rsquo;s most demanding e-science applications. In this paradigm, the central architectural element is optical networks, not computers, which use multiple wavelengths of light (lambdas) on single optical fibers to create supernetworks. The GLIF infrastructure is evolving into a world-scale LambdaGrid laboratory for application and middleware development, where applications rely on dynamically configured networks based on optical wavelengths with known and knowable characteristics, including scheduling, bandwidth and latency guarantees. 

Calit2 / <a href="http://www.calit2.net/index.php">www.calit2.net/index.php</a> 

Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) on the campus of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla, California will host iGrid 2005. The iGrid Workshop and subsequent GLIF Meeting will be among the first major events to utilize Calit2&rsquo;s newly erected facilities through use of its vast resources - advanced networking, visualization and technology environments and cyberinfrastructure. 

The numerous press releases, articles and related documentation chronicle applications, technologies, symposia and general iGrid 2005 successes at <a href="http://www.igrid2005.org/media/press.html">www.igrid2005.org/media/press.html</a>

iGrid 2005 brochure

iGRID 2005 :: The Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF)

Another Language Performing Arts Company performed InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box, an unprecedented real-time national collaboration, at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the world renown ACM SIGGRPAH 2005 computer graphics conference on August 3 &amp; 4, 2005. Another Language was invited to be a part of the Access Grid&rsquo;s introduction into the Emerging Technologies program at SIGGRAPH as a result of its pioneering performances. 

Another Language had the unique opportunity to be among many of today&rsquo;s foremost authorities in telematic, collaborative, multimedia and computer arts, such as Roy Ascott, Margaret Dolinsky and Don Forresta. We performed on Wednesday, August 3 at 9:30 A.M. and Thursday, August 4 at 1:00 P.M. Each performance was streamed over Internet 2 for Windows Media Player. 

Coming together again to perform InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box from their respective states were Scott Deal (Alaska), Charles Nichols (Montana), Tina Shah, Helen Kostis, (Illinois), T.J. Rogers, Joe Hayes, Carol Cunningham (Indiana), Nadja Masura and Peter Rogers (Maryland), and Erik Brown (Utah). Performing locally in the Los Angeles Convention Center were Beth Miklavcic, Jimmy Miklavcic (Utah), Miho Aoki (Alaska) and Dioselin Gonzalez (Indiana).

LMIB Video Still

Interplay: Loose Minds in a Box at Siggraph

EVL&rsquo;s Ph.D. student Xun Luo was chosen again by Google, Inc. to participate in the company&rsquo;s Summer of Code 2006 program. Xun&rsquo;s proposal &ldquo;Multivariate Analysis for PIM Data&rdquo; was among 6,000 applications submitted to the 2006 competition; it features the design and implementation of intelligent computation module for Personal Information Managers (PIMs). 

Xun was granted a $4,500 stipend by Google to complete the project with technical mentoring by the Open Source Application Foundation, Philippe Bossut. The completed software module is incorporated into Chandler - a leading open source PIM software, which builds upon the experimentally usable calendar for individuals and small workgroups (see <a href="http://chandler.osafoundation.org">chandler.osafoundation.org</a>). 

Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Since the program&rsquo;s inception in 2005 mentor organization participation has nearly tripled to 102. In addition to the organizations that participated last year, organizations such as GNU, Gentoo, Adium and PHP have joined the program. The event draws its name from the 1967 Summer of Love. 

Xun Luo&rsquo;s proposal is available online at: <a href="http://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/2006/">developers.google.com/open-source/soc/2006/</a>

EVL Student Awarded by Google Summer of Code 2006

EVL&rsquo;s Ph.D. student, Xun Luo presented his research in machine learning and artificial intelligence in mobile computing / wearable systems at The 2006 International Conference on Machine Learning; Models, Technologies &amp; Applications (MLMTA 2006). His paper, &ldquo;Pervasive Web Community Structure Summarization: A Machine Learning Approach&rdquo; addresses the research problem of finding web community structures of interest to a specific user using machine learning approaches. 

MLMTA&rsquo;06 is co-located with WORLDCOMP&rsquo;06 (The 2006 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing) - the largest annual gathering of researchers in computer science, computer engineering and applied computing, which is also considered among the premier venues for presentation / publication of advancements in these fields. 

Thursday, June 29, 2006 
SESSION 5-MLMTA: MACHINE LEARNING 
&ldquo;Pervasive Web Community Structure Summarization: A Machine Learning Approach&rdquo;, Xun Luo, Robert Kenyon, and Yun Guan

MLMTA&rsquo;06 Attendees

MLMTA 2006 Conference

EVL&rsquo;s Ph.D. student, Xun Luo presents his research in intelligent web information retrieval for mobile computing and wearable systems (&ldquo;Web 2.0: concepts, trends and research problems&rdquo;) at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Student Chapter at UIC seminar series. The main focus of the talk - towards finding web community structures of interest to a specific user using machine learning approaches. Over 30 UIC faculty, research staff and graduate students from the Match Statistics &amp; Computer Science and the Computer Science departments participated in the talk. 

The (SIAM) Student Chapter seminar series is held bi-weekly, consisting of invited scholars in interdisciplinary fields whose research make use of dedicated computation methods. The 2006 series features speakers in Computational Finance, Data Mining and Web Mining, as well as Personal Computing. 

Abstract 
Web 2.0 is rapidly becoming a buzzword in the Web design and development communities. Although its definition and scope are still evolving, characteristics such as treating web as platform and emphasis on user contribution depict its clear difference from its &ldquo;1.0&rdquo; predecessor. To many observers Web 2.0 appears to be a loose collection of recently developed concepts and technologies including Weblogs, Wikis, podcasts, Web feeds and other forms of collaborative publishing. Added to this mix are social software, Web APIs, Web standards, online Web services, AJAX, and more. This presentation discusses key concepts of Web 2.0, introduces the implications that Web 2.0 promises to have on the future of Web Information Systems, and reviews two cases of Web 2.0 related research.

Presentation on Web 2.0 and Mobile / Wearable Systems Research at SIAM Student Chapter at UIC

EVL&rsquo;s Ph.D. student, Xun Luo presented his latest research in machine learning and artificial intelligence in mobile computing / wearable systems, &ldquo;Active Lifestyles Software&rdquo; at the Motorola Symposium on Software, System and Simulation (S3&rsquo;2006). 

Xun&rsquo;s presentation addressed the research problem of delivering machine intelligence and scalable computation for mobile device users. Several proof-of-concepts that delivered machine intelligence to the Motorola handsets, including a smart calendar suite that could summarize and visualize daily activities by sensor fusion, and Active Lifestyle wristband that changes visualization mode with the wearer&rsquo;s fitness were also demonstrated.

Motorola S3 Symposium 2006

EVL congratulates PhD student, Xun Luo on being awarded the University&rsquo;s Provost Award for Graduate Research in the spring 2006 competition. In being chosen for the award, Xun was cited as exceptional in his program of study, which focuses upon extending computation scalability to mobile devices and wearable systems. 

Xun is the first graduate student recipient of this honor in the Computer Science Department since the creation of the award.

EVL PhD Student Xun Luo Honored with the Provost Graduate Research Award

Investigators: Tim Lenoir (PI), John Madden, Cathy Davidson 
Senior Personnel: Rachael Brady 

Knowledge of how to support the growth and diffusion of scientific knowledge and technological innovation is critical for creating effective environments for education, research, and economic development. The ecology of social, knowledge, and technological networks significantly affects who has access to them, both topically and temporally. 

A key problem of interest to federal policy makers, university research administrators, and regional planners is the role and impact of federal funding of scientific research in the stimulation of economic growth. 

Aggregate input-output scenarios combined with anecdotal evidence are most frequently used in such discussions. 

However, we live in an era in which rapid formation of flexible transdisciplinary collaborations involving close interaction among numerous scientific and engineering areas of research in close working relationships with industry have become critical to both scientific and industrial development. 

Hence, it becomes imperative to understand the local conditions and optimal configurations favoring successful interdisciplinary work in academic research settings and the transfer of knowledge to industry. 

Knowledge and technology diffusion in a dynamically evolving ecology of networks (e.g., social, co-author, paper-citation, patent, and funding networks) are complex, and do not yield their secrets to a single methodology. 

The proposed project will address this issue by linking sophisticated analytical tools for identifying and clustering closely related documents with visualization techniques that enable users to understand complex diffusion processes. 

The visualizations, called &ldquo;Knowledge Domain Visualizations (KDVs)&rdquo; aim to communicate the results of the data analyses and to support the interpretation, discovery, understanding, and management of complex data sets. 

Knowledge domain visualizations are a special kind of Information Visualization that exploit powerful human vision and spatial cognition to help humans mentally organize and electronically access and manage large, complex information spaces. 

Unlike scientific visualizations, KDVs are created from data that have no spatial reference, such as papers, patents, and grants stored in digital libraries. 

KDVs use sophisticated data analysis and visualization techniques to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, grants, papers, journals, etc., in a domain of interest. 

They can be used to gain an overview of a knowledge domain; to study its homogeneity, import-export factors, and relative speed; to track the emergence and evolution of topics; or to help identify the most productive as well as new research areas.

Visualizing Networks of Innovation Proposal

Cathy N. Davidson

Visualizing Networks of Innovation - Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University

At this year&rsquo;s <a href="http://sc07.supercomp.org/">SC07</a>, the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) are &ldquo;Inventing the Future with Cyberinfrastructure.&rdquo; The &ldquo;team&rdquo; will display their current projects in a joint booth at the conference. 

Together with global scientific communities and industrial partners, they are creating multidisciplinary teams, tools, hardware, software, and human-interface models that underpin cyberinfrastructure for data-intensive research and collaboration. This team provides technological leadership in: high-performance TeraGrid and grid computing, data management and storage, optical networking, and visualization, virtual-reality and collaboration technologies, and partner with computational scientists and computer scientists to maintain competitive advantages and accelerate scientific innovation and discovery. 

Please click the following link for a full text article on the partnership and the SC07 event: 
<a href="http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=1207">Calit2, SDSC, Scripps and UIC / EVL Showcase Cyberinfrastructure Future at SC07</a> 

SC07 is the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. SC07 is expanding the frontiers of High Performance Computation by introducing a new cluster challenge that combines the computation, networking, storage, and analysis elements into a single competition. 

SC07 provides attendees the opportunity to speak with industry and academic research leaders through the technical program, industry exhibits, research exhibits and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. 

The SC07 Education Program is designed to work with undergraduate faculty, administrators and college students to integrate computational science and the high performance computing and communications technologies highlighted through the SC Conference into the preparation of future scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians and teachers. 

The following EVL projects were displayed in the SC07 booth. 

Tellurion 
Tellurion is a real-time planetary-scale data visualization. It uses a GPU-based algorithm to adaptively tessellate the sphere and apply terrain displacement, composing height field images of arbitrary resolution and projection. A deferred rendering approach combines per-pixel illumination and atmospheric effects for added realism. 

LambdaVision 
LambdaVision is an ultra-high-resolution visualization and networking instrument connected to high-bandwidth optical networks, and designed to support collaboration among co-located and remote experts. It is a 55 LCD panel tiled array driven by a 32-node cluster with a combined resolution of over 105 Megapixels. 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/lambdavision">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/lambdavision</a> 

SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) 
SAGE enables researchers to create real-time shared &ldquo;cyber-mash-ups&rdquo; of extremely high-resolution content on scalable tiled display walls over high-speed networks, including stored scientific-visualization movies, real-time generated visualizations of computational simulations, and camera-based streams. 

The SAGE architecture uses distributed rendering clusters connected by high-bandwidth networks to stream multiple applications to a class of scalable tiled displays that are fast becoming a standard for scientific distance collaboration. 

Using SAGE, several applications - including high-resolution 2D imagery, 3D computer graphics and high definition video - can be streamed and viewed simultaneously. SAGE is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter project. 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage</a> 

Lambda Table 
Lambda Table is a tiled LCD tabletop display connected to high-bandwidth optical networks that supports interactive group-based visualization of high-resolution data. 

Lambda Table&rsquo;s camera tracking system is a scalable multi-camera computer vision architecture designed to track input from many simultaneous users interacting with a variety of different interface devices. 

Lambda Table is a 6 LCD panel tiled array driven by a 7-node cluster (including tracking) with a combined resolution of 24 Megapixels. 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/lambdatable/">www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/lambdatable/</a>

The LambdaVision and Sage Display

Supercomputing &rsquo;07 - SC07

Argonne Laboratory 
Mathematics and Computer Science Division Seminar 
LambdaRAM: A High-performance, Multi-dimensional, Distributed Cache for Data-intensive Applications 

DATE: March 4, 2008 
TIME: 10:30 am 
LOCATION: Building 221 Conference Room A216, Argonne National Laboratory 
HOST: Tom Peterka 

In his talk, Vishwanath presented his current research, LambdaRAM, a high-performance, multi-dimensional, distributed cache that harnesses the memory of multiple clusters interconnected by ultra-high-speed networks and employs efficient latency mitigation heuristics to provide data-intensive applications with low latency, seamless access to local and remote data. 

In addition, Vishwanath discussed the integration LambdaRAM with Bioscience applications to interactively visualize remote data and with NASA Goddard&rsquo;s Climate analysis application for computation of wind shear. 

Venkat Vishwanath is a PhD candidate at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory(EVL) in Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago(UIC). He works on High Performance Networking at 10Gbps and beyond, Data Intensive Computing and High-Speed Transport Protocols.

LambdaRAM Research Presented at Argonne National Laboratory Seminar

Director Jason Leigh presents &ldquo;The Global Cyber-Commons&rdquo; at the 2008 iCORE (Informatics Circle of Research Excellence) Banff Summit, August 21-23, 2008. iCORE&rsquo;s goal for this Banff Summit is to explore how Collaboration, Visualization, and Interaction can solve some of the issues that have come up these last 20 years thanks to the &ldquo;information big bang&rdquo;; the exponential explosion of data the world has experienced. The iCORE Summit presenters and attendees explore how local and international research expertise in informatics and related areas can contribute to new collaborative explorations and research in Alberta, Canada. 

Dr. Leigh&rsquo;s presentation summarizes EVL&rsquo;s research interest in developing collaboration technologies and techniques for supporting a wide range of applications ranging from the remote exploration of large-scale data, education and entertainment.

Students at EVL using LambdaVision for Collaborative Research Session

Global Cyber-Commons Presented at iCORE Summit

EVL principal investigators participate in the National Science Foundation (NSF) exhibit at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2009 annual meeting. 

Focusing on research and demonstrations related to International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program, TransLight / StarLight project, EVLers will collaborate with international collaborators from the show floor at the Hyatt Regency, Chicago, where the event will be held. 

EVL will also showcase the TacTile system developed for multi-user touch interaction, running the RainTable application where participants simulate rainfall on a variety of terrains.

IRNC demo at AAAS 2008 using OptIPortal

AAAS 2009 Annual Meeting

The National Science Foundation Showcases Gigabit-enabled Science at the World&rsquo;s Largest General Science Conference 

CHICAGO - The transformative technology of high-performance networking in support of science was prominently featured at the 175th American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting held February 12-16 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. For the first time, the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided an advanced network service for its exhibition space at the conference, enabling multiple gigabit-performance applications to be demonstrated continuously. 

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Northwestern University were invited by the NSF to showcase its International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program in the city where StarLight, the world&rsquo;s most advanced communications exchange facility, was established with funding from the NSF. 

To support the demonstrations, a high-performance network was extended from StarLight, located on the Chicago campus of Northwestern University, to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, site of the conference. The StarLight communication services supported high-resolution video teleconferences with international collaborators as well as several high-performance application demonstrations. 

The high-definition video teleconferences took place between the NSF booth and scientific institutions in Michigan, Russia, the Netherlands, Korea, the Czech Republic and Brazil. Attendees were able to watch the live presentations and question the scientists appearing on a 65-inch LCD display, as if meeting face to face. 

&ldquo;The clarity of high-definition audio and video were compelling, eliminating technological artifacts so we could easily interact with our colleagues and concentrate on what they were saying and showing us,&rdquo; said Maxine Brown, Associate Director of UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and co-principal investigator of the NSF IRNC award TransLight / StarLight, which provides connectivity between the U.S. and Europe. 

In addition to the teleconferencing demonstrations, Greg Cole from the University of Tennessee and principal investigator of the NSF IRNC GLORIAD award gave booth presentations on GLORIADEarth, a real-time graphical depiction of network use of large science applications on the GLORIAD network, a research and education network ring circling the earth. 

Northwestern University&rsquo;s International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) demonstrated its High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet) by streaming high-resolution digital content from servers in Spain, Canada, the Netherlands and StarLight to the displays in the NSF booth. 

HPDMnet is an advanced digital media service that is being designed and developed by an international consortium which has created unique technologies that allow high-performance networks to stream exceptionally high-quality digital media from any source, including cameras, servers, scientific instruments and data repositories. 

HPDMnet, which is based on a global optical networking facility, can support high-volume digital media streams including individual streams thousands of times larger than those on the common Internet. 

&ldquo;Today&rsquo;s Internet provides a generalized service that does not support high-quality digital media,&rdquo; said iCAIR director Joe Mambretti. &ldquo;Using HPDMnet, you can transport digital media worldwide in the highest possible resolution, including media that&rsquo;s more than four times the resolution of HD.&rdquo; 

UIC&rsquo;s National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) used the gigabit bandwidth to demonstrate Sector, a cloud computing platform that is designed to support computing over geographically distributed racks of computers. At the AAAS meeting, Sector was used over four racks located at UIC, StarLight, Johns Hopkins University, and Calit2 at University of California, San Diego. 

NCDM is the first group to use cloud computing for data intensive computing over wide-area networks rather than within a single data center. Sector was used to sort one terabyte of data over racks at four sites to demonstrate how a large data computation can be performed across several data centers at scale. 

&ldquo;The high-performance networks already connect data centers around the world,&rdquo; said NCDM director and UIC professor of Mathematics, Statistics &amp; Computer Science Robert Grossman. &ldquo;Sector allows a user to harness the combined computational power of several data centers simultaneously, with only a slight degradation in the quality of the computing work. It&rsquo;s a major leap in the field of high-performance computing.&rdquo; 

In addition to these networked demonstrations, UIC&rsquo;s EVL demonstrated its TacTile multi-touch display, which is a funded NSF Major Research Instrumentation project. The TacTile system has touch-enabled pan, zoom and interactive functions, like a tabletop-sized Apple iPhone, but in high-resolution suitable for displaying scientific data. 

TacTile was running RainTable, an application EVL developed with the Science Museum of Minnesota to demonstrate how water flows over terrain, which is now part of a traveling museum exhibit about water. TacTile was extremely well received by AAAS attendees, as well as the hordes of students and children who participated in the AAAS Family Science Days. 

The NSF was pleased to have gigabit networking to its booth, enabling its funded researchers to show their work rather than just talk about it. The 2010 Annual Meeting of AAAS will be in San Diego, and NSF is already thinking of the possibilities!

TacTile at AAAS 2009 Family Science Days

High-Performance Networked Applications a First for the National Science Foundation at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago

EVL collaborators at the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) have been awarded $1.22 million by the National Science Foundation towards continued development of UIC&rsquo;s cyberinfrastructure in support of advanced networking and high performance computing research and applications. &ldquo;The Incus Facility: An Integrated UIC Cyberinfrastructure for High-Performance Computing and Networking&rdquo; will be directed by PI Grossman with research contributions from EVL (co-PI Jason Leigh) and other colleagues from the Copmputer Science Department and Academic Computing and Communications Center. The award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

National Center for Data Mining

EVL Collaborator NCDM Awarded NSF Advanced Networking Infrastructure Grant

EDITOR&rsquo;S NOTE: The recent return of several UIC Computer Science (CS) faculty and students from a 3-week trip to Kenya is featured in a news article by two Northwestern University Medill School journalism students. The trip is a part of CS professor Tanya Berger-Wolf&rsquo;s course &ldquo;Field Course in Computational, Ecology.&rdquo; Jason Leigh, also a CS professor and director of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), participated in the class this year, bringing to it a special emphasis on 3D visualization. The students are now compiling and analyzing all the data they collected on the trip, so more stories will come, but here&rsquo;s the first&hellip; and it&rsquo;s clear everyone had a great time and learned a lot about scientific collaborations! 

Chicago computer scientists develop tools to help ecologists in Kenya 
by Rian Ervin and Thomas Owen 
Medill Reports Chicago, Northwestern University 

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 - Merging the worlds of ecology and computer science meant a trip to the Mpala Research Center in Kenya for Chicago graduate students. Students enrolled in field computational ecology at the University of Illinois at Chicago made the trip to Kenya in January. In Africa, they conducted experiments, used computer technology to gather wildlife data, and took 3D images and video footage to create Mpala as a virtual space back home. The UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and Laboratory for Computational Population Biology (LCPB) worked on the initiative with scientists from Princeton University. 

LCPB Director Tanya Berger-Wolf combined her background in data mining, which focuses on finding patterns in information, with EVL professor Jason Leigh&rsquo;s expertise in data visualization. And while the faculty organized the course, it was the students in her ecology course who drove the projects, Berger-Wolf said. Among these projects were the study of ants in acacia trees, ant navigation and a &ldquo;Virtual Mpala&rdquo; project. 

<a href="http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=200403&amp;terms=kenya">Read the entire article</a> 

FOR MORE INFORMATION: 
<ul>
<li><a href="http://kenyacourse.blogspot.com/">The 2012 Field Computational, Ecology Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.cs.uic.edu/bin/view/ComputationalEcology">Official website for the Field Course in Computational, Ecology course</a></li>
</ul>

Virtual Mpala

Chicago computer scientists develop tools to help ecologists in Kenya

70 young women recognized as Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars 

May 22, 2012 

UIC computer science graduate student Jillian Aurisano was selected one of 70 international Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars for 2012. These 70 young women, in addition to 79 finalists, attend universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East or Africa. Google created this scholarship in 2004 to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders in the field; the scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing. 

To apply, Aurisano had to gather recommendation letters, transcripts, and a Curriculum Vitae, and had to write three essays about her research, her leadership skills, and her suggestions for improving the number of women and minorities who enter computing and technology fields. She also had to participate in a lengthy phone interview with a Google employee. 

Aurisano&rsquo;s academic achievements, unique technical abilities, volunteer leadership efforts, strong communication skills and amiable personality make her very deserving of this scholarship. Moreso, Google has gained an excellent role model that epitomizes the essence of what this scholarship aims to achieve. 

With an undergraduate degree in biology, Aurisano came to UIC in 2009 to pursue her MS (and ultimately PhD) in computer science. At that time, the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) was starting to work with a professor of molecular biology and an industrial partner doing metagenomics, so EVL Director Jason Leigh was delighted to find someone who could both understand, and speak, biology. Aurisano immediately began synthesizing what biologists needed and what EVL had to offer, and in the first of her essays about her research, she wrote how &ldquo;visualization provides a powerful platform for combining expert judgment with computational approaches, facilitating hypothesis formation, data analysis and an iterative refinement of explanatory models.&rdquo; 

Aurisano&rsquo;s second essay described her leadership roles and community outreach. She is &ldquo;passionate about challenging this notion that good computer scientists are lifelong, tech-obsessed geeks who live to program,&rdquo; as she discovered that &ldquo;computer science is a field for creative and intellectually curious people who want to contribute in meaningful ways to the world.&rdquo; Since 2011, Aurisano has been President of the UIC Women in Computer Science (WiCS) club, organizing &ldquo;Girls in CS&rdquo; events for visiting elementary and high school students; she has assisted EVL with tours and demos; and, she has helped introduce children to the programming language Scratch. 

Aurisano&rsquo;s third essay addressed Anita Borg&rsquo;s &ldquo;50/50 by 2020&rdquo; initiative, so that women earning computing degrees would be 50% of the graduates by the year 2020. Aurisano wrote that she believes &ldquo;gender imbalance in CS programs should build upon existing research and successful programs that recruit and retain women in the field,&rdquo; and cites the 2002 book &ldquo;Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computer&rdquo;. Aurisano believes &ldquo;that there are two issues underlying the absence of women in CS departments: the computing experience gap between girls and boys that develops during adolescence, and introductory CS courses that fail to consider the background, learning style and interests of women considering CS careers.&rdquo; 

Once the essays and telephone interview were over, Aurisano was asked why she thought she got the scholarship, besides her research in functional genomics. &ldquo;I have been president of WiCS this past year, so I believe some of the activities I helped organize came into play,&rdquo; she said, and &ldquo;I also believe that EVL-sponsored events for young women interested in CS helped my application as well.&rdquo; EVL hosts many tours and demos, including recruitment efforts by the UIC CS department and College of Engineering, the UIC Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) pre-college outreach program, the Engineering Week open house, the &ldquo;Bring Your Daughters to Work&rdquo; day, and numerous occasional requests - such as faculty members who organized a trip for their daughters&rsquo; Girl Scout Troop and a UIC staff person who brought her daughter&rsquo;s 2nd grade class. 

Google Anita Borg Scholarship recipients each receive a financial award for the academic year, and attend a two-day &ldquo;Google Scholars Retreat&rdquo; at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, in June 2012. 

<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/70-young-women-recognized-as-google.html">Read more about the winners</a>

Jillian Aurisano, UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

UIC student Jillian Aurisano receives Google Anita Borg Memorial scholarship

The September 2, 2012 issue of UIC NEWS profiles Computer Science MS student Jillian Aurisano. She&rsquo;s a woman who is working in a field where women are a minority. 

Statistics are depressing. The Computing Research Association&rsquo;s Taulbee Survey for 2010-11 states that less than 12% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women, as documented in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing">Wikipedia</a>. 

In this UIC NEWS profile, Aurisano compares computer literacy to writing. &ldquo;We believe all children should learn to write so they can express themselves. I believe CS is a similar form of expression,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;In some sense, the issue is not just about the lack of women [in the field], it&rsquo;s that a narrow segment of people are learning to express themselves using computing.&rdquo; 

Aurisano is a research assistant in the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), where she combines her undergraduate work in biology with her Master&rsquo;s degree work in computer science. In the UIC NEWS article, she explains, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m working with a series of computer monitors connected together, driven by a single computer&hellip; I hope to write programs to take biological data, questions researchers have, and translate it to interactive visual representation to permit researchers to take advantage of large high-resolution digital space. Huge wall screens can show lots of data, lots of juxtaposed information, considering lots of pieces of the puzzle,&rdquo; she said, and expects them to be standard equipment in labs and offices within 10 to 20 years. 

Read the UIC NEWS story <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/uicnews/articledetail.cgi?id=16590">&ldquo;Profile: Computer scientist Jillian Aurisano bridges the gender gap</a> 

Other recent stories on Aurisano: 
In July 2012, UIC / EVL applauded <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=4&amp;indi=817">&ldquo;Aurisano Receives Scholarship to Grace Hopper Conference&rdquo;</a> 
In May 2012, UIC / EVL published <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=4&amp;indi=809">&ldquo;UIC student Jillian Aurisano receives Google Anita Borg Memorial scholarship&rdquo;</a> 
In 2011, Northwestern University journalism student Ashley Cullins did a one-week practicum at UIC / EVL and wrote the article <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=4&amp;indi=762">&ldquo;Diamonds in the digital rough - female computer scientists shine&rdquo;</a>

Jillian Aurisano, UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory

UIC NEWS profiles CS student Jillian Aurisano: bridging the gender gap

EDITOR&rsquo;S NOTE: The &ldquo;UIC Alumni Magazine&rdquo; Winter 2012 publication features a review of some of the leading innovations UIC forged in the past 30 years. The article cites the 1982 merger of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and the University of Illinois Medical Center as creating a new paradigm, one facilitating the free flow of research from faculty to physicians, researchers to end users, and back again. 
 
While the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) began innovating long before that - it was founded on interdisciplinary collaboration between the sciences and arts in 1973 - the article goes on to recognize one of EVL&rsquo;s major achievements in the past 30 years: &ldquo;UIC has played a critical role in virtual reality development. Its CAVE automatic virtual environment is used to analyze everything from molecules to car designs.&rdquo; 

Here is an excerpt from the article: 

The issue was comfort, or rather, the lack of it. To enter the virtual world of the early 1990s, users first had to don cumbersome helmets. Along with his colleagues, Thomas A. DeFanti, director emeritus of UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, &ldquo;decided to turn the problem inside out,&rdquo; recalls current EVL Director Jason Leigh phd &rsquo;98 eng, then a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering&rsquo;s Computer Science Department. &ldquo;Rather than project images through head gear, we decided to project them on walls.&rdquo; The resulting CAVE automatic virtual environment, essentially a room-sized cube within a larger room, directed projectors at several walls to create an experience akin to &ldquo;visiting the Grand Canyon rather than looking at a photo of it,&rdquo; says Leigh, adding that CAVE&rsquo;s eyewear not only proved lighter, but more immersive. &ldquo;Earlier eyewear tended to block peripheral vision,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Ours didn&rsquo;t.&rdquo; When it debuted in 1992, its impact was immediate. Users could see images that appeared to float on air. They could walk around an image and view it from different vantage points. Then came General Motors, which wanted to design cars with it. &ldquo;You could simulate the experience of sitting in a car, how it felt with a larger dashboard, then a smaller one, or a more prominent steering wheel, then a less prominent one,&rdquo; says Leigh. In October 2012, EVL launched CAVE2, which combines virtual reality and scalable-resolution display walls at a resolution matching that of human acuity. 

To read the entire article, see the link to the PDF (right).

UIC Alumni Magazine article

Professor Andy Johnson provides background about EVL to UIC prospective students using EVL&rsquo;s Cyber-Commons.

Discoveries Channeled: Celebrating 30 Years of UIC

Project Batman is a UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) project being done in conjunction with the Civic Consulting Alliance (CCA) of Chicago and funded by the UIC Office of the Chancellor and the Dean&rsquo;s Office of the College of Engineering. 

The CCA builds pro bono teams of business experts, government leaders, and members of its staff, with the goal of making Chicago more livable, affordable, and globally competitive. More specifically, EVL&rsquo;s Project Batman focuses on mapping publicly available crime data onto Chicago&rsquo;s urban infrastructure, to help civic leaders and law enforcement see and understand the big picture - literally - and make more informed decisions. 

While the project is in its infancy, WBEZ reporter Elliott Ramos published the online article <a href="http://www.wbez.org/news/city-tech-wonks-add-toys-emanuel%E2%80%99s-utility-belt-106460">&ldquo;City tech wonks add toys to Emanuel&rsquo;s utility belt&rdquo;</a> on April 3. It covers a number of new initiatives by the Chicago&rsquo;s Department of Innovation and Technology, including reference to Project Batman. 

This story is based on a WBEZ blog by Charlie Meyerson, titled <a href="http://www.wbez.org/blogs/charlie-meyerson/2013-02/chicago-has-project-batman-and-its-hiring-105799">Chicago has a &ldquo;Project Batman&rdquo;</a>. Reporting on an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMpHZs0F7k&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=5m5s">OpenGov Chicago meeting</a> held February 26, 2013, Meyerson wrote that Tom Schenk Jr., Chicago&rsquo;s analytics director, told a gathering of journalists, programmers and government leaders that the city is working with UIC to visualize crime data in a 3-D virtual reality &ldquo;cave.&rdquo; 

Subsequently, WTTW followed up on the &ldquo;Project Batman&rdquo; story as part of its coverage of EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2&trade; hybrid-reality environment that aired April 23, 2013 on the nightly <a href="http://video.wttw.com/video/2365000889/">&ldquo;Chicago Tonight&rdquo; news show</a>. 

See the <a href="http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2013/04/23/cave2">WTTW article and video</a>

Google Earth in EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2&trade; being used by the City of Chicago to visualize &ldquo;Project Batman&rdquo; data.

WBEZ and WTTW promote UIC / EVL&rsquo;s Project Batman

There exists a number of scientific visualization systems designed to provide a two-dimensional interface to the user. However, little consideration has been given to the development of collaborative virtual environment for visualization purposes. This paper discusses the Tele-Immersive Data Explorer, a generalizable framework to facilitate the construction of domain-specific data exploration applications challennged with the problem of having to visualize massive data-sets immersively and collaboratively. In the paper, we describe the framework&rsquo;s conceptual organization, its distributed multiprocessed object-oriented architecture, and its application to visualize gridded scalar data.

The Tele-Immersive Data Explorer: A Distributed Architecture for Collaborative Interactive Visualization of Large Data-sets

In this paper we describe a new interface to scientific databases, the SANDBOX: Scientists Accessing Necessary Data Based On eXperimentation. The SANDBOX is a virtual reality tool allowing an investigator to visualize the contents of a scientific database while retrieving data. As the data in these databases was typically collected through experimentation, an investigator can use the SANDBOX to retrieve data from the database by placing virtual instruments into a virtual reenactment of the original experiment. These instruments give visual and auditory feedback, allowing the user to browse through the data, setting up and running experiments until they have collected the data they need. We have implemented a prototype of the SANDBOX on NASA&rsquo;s FIFE scientific database using the CAVE virtual reality theatre.

Desktop Version of SANDBOX

Data Retrieval Through Virtual Experimentation

This paper proposes a methodology for employing collaborative, immersive virtual environments as a high-end visualization interface for massive data-sets. The methodology employs feature detection, partitioning, summarization and decimation to significantly cull massive data-sets. These reduced datasets are then distributed to the remote CAVEs, ImmersaDesks and desktop workstations for viewing. The paper also discusses novel techniques for collaborative visualization and meta-data creation.

Virtual Collaborative Work Session Built with CAVERNsoft

A Methodology for Supporting Collaborative Exploratory Analysis of Massive Data Sets in Tele-Immersive Environments

This is a white paper outlining a methodology for employing collaborative, immersive virutal environments as a high-end visualization interface for massive data-sets.

Artist&rsquo;s Rendition of CAVEscope System

A Tele-Immersive Environment for Collaborative Exploratory Analysis of Massive Data Sets

This paper presents an overview of the Tele-Immersion applications that have been built by collaborators around the world using the CAVERNsoft toolkit, and the lessons learned from building these applications. In particular, the lessons learned are presetned as a set of rules-of-tummb for developing tele-immersive applications in general.

CAVERNsoft

A Review of Tele-Immersive Applications in the CAVE&reg; Research Network

CAVERNsoft is an architecture for creating Tele-Immersive applications, with the goal of making synchronous and asynchronous trans-oceanic collaboration a routine matter. This paper briefly discusses CAVERNsoft and then discusses several applications that have been built using CAVERNsoft with a focus on those with trans-oceanic concepts.

User in an Asynchronous Collaborative Session

Multi-disciplinary Experiences with CAVERNsoft Tele-Immersive Applications

The term Tele-Immersion was first used in October 1996 as the title of a workshop the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) organized in Chicago to bring together researchers in distributed computing, collaboration, virtual reality (VR), and networking. Workshop attendees paid specific attention to the future needs of applications in the sciences, engineering, and education. EVL defines Tele-Immersion as the union of networked VR and video in the context of significant computing and data mining. Some researchers use the terms Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) or Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) to describe the field of networked VR. Tele-Immersion, as defined by the authors, encompasses more image-based technology, like video and bit maps, than CVE / DVE researchers typically envision, so that more &ldquo;reality&rdquo; (so to speak) is incorporated. It also has the benefit of being pronounceable. Global Tele-Immersion is &ldquo;better than being there&rdquo; because physical travel, especially international travel, is best devoted to vacation, not work, in the authors&rsquo; experienced opinion.

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