The MIT Programming Languages group has selected &ldquo;Optimizing Datalog for the GPU&rdquo; Sun, Y., Shovon, A.R, Gilray, T., Kumar, S., Micinski, K. to be presented and published at the 2026 MIT PLR Workshop. 
The <a href="https://plr.csail.mit.edu/">MIT Programming Languages Review</a> launched in 2023, to highlight recent research deemed interesting and important, highlighting recent developments with significant potential to shape the future direction of PL research and/or industry practice. The MIT PL Review program committee consists of senior MIT PhD students, with the mission of selecting papers that can substantially transform the PL community and beyond, with a focus on emerging trends rather than established lines of research. 
Abstract: 
&ldquo;Optimizing Datalog for the GPU&rdquo; explores how modern Datalog engines can be redesigned for accelerator hardware. It introduces a GPU-backed Datalog engine built around a novel data structure called hash-indexed sorted array (HISA). HISA enables efficient execution of sparse relational workloads by combining the benefits of constant-time indexed access with dense, range-structured data layouts. By rethinking how a foundational declarative programming technology maps to GPUs, the work highlights a growing intersection between programming languages, program analysis infrastructure, and accelerator-aware system design, illustrating how PL implementation techniques can evolve alongside modern hardware trends. 
The Workshop will be held May 8, 2026.

EVL Researchers Invited to Present &ldquo;Optimizing Datalog for the GPU&rdquo; at MIT PLR Workshop 2026

Congratulations to EVL alumnus Dr. Andrew Wentzel for the huge achievement of receiving a UIC 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the UIC Graduate College! 
This annual award rewards the most outstanding scholarship in each of the Graduate College&rsquo;s four graduate divisions, as determined by the Graduate College Awards Committee. It is the basis for UIC&rsquo;s nominations of outstanding dissertations to regional and national competitions.

(A) Lymph nodes overlaid over a diagram of the neck. (B) Example graphs of diseased nodes for 2 individual patients (datapoint representation). (C) Example consensus graph for 1 cluster (cluster representation).

Dr. Andrew Wentzel Receives the UIC 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award

&ldquo;Advancing Normal Tissue Complication Probability Modeling with Supervised Contrastive Learning for Predicting Osteoradionecrosis&rdquo; by a multidisciplinary team led by Prof. Canahuate at the University of Iowa and including UIC CS Prof. Zhang and Prof. Marai has received a Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) 2026 in Thessaloniki, Greece. The paper describes the development of a supervised contrastive learning model for predicting a delayed-onset, significant toxicity associated with radiation therapy treatment for head and neck cancer.

Best Paper Award @ ACM SAC'26

The SAGE team (UIC, University of Hawaii Manoa, Virginia Polytechnic) recently published a capstone paper about three generations of SAGE - SAGE: Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment, SAGE2: Scalable Amplified Group Environment, and SAGE3: Smart Amplified Group Environment. Each generation of the SAGE Suite has been a complete redesign and re-implementation of its predecessors, providing users with significantly improved versions of prior capabilities, as well as new capabilities, in response to evolving needs and computing advances. However, through all its generations, SAGE never wavered from its ultimate goal - enabling users to share information and digital media, particularly large-scale visualizations and animations, to accelerate discovery, to build consensus, and to make decisions with greater speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and confidence. 
&ldquo;Building Collaborative Intelligence: The Translational Journey of the Smart Amplified Group Environment Across Research, Education, and Practice&rdquo;
By Jason Leigh, Luc Renambot, Ryan Theriot, Lance Long, Christopher Lee, Jesse Harden, Nurit Kirshenbaum, Mahdi Belcaid, Chris North, Andrew Johnson, Maxine Brown 
Published by Springer Nature Computer Science, Vol. 7, Article 281, March 17, 2026

Various collaboration modalities supported by SAGE3

Just published: SAGE&rsquo;s 22-Year Journey in Support of Research, Education and Practice

UIC Design Professor and EVL faculty member Daria Tsoupikova presented her development and experience in producing the interdisciplinary, collaborative VR Live Theater performance Hummingbird at the 114th College Art Association Conference held in Chicago February 20, 2026. Tsoupikova presented at the session entitled &ldquo;Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique in the Age of AI and Immersive Technologies.&rdquo; This session examined how emerging technologies - from generative AI to virtual reality - are reshaping art and design education, practice, and theory. The presentations addressed the challenges and opportunities of teaching AI across the curriculum, rethinking artistic labor and aura in an era of machine collaboration, and creating interdisciplinary projects that blend performance, creative coding, and immersive media. Together, these talks highlighted how designers, educators and artists can engage critically with technology to expand creative expression, foster interdisciplinary collaboration, amplify student voices, and reimagine the future of studio-based learning. 
Tsoupikova&rsquo;s presentation &ldquo;Interdisciplinary Collaboration Developing VR and Live Theater Hummingbird Performances&rdquo; told the story of the collaboration, development and showcasing of Hummingbird, an award-winning, immersive virtual reality (VR) performance that merges live theater with interactive storytelling, fostering collaboration and active audience participation. Developed through an interdisciplinary partnership among computer scientists, designers, theater professionals, and over 30 students, the production explores innovative methodologies for VR theater. Tsoupikova&rsquo;s talk examines the collaborative processes, theoretical challenges, and technological advancements behind Hummingbird, which serves as a prototype for integrating VR with live performance. 
At its core, Hummingbird is a coming-of-age story that empowers participants by granting them agency within the narrative. Five audience members engage directly with a lead actor in a responsive, collaborative adventure, utilizing problem-solving, teamwork, and storytelling skills. The production has been performed at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Children&rsquo;s Theater, and the Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, reaching over 500 audience members. Through a qualitative analysis of audience experiences and collaboration findings, we identify key design considerations for interdisciplinary VR theater production. Our insights contribute to the development of collaborative systems that enhance live performance through VR, demonstrating how this medium can push the boundaries of traditional theater and make immersive storytelling more accessible. Hummingbird exemplifies the potential of VR to revolutionize theatrical narratives, offering a model for cross-disciplinary education and future partnerships between nonprofit theater and academic research.

Design Professor and EVL Faculty Daria Tsoupikova Presents &ldquo;Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique in the Age of AI and Immersive Technologies&rdquo; at CAA 114

PhD Student: Kazi Shahrukh Omar 
Committee Members: 
Dr. Fabio Miranda, Chair and Advisor 
Dr. Michael Papka 
Dr. Khairi Reda 
Dr. Saeed Boorboor 
Dr. Lane Harrison, Worcester Polytechnic Institute 
Date/Time: Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 4 PM 
Location: CDRLC 1219 
Zoom Details: 
<a href="https://uic.zoom.us/j/9284268608">https://uic.zoom.us/j/9284268608</a> 
Meeting ID: 928 426 8608 
Abstract: 
As cities continue to grow rapidly, urban environments are producing increasingly large, diverse, and interconnected datasets. While this abundance of data creates new opportunities for urban analytics, it also imposes significant computational challenges when analyzing large-scale urban phenomena. For practical use, computational models should efficiently process heterogeneous datasets and produce faster model outputs. A representative example is accumulated shadow or sunlight access modeling, which requires computation over dense spatial structures and lengthy temporal scales, posing significant challenges for efficient execution at large scales, such as city-level analysis. Another key challenge lies in how these urban data and computational models are presented to stakeholders for effective decision-making. Beyond understanding what is happening, stakeholders must be able to explore what to do next, which calls for scenario-based representations through visual analytics (VA) that structure urban data and models around alternative design and planning outcomes. 
However, the current landscape of urban visual analytics (VA) tools remains largely centered on exploratory data analysis, emphasizing descriptive questions about existing urban conditions. In practice, these tools often take the form of domain-specific dashboards focused on exploratory analysis of static data through visualizations, rather than generating or comparing alternative scenarios. As a result, they offer limited support for the forward-looking reasoning required in urban decision-making, where stakeholders must compare alternative design choices and assess their potential outcomes. Although more recent modular urban VA toolkits improve flexibility in composing data and visualizations, they either lack explicit support for scenario-oriented workflows or require substantial expertise to assemble them. Addressing this gap calls for a shift from an exploration-centric VA to a scenario-oriented VA that explicitly supports reasoning over alternative urban futures. 
A scenario-oriented modular VA stack poses several key challenges across urban data and modeling pipeline. These challenges include: (C1) how to appropriately model complex urban phenomena, (C2) how to enable domain experts to externalize scenarios, (C3) how to support the comparison and analysis of alternative scenarios, and (C4) how to facilitate iterative exploration of counterfactual inputs that would lead to a scenario. This dissertation addresses these challenges by (C1) introducing Deep Umbra, an efficient computational framework for large-scale accumulated shadow modeling; (C2–C3) presenting SCOUT, a modular, scenario-oriented urban visual analytics toolkit that enables domain experts to externalize, analyze, and compare alternative urban scenarios across domains; and (C4) extending SCOUT with ongoing work on CF-Planner, that supports interactive exploration of counterfactual inputs that leads to a scenario outcome.

Prelim Announcement: &ldquo;From Scenarios to Counterfactuals: Towards Visual Analytics for Definition and Analysis of Urban Futures&rdquo;

EVL PhD candidate Kunting Qi's paper entitled &ldquo;ML–Driven Auto-tuning Framework for Non-uniform All-to-All Data Exchange&rdquo; (Qi, K., Fan, K., Domke, J., Ba, S., Vishwanath, V., Papka, M.E., Kumar, S.) has been selected as a Distinguished Paper Award Nominee to the IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, Analytics, and Data Science (HiPC) 2025. 
HiPC serves as a forum to present current work by researchers from around the world in the areas of high-performance computing and data science. The meeting focuses on all aspects of high-performance computing systems, data science and analytics, and their scientific, engineering, and commercial applications. This year the conference will be held in Hyderabad, India, December 17-20, 2025.

Optimal algorithm configuration for non-uniform MPI_Alltoallv. Each tile references a system configuration of a different number of processes, maximum message size, and network topology.

EVL Graduate Researcher Kunting Qi HiPC 2025 Distinguished Paper Award Nominee

Candidate: Francesco Botto 
Committee: 
Professor G. Elisabeta Marai, Chair and Advisor 
Professor Khairi Reda 
Professor Stefano Di Calro, Politecnico di Torino 
Date/Time: Tuesday, December 9 at 9:30AM 
Location: CDRLC 5424 
Abstract: FlavorCharter introduces a data-driven research framework composed of a mobile platform for crowd-sourced sensory data collection and an interactive visualization environment for exploratory analysis. This integrated system bridges data acquisition and visual reasoning, enabling both large-scale collection and interpretability of flavor perception data. This approach has the potential to document taste loss and empower patients to describe taste loss symptoms in a more precise and standardized language.

MS Thesis Defense Announcement: &ldquo;FlavorCharter: Development of a Framework for Quantifying and Visually Analyzing Flavor Perception&rdquo;

Title: Scientific Data Management and Visualization to Advance AI for Science 
UIC PI: Luc Renambot 
Sponsor: Argonne National Laboratory, Department of Energy 
Dates: 11/21/25 - 11/20/30 
Abstract: 
The project aims to support ongoing development and deployment of an AI-powered scientific assistant that transforms scientific exploration through intuitive, adaptive, and interoperable interaction with complex data. The result is two proposed thrusts, one in scientific data management and one in scientific data visualization. 
 UIC will participate in the thrust &lsquo;AI-Enhanced Visualization and Human-centered Data Interaction&rsquo;. The hypothesis to be researched is the following: advanced AI-driven visualization and intelligent data exploration - when coupled with novel, efficient data representations - will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling real-time analysis of large-scale datasets and live experimental data. 
 To investigate this hypothesis, we leverage exemplary data from a range of DOE domains to conduct research in the following three areas: human-centered exploration of scientific data, efficient data representations for interactive exploration, and AI-driven advanced rendering and visualization. UIC will participate in the design and development of an AI assistant for data exploration and a visualization workflow AI assistant.

EVL Research Faculty Member Luc Renambot Collaborates with Argonne National Laboratory Researchers on Newly Awarded &ldquo;Scientific Data Management and Visualization to Advance AI for Science&rdquo;

This year&rsquo;s Art of HPC showcase at the <ahref="https://sc25.supercomputing.org/">International Conference for High Performance Computing SC25</a>, brought together an inspiring community of artists, designers, and technologists exploring the intersections of creativity, high-performance computing, AI, and immersive media. The Art Gallery became a vibrant hub of curiosity and inspiration, where the audience could explore new possibilities at the intersection of art and cutting-edge computation. 
UIC Design and EVL Professor Daria Tsoupikova participated on the panel &ldquo;From Silicon to Surrealism: The Fusion of Art, AI, and HPC,&rdquo; moderated by Tomasz Bednarz with Amy Karle, Ruth West, and Mark Hereld. The discussion explored how large-scale computation is opening new frontiers in creative expression, from generative imagery to immersive storytelling, and how artistic inquiry, in turn, is reshaping our understanding of the purpose and potential of computing itself. 
The EVL Hummingbird VR Performance project, featured prominently in the exhibition, was displayed on giant displays across the show floor, in the Art Gallery, and in the poster ballroom. It was awe-inspiring for Tsoupikova to share this work, born from deep collaboration between theater artists, designers, and computer scientists, which was truly inspiring. 
This was Tsoupikova&rsquo;s first SC, &ldquo;I am deeply grateful to the Art of HPC Committee Joseph Insley, Francesca Samsel, Mark Hereld, India Gordon and Silvina Caino-Lores for championing and elevating artistic innovation at SC25. Their vision made this year&rsquo;s program groundbreaking.&rdquo; 
#SC25, #HPCignites 
<a href="https://sc25.supercomputing.org/program/art-of-hpc/">The Art of HPC</a> Where Creativity Meets HPC: 
Creativity has always been at the heart of innovation. It drives new perspectives, fuels artistic expression, and allows us to see beauty in unexpected places. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and resources, we can push the boundaries of both science and art. 
SC proudly presents Art of HPC, a showcase of the intersection between artistic creativity and high-performance computing. This comprehensive event featured a diverse array of exhibits, presentations, and activities throughout the conference. 
The Art of HPC Panel: 
High-performance computing and AI are sparking a thrilling new era in creativity and the arts. This dynamic panel brought together visionary artists and cutting-edge technologists to reveal how they harness the power of large-scale computation to craft works that dazzle the senses, resonate culturally, and often surprise us in delightful ways. From mesmerizing generative imagery to immersive, interactive experiences, the panelists demonstrated how HPC unlocks artistic possibilities at scales and resolutions previously unimaginable. 
But the excitement doesn&rsquo;t stop there - this is a two-way street. Artistic practices aren&rsquo;t just benefiting from big tech; they&rsquo;re reshaping how we think about computing itself, transforming its purpose from mere efficiency and scientific rigor to a wellspring of inspiration and expressive power. The panel provided an accessible and fascinating peek into a future where silicon and creativity join forces, co-designing bold new forms of culture and unlocking realms of imagination we&rsquo;ve yet to explore.

The Art of HPC Exhibition was a tremendous success at Supercomputing25!

Congratulations to Francesco Botto and co-authors on their workshop paper being accepted to <a href="https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~icdm2025/index.html">Workshop on Computational Gastronomy: Data Science for Food and Cooking at the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2025</a>. 
&ldquo;FlavorCharter: Development of a Smartphone App for Quantifying Food Flavor&rdquo;, Francesco Botto, Guadalupe Canhuate, Xinhua Zhang, C. David Fuller, G. Elisabeta Marai, pp. 1-7, Workshop on Computational Gastronomy: Data Science for Food and Cooking (CoGamy) at the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2025 
The paper presents a smartphone app to survey people about their perceptions of flavors. It is designed to be easy/fast to use but to cover enough variations of flavors to capture results that are useful for analysis. The app is motivated by the loss of taste experienced by some patients due to various conditions, including cancer.

Congrats to Francesco Botto for a CoGamy Workshop Paper at ICDM 2025!

IEEE VIS 2025 is the premier forum for advances in theory, methods, and applications of visualization and visual analytics. The conference will convene an international community of researchers and practitioners from universities, government, and industry to exchange recent findings on the design and use of visualization tools. This year&rsquo;s Conference will be held November 2 to 7 in Vienna, Austria 
EVL PhD students Sanjana Srabanti, Leonardo Ferreira, and Gustavo Moreira have had their research papers accepted into the Conference: 
&ldquo;StreetWeave: A Declarative Grammar for Street-Overlaid Visualization of Multivariate Data&rdquo; 
Sanjana Srabanti, G. Elisabeta Marai, Fabio Miranda 
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (To appear) 
This is Sanjana&rsquo;s second full paper at a visualization conference, following her first at PacificVis. The paper proposes a design space for street-overlaid visualizations, and a declarative grammar to operationalize such space. 
&ldquo;VA-Blueprint: Uncovering Building Blocks for Visual Analytics System Design&rdquo; 
Leonardo Ferreira, Gustavo Moreira, Fabio Miranda 
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (To appear) 
This is Leonardo&rsquo;ss second VIS paper, first as first author, and third full paper overall in just 1.5 years into the PhD -- and having joined the program without a CS bachelor&rsquo;ss degree. The paper proposes an LLM-based approach to extract building blocks from papers describing visual analytics systems. The data and interface for the paper are available here: <a href="https://urbantk.org/va-blueprint/">https://urbantk.org/va-blueprint/</a> 
&ldquo;Urbanite: A Dataflow-Based Framework for Human-AI Interactive Alignment in Urban Visual Analytics&rdquo; 
Gustavo Moreira, Leonardo Ferreira, Maryam Hosseini, Carolina Veiga, Fabio Miranda 
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (To appear) 
This is Gustavo&rsquo;s fourth VIS paper and the third consecutive year he has had a first-author full paper at VIS. In total, it&rsquo;s his eighth published full paper (!) in just three years into his PhD. The paper proposes a series of design features to support human-AI alignment in the creation of urban dataflows. The code and tutorials for the paper are available here: <a href="https://urbantk.org/urbanite/">https://urbantk.org/urbanite/</a>

EVL PhD Students Sanjana Srabanti, Leonardo Ferreira, and Gustavo Moreira Publish to VIS 2025

Join us in congratulating Nafiul Nipu and co-authors for a newly accepted paper in the <a href="https://visualanalyticshealthcare.github.io/homepage/2025/">VAHC: 16th Annual Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare</a> at IEEE VIS'25. The Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare (VAHC) is the premier research event exploring the application of data visualization and visual analytics to biomedicine. The Workshop is organized by General Chair Alessio Arleo, Eindhoven University of Technology, and Co-Chairs Renata Raidou, TU Vienna and Gabriela Morgenshtern, University of Zurich. 
N. Nipu, L. van Dijk, G. Canahuate, C.D. Fuller, G.E. Marai, &ldquo;Lessons from the Development and Deployment of an Interactive Oncological Risk Estimator&rdquo;, VAHC 2025 (16th workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare), in conjunction with IEEE VIS 2025, Vienna, Austria, pp. 1-7, November 2025. 
This is a &ldquo;lessons learned&rdquo; paper about our experience developing and deploying an interactive dashboard for predicting oncological risk in head and neck cancer. The tool is hosted at EVL as <a href="https://risk-calculator.evl.uic.edu/">https://risk-calculator.evl.uic.edu/</a>, it is publicly available, and it is currently used by a large clinician base across multiple continents, which is very impressive. From the data visualization perspective, this work is particularly interesting because we collected clinician feedback more than a year after the initial deployment.

&ldquo;Lessons from the Development and Deployment of an Interactive Oncological Risk Estimator&rdquo; to be Presented at VAHC 2025

EVL PhD candidate Hossein Fathollahian has his short paper accepted at the <ahref="http://biovis.net/2025/">BioMedVis Challenge 2025</a>, a data contest organized by <a href="https://ieeevis.org/year/2025/welcome">IEEE VIS 2025</a>. 
H. Fathollahian, S. Zhao, M. Nipu, G.E. Marai, &ldquo;Attention-based Region of Interest Discovery in 3D Tissue Images&rdquo;, IEEE BioMedVis Challenge 2025, IEEE VIS, 2025. 
This work presents an approach for the detection and exploration of regions of interest (ROIs) using graph-based analysis. The novel computational approach for ROI detection is a main strength, and the interactive frontend includes several features addressing the challenge tasks, such as quick navigation to prominent ROIs. 
Additionally, Hossein paper &ldquo;From Peaks to Patterns&rdquo; was accepted to the ReDesign Contest: 
Authors: Hossein Fathollahian, Marziye Salahshour 
Abstract: MRS is a non-invasive way of gaining information about cellular metabolism and can be used to study neurological and metabolic disorders. However, the clinical utility is limited by low signal quality, overlapping spectral peaks, and the inability to interpret and compare metabolite data. We developed an interactive visual analysis system that establishes the methods by adding filtering, quality measurement, and a comparative summary of MRS signals. This will allow researchers to perform a more accurate evaluation of spectral data, which will help them understand the molecular processes behind the complex neurological and metabolic processes in greater depth. 
Congratulations, Hossein!

BioMedVis 2025 Accepted Papers

EVL, Computer Science Professor and Director, UIC Institute for Health Data Science Research, Liz Marai delivered the Keynote at the <a href="https://visualanalyticshealthcare.github.io/homepage/2025/program.html">Visual Analytics in Healthcare (VAHC) 2025</a> meeting in early November in Vienna, Austria. VAHC is associated with <a href="https://ieeevis.org/year/2025/welcome">IEEE VIS 2025</a> held November 2 - 7, 2025. 
Title: &ldquo;The Blackbox Patient and the Power-of-Many&rdquo; 
Abstract: 
Precision medicine aims to tailor treatment for individual patients based on big data collected from cohorts of similar patients. This power-of-many can also be used to predict treatment outcomes and treatment-related side effects for individual patients. Visual computing and visual analytics play a crucial role in addressing this problem, from calculating spatial similarity to facilitating risk communication. This talk reflects on work in this area, emerging lessons, and future research directions.

Professor Liz Marai Delivers Keynote at the Visual Analytics in Healthcare

Regretted Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) faculty Leland Wilkinson and EVL alumna Anushka Anand received the 20-Years InfoVis Test of Time Award at the IEEE VIS 2025 conference meeting this month. A &ldquo;Test of Time&rdquo; award is a highly-prestigious accolade given by academic and professional organizations to recognize published papers that have had a significant and lasting impact on their field. These awards honor research that has remained influential and useful long after its initial publication, often after a minimum of 10 years. Anushka Anand accepted the award. Here is the accolade: 
Graph-theoretic scagnostics 
Leland Wilkinson, Anushka Anand, Robert L. Grossman 
<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1532142">10.1109/INFVIS.2005.1532142</a> 
In this highly influential work, the authors established the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of the now well-known scagnostics techniques for visualizing high-dimensional multivariate data. While they duly acknowledged John and Paul Tukey for the original idea, they not only formalized the concept of scagnostics but also introduced a suite of graph-theoretic measures to enable feature-driven visualization. The impact of this work extends well beyond scatter plots, setting a gold standard for visualizing complex datasets through the analysis of visual features in their graphical representations.

EVLers Receive 20-Years InfoVis Test of Time Award at the IEEE VIS 2025

Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) alumna Anushka Anand received the 10-year Test of Time Award at the IEEE VIS 2025 conference this month. A &ldquo;Test of Time&rdquo; award is a highly-prestigious accolade given by academic and professional organizations to recognize published papers that have had a significant and lasting impact on their field. These awards honor research that has remained influential and useful long after its initial publication, often after a minimum of 10 years. Anushka Anand accepted the award. Here is the accolade: 
2015 (10-Years InfoVis ToT Award): 
Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations 
Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, Anushka Anand, Jock D. Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer 
<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7192728">10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467191</a> 
This work represents a major landmark in the development of visualization technology, transforming from human-led interactive visualization to a mixed-initiative approach, with which visualization plots are automatically generated as machine-led recommendations. In the paper, the authors presented not only the novel concept, but also the Voyager system for demonstrating the concept, including its architecture, algorithmic components, and visual design, together with a study for comparing it with another system. With the advancement of AI, the mixed-initiative approach is even more relevant today.

EVL alumna Anushka Anand received the 10-year Test of Time Award at IEEE VIS 2025

EVL PhD graduate Andrew Wentzel and co-authors publish in Nature Scientific Data. &ldquo;Clinical and dosimetric dataset of time-to-event normal tissue complication probability for osteoradionecrosis&rdquo; Natalie A. West, Serageldin Kamel, Andrew Wentzel, Zaphanlene Kaffey, Moamen Abdelaal, G. Elisabeta Marai, Guadalupe Canahuate, Xinhua Zhang, Melissa M. Chen, Kareem A. Wahid, Jillian Rigert, Kristy K. Brock, Mark Chambers, Adegbenga O. Otun, Ruth Aponte-Wesson, Renjie He, Mohamed A. Naser, Katherine A. Hutcheson, Abdallah S. R. Mohamed, Lisanne V. van Dijk, Amy C. Moreno, Stephen Y. Lai, Clifton D. Fuller, Laia Humbert-Vidan 
This paper describes the open-access data used for building the ORN predictor model and interface (the latter is hosted at EVL). ORN is a delayed-onset, low incidence, high cost side effect of radiation therapy in head and neck cancer. 
medRxiv 2025.08.12.25333524; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.12.25333524

Diagram showing the data collection workflow and input into the final CSV file.

Congratulations to EVL PhD Andrew Wentzel & Co-authors for a Nature Scientific Data Publication

Candidate: Carla Floricel 
Committee: 
Dr. Michael Papka (chair and advisor) 
Dr. Fabio Miranda 
Dr. Khairi Reda 
Dr. Andrew Johnson 
Dr. Victor Mateevitsi 
Dr. Guadalupe Canahuate (University of Iowa) 
Date: Tuesday October 21st, 4:00 PM CDT 
Location: Engineering Research Facility, Room 2068 
Abstract: 
Post-treatment decision-making is a process that depends on longitudinal studies of patient cohorts, in which identifying the risk of adverse treatment outcomes is critical to improving personalized care. This process benefits from visual analytics because it can overcome many of the challenges that arise with complex patient cohort data. Visual analytics can help to interpret treatment progressions and outcomes, and stratify cohorts by risk categories, which are crucial for improving treatment decision-making. However, post-treatment cohort analysis uses large-scale, heterogeneous, temporal, multivariate datasets with associated
attributes and missing values. Visualization needs to provide scalable, effective methods for cohort analysis at different levels of detail that can uncover patterns and associations among patient attributes that correspond to negative treatment outcomes. Moreover, posttreatment care planning relies on computational cohort data modeling and, as a result, uses both objective and subjective evidence, namely, the clinician’s interpretation of the modeling results. Consequently, cohort modeling and analysis depend on collaborations between clinicians and data modelers. Therefore, visual analytics solutions need to facilitate these collaborations and the interpretation and evaluation of modeling results in a clinical context. 
I am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over. This dissertation explores visual analytics techniques for cohort modeling and analysis
and applies these techniques to post-treatment decision-making. This work addresses the challenges identified above by designing, developing, and evaluating four application-specific visualization systems in collaboration with clinical researchers and data modelers. I first identified the design requirements for a family of cohort modeling problems in cancer symptom and digital biomarker research. Next, I design several systems that integrate unsupervised modeling for the computational back-end and data visualization for the front-end. I propose novel, custom visual encodings for multivariate temporal cohorts that enable iterative risk assessment across cohort stratifications. A first system, OpenDBM, uses visual analytics for behavioral risk assessment in digital biomarker research, using cohorts with hundreds of modeled attributes, and it was designed for the open-source community. This work proposes a novel encoding that aggregates multivariate, spatial, and non-spatial temporal attributes on anatomical locations to explain behavioral biomarkers. A second system, THALIS, shifts
the focus to clinician-modeler collaborations in head and neck cancer cohort modeling and to a multi-stage patient monitoring process, namely, during and post-treatment. This system uses scalable visual encodings to interpret attribute associations and introduces a new encoding for evaluating patient outcomes in multivariate, multi-stage time series. A third system, Roses, builds on the previous work, using custom visualizations for the interpretation and evaluation of outcome risk predictions, this time accommodating configurable analytical workflows for clinicians and modelers. The system introduces a visual encoding
to summarize multi-stage networks, with temporal nodes, which helps to evaluate patterns and associations in modeled outcome risk components. A fourth system, L-VISP, explores visual analytics for understanding and assessing black-box models in cohort risk prediction, with an emphasis on the design requirements for data modeler activities. To support model evaluation, the system visualizes results for machine-derived (cluster) or user-specified cohort stratifications and introduces custom encodings for weighted associations in multivariate attributes. Together, these systems contribute to data visualization and modeling solutions for the challenges that data modelers and clinicians face during collaborations. 
Patient records were used for the cancer research projects. These records contained demographic and diagnostic details, as well as longitudinal symptom ratings. The records were anonymized by our clinical expert collaborators and stored on a private institution cloud. Access was limited and given by our collaborators on a case-by-case basis. For the digital biomarker project, the collaborators provided longitudinal biomarker records. These records were extracted from actor, not patient, videos using a feature-extraction toolkit and stored in a private cloud. There were no personal identifiers in these data, and no research involving human subjects was conducted in this dissertation.

PhD Dissertation Announcement: &ldquo;Patient Cohort Visual Analytics for Post-Treatment Care&rdquo;

On Friday, October 3rd, EVL hosted the College of Engineering&rsquo;s Fall 2025 Advisory Board meeting in EVL&rsquo;s new visual data science space <a href="https://arcade.evl.uic.edu/web/">Arcade</a>. Arcade is located in the new Computer Design Research Learning Center (CDRLC) building and is an instrument designed for UIC science and engineering research and research training - a digital Project Room that enables domain scientists and computer scientists to collaborate on real-world problems by providing them with high-performance computing, high-resolution displays, and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI), data analytic, data simulation, image processing, visualization, and virtual-reality software and services. 
Arcade offers on-site computing with adequate support, as well as collaboration software services. It is a configurable computing environment that prioritizes real-time, interactive, collaborative, and data-intensive applications, while also supporting off-hours batch-mode processing. Users can execute code more quickly, apply more sophisticated analytics to large-scale problems, gain deeper insights, and open new avenues of research. The Arcade&rsquo;s collaboration software enables researchers to interact locally with colleagues using the display walls or engage in video-teleconferences while simultaneously sharing and interacting with their data on the large displays, which remote viewers can also access online.

EVL Hosts COE Advisory Board Fall Meeting 2025

EVL Director and Computer Science Professor Michael Papka and Professor Zhiling Lan have received a new award from the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE): Core Programs entitled &ldquo;SHF:Small: Beyond Performance: Energy-Conscious High Performance Computing.&rdquo; The grant project period runs 10/01/2025 to 09/30/2028 for $540,000. 
Abstract: 
As high-performance computing (HPC) systems grow increasingly heterogeneous and application workloads become more diverse, achieving both high performance and energy efficiency poses a significant challenge. While performance optimization remains essential, energy efficiency has emerged as a critical priority due to substantial infrastructure demands, operational costs, and environmental impact. This project tackles two fundamental barriers to energy-conscious HPC: power waste in heterogeneous hardware and the lack of dynamic power coordination. It develops a holistic framework, EcoHPC, to enable energy-efficient execution of hybrid workloads on heterogeneous systems. The anticipated outcomes have broad scientific, economic, and environmental impacts. Additionally, an integrated education plan aims to train the next generation of the HPC workforce. 
The project introduces three core technical innovations. First, it exploits collaborative filtering-based recommendation systems that combine offline analysis with real-time profiling to model application performance–power trade-offs and guide scheduling decisions. Second, it applies multi-objective optimization and Pareto-front analysis to treat power as a first-class schedulable resource, enabling system-wide coordination and optimization. Third, it develops adaptive runtime systems that dynamically predict application phases and resource demands, allowing applications to minimize power waste while maximizing performance under power constraints. Together, these innovations yield new workload models, energy-aware allocation methods, and runtime strategies that significantly enhance energy efficiency in heterogeneous computing environments.

Researchers Michael Papka and Zhiling Lan Receive New NSF CISE Award

&ldquo;ChromPolymerDB: A High-Resolution Database of Single-Cell 3D Chromatin Structures for Functional Genomics&rdquo; authored by Chronis, Constantinos (UIC), Chen, Min (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Du, Lin (UIC), Zhao, Siyuan (UIC), Ye, Bowei (UIC), Delafrouz, Pourya (UIC), Farooq, Hammad (UIC), Chattopadhyay, Debaleena (UIC), Marai, G. Elisabeta (UIC), Shao, Zhifeng (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Liang, Jie (UIC), and Czajkowsky, Daniel M (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) has been published in NAR-02636-2025, Nucleic Acids Research, 2025. 
This work provides a valuable interface and algorithm resource and a database for exploring scHi-C (single-cell Hi-C) data and integrating these analyses into ongoing research. This work stems from a project by Lin Du, advised by Jie Liang. Constantinos Chronis, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at UIC, shepherded the submission after Jie Liang passed away.

Overview of the ChromPolymerDB database.

EVL Researchers Co-Author Prestigious Nucleic Acids Research Publication

Hypertext 2025 Virtual Reality Exhibition in the CAVE2 VR Environment 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) 
842 W Taylor St. Room 2036 
Chicago IL 60607 
September 16, 2025 @ 4.30pm 
Your VR Theater experience awaits! 
Plunge into the surrounds of our burning forests. Explore the ghostly seams of the logistical city. 
Immersive CAVE2 Virtual Reality Exhibition -- Hidden Costs of Logistics and the Disappearing Wild -- highlights immersive projects that explore the intersections of anthropology, design, theater, creative coding, typography, and hypertext interaction to tackle some of the world’s most complex problems. From disappearing ecosystems to the invisible machinery behind global supply chains, each project invites participants to observe and reflect on the environmental, social, and economic impacts shaping the American Midwest and our planetary well-being. 
Developed by multi-institutional teams of anthropologists, artists, and computer scientists from the University of Chicago, UIC, and Yale, and created by the Creative Coding participants in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), these VR experiences confront pressing global challenges with ethnographic insight and design innovation. Participants will journey through digitally rendered 360 landscapes of deforestation and the unseen logistical labor behind everyday commodities. By merging art, technology, and interactive hypertext in storytelling, these projects advance critical conversations around climate change, social justice, and the hidden infrastructures that sustain -- and strain -- life on Earth. 
Supported and organized by the Hypertext2025 Conference, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), the Department of Computer Science and the School of Design at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. 
Featured Projects: 
CAVE2 Virtual Reality Exhibition: Project Fulfillment 
by Daria Tsoupikova, Julie Y. Chu, Alexandria Schmidt, Harini Kumar, Shahira Bhasha, Gaeun Lee, Eunseo Ko, Kenzell Huggins, Darshan Shet and Farah Kamleh 
Interactive VR Exhibition: Why Must We Make It All Burn? 
by Alexandra Preuss 
ACM Hypertext 2025 Conference <a href="https://ht.acm.org/ht2025/">website</a>.

Why Must We Make It All Burn?

CAVE2 VR Exhibition: The Hidden Costs of Logistics and the Disappearing Wild

The The VR project &ldquo;Fulfillment: a field guide to the logistical city&rdquo; a multi-year research project developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in collaboration with the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago will be exhibited as part of the <a href="https://ht.acm.org/ht2025/">ACM Hypertext 2025 Conference</a> to be held in Chicago, September 15-18. 
Spearheaded by UIC School of Design and EVL Professor Daria Tsoupikova, &ldquo;Fulfillment&rdquo; was enabled through a unique collaboration between anthropologists, designers, and other social scientists from several research institutions spanning the U.S., Europe and Asia with support from the National Science Foundation. The project brings VR technology to the forefront of anthropological research to engage participants in guided first-hand observation of the hidden aspects of logistics and the behind-the-scenes effects of supply chain capitalism on ecology, labor and socio-economic well-being. This immersive experience unfolds the increasingly pervasive yet often obscured ways in which the infrastructural and operative dimensions of commercial logistics are reshaping the way we work, live, and relate to each other and to our environments.

CAVE2 Virtual Reality Exhibition: Project &ldquo;Fulfillment&rdquo;

Computer Science professor and EVL High-Performance Computing (HPC) faculty member Zhiling Lan is this year&rsquo;s general chair with Ioan Raicu of the Illinois Institute of Technology. IEEE eScience 2025 brings together leading interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of eScience applications and enabling IT technologies. The objective of the eScience Conference is to promote and encourage all aspects of eScience and its associated technologies, applications, algorithms, and tools with a strong focus on practical solutions and challenges. 
Dr. Lan will bring her expertise in HPC, artificial intelligence, cloud and IoT infrastructures, among other technological innovations to the organization of the event scheduled to be held September 15-18, 2025 at the Embassy Suites Chicago Downtown Magnificent Mile, Chicago.

CS Professor & EVL Faculty Member Zhiling Lan General Chair eScience 2025

EVL&rsquo;s Director (2014-2020) Maxine Brown continues to contribute to the advancement of research innovation as The 6th Global Research Platform (6GRP) Workshop Coordinator with long time EVL collaborator Joe Mambretti (International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR), Northwestern University) as Workshop Chair. The Workshop focuses on recent and emerging advances in architectures, services, technologies, and infrastructures driven by the requirements of large-scale, data-intensive, scientific research. Speakers present their innovations and explain how their work supports global science research. The 6GRP Workshop program consists of five themes: 
- Large-Scale Global Science 
- Next-Generation Research Platforms 
- International Testbeds for Data-Intensive Science and the Transition to Tbps-800G-400G WANs 
- Global Networking for Science Initiatives 
- Enhancements of Major R&E Networks and Open Exchange Points 
6GRP is co-located with the IEEE International Conference on <a href="https://www.escience-conference.org/2025/">eScience 2025</a>. GRP Workshops and eScience Conferences co-locate because of their similar but complementary goals. Whereas both focus on data- and compute-intensive research across domain sciences, GRP promotes communication strategies for next-generation distributed services and infrastructure. 
6GRP will be held at the Embassy Suites Chicago Downtown Magnificent Mile, Chicago, September 15-16, 2025.

EVL Director Emeritus Maxine Brown 6GRP Workshop Chair

Computer Science and EVL Professor Liz Marai and Andrew Boyd, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Chief Research Information Officer, organized and led the <a href="https://hds.uic.edu/news-and-events/2025-bootcamp-information/">2025 Health Data Science Interdisciplinary Bootcamp</a>, which aims to bridge healthcare and data science research at UIC. Computer Science Associate Professor Elena Zheleva and Assistant Professor Hao Chen were among the participants, and Professor Bhaskar das Gupta was one of the bootcamp mentors. 
The second annual bootcamp organized by the UIC Institute for Health Data Science Research took place on August 18-22 2025. It was the second bootcamp of this type organized at UIC, and took a quite unique and innovative approach to bridging healthcare and data science. In a 5-day long facilitated workshop, 15 researchers from the two campuses (UIC and UI Health), most of whom had not met before: formed interdisciplinary teams of 3-4 individuals around unique project ideas; learned and practiced the basic principles of team science and collaboration; received hands on training and information about funding opportunities; identified the significance and innovation of those ideas; received targeted feedback from peers and mentors, which enabled the teams to repeatedly pivot and refine the project ideas; and refined those ideas repeatedly until they turned into remarkably inventive mini-proposals for seed funding. In the following year, the Institute will work with the teams to strengthen and submit unique project proposals to federal funding agencies and other funding sources.

2025 Interdisciplinary Bootcamp (UIC and UI Health)

We are thrilled to announce that CS+DES students Gaeun Lee, Hope Jo, Cindy Nakhammouane, and CS student Khin Yuupar Myat presented their virtual reality project You Can Grow Here: A Therapeutic VR Journey for Anxiety Management at <a href="https://s2025.siggraph.org/">ACM SIGGRAPH 2025</a>, held in Vancouver, Canada August 10-14, 2025! 
This innovative project was developed in the CS/DES 427/450 Creative Coding course, taught by Professors Daria Tsoupikova and Mike Papka with support from TA Hal Brynteson. The work explores the intersection of technology, design, and mental health through a VR experience aimed at anxiety management. 
ACM SIGGRAPH is the world&rsquo;s premier international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, known for its competitive selection process and global prestige. Having undergraduate students accepted to present at SIGGRAPH is a rare and outstanding achievement. 
Congratulations to our CS+DES students for this remarkable accomplishment and for showcasing the creativity and impact of the CS+DES program on an international stage!

CS+DES Students Presented &ldquo;You Can Grow Here: A Therapeutic VR Journey for Anxiety Management&rdquo; at ACM SIGGRAPH 2025

SAGE3, the Smart Amplified Group Environment, is the next-generation, “human-in-the-loop” visualization and collaboration platform, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to serve as a user’s “co-pilot” to autonomously manage and link disparate datasets and orchestrate services. It is being developed by the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications (LAVA) and the Hawaii Data Science Institute (HI-DSI) at University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI) at Virginia Tech (VT).

SAGE3 held its annual AHM at EVL from July 23-25, 2025. LAVA, EVL and CHCI team members participated either locally or remotely, and were joined by long-time collaborators Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory and the Academy for Creative Media (ACM) at University of Hawaii. 
Though distributed, the team had fruitful discussions and brainstorming sessions, which were greatly enhanced by using SAGE3 on EVL&rsquo;s Cyber-Commons display wall to share documents, webpages, stickie notes, etc. They also utilized SAGE3&rsqu;s AI capabilities to search online for information, summarize documents, etc. Given this is the last year of the current NSF SAGE3 award, discussions also centered on the future. Topics discussed: 
* Listing both work to be completed, and aspirations for how SAGE3 can be an even more productive collaboration and visualization tool. 
* Discussions of how technology is advancing and what will be important over the next five years. 
* Deciding what new user communities might benefit from SAGE3. 
* Discussions on how AI can further help with collaboration, documentation, spatialization of content, etc. 
* Looking at future opportunities and potential NSF programs to pursue. 
SAGE3 receives major support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), awards #2004014 (UHM), #2003800 (UIC) and #2003387 (VT).

SAGE3 Annual All Hands Meeting (AHM) 2025

On July 16, 2025 UIC&rsquo;s Computer Science Department&rsquo;s new building - Computer Design Research and Learning Center (CDRLC) opened at 850 W. Taylor Street. The 135,000-square-foot building houses EVL&rsquo;s Arcade, also known as the Data Observation and Computation Collaboratory (DOCC). Arcade is a visual data science instrument for UIC science and engineering research and research training - a digital Project Room that enables domain scientists and computer scientists to collaborate on real-world problems by providing them with high-performance computing, high-resolution displays, and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI), data analytic, data simulation, image processing, visualization, and virtual-reality software and services. 
Arcade provides on-site computing with adequate support, and it provides collaboration software services. It is a configurable computing environment that prioritizes real-time, interactive, collaborative, data-intensive applications, but can be scheduled off-hours for batch-mode processing. Users can execute codes faster, apply more sophisticated analytics to large-scale problems, gain greater insights, and open new avenues of research. The Arcade's collaboration software lets researchers either interact locally with colleagues using the display walls or video-teleconference while simultaneously sharing and interacting with their data on the large displays, which remote viewers can also access online.

EVL&rsquo;s Arcade Visual Data Science Space Premieres at the Computer Design Research and Learning Center Opening

UIC CS Assistant Professor Wei Tang has received the NSF CAREER Award for his proposed research &ldquo;Compositional Learning and Understanding of the Physical World&rdquo;. $539,051 has been awarded for the five-year project period July 2025 to June 2030. 
Tan&rsquo;s research project aims to develop a computer vision framework that learns and understands the physical world in a compositional manner, offering two significant benefits. First, a compositional interpretation of objects and scenes enables intelligent systems to engage in richer physical interactions and accomplish more complex tasks. Second, by decomposing complex entities into simpler constituents and modeling their relationships, this compositional approach addresses fundamental challenges faced by purely data-driven methods, including data inefficiency, curse of dimensionality, and limited explainability. The outcomes of this project will impact a wide range of emerging applications, including robots that support manufacturing or assist with daily tasks, autonomous vehicles that enhance mobility and safety, and virtual or augmented reality interfaces that facilitate assistive workflows and remote collaboration. This project will tightly integrate research and education through curriculum development, research training for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and community outreach. 
This project will develop new methodologies for learning and understanding the innate compositionality of objects and scenes in the physical world. It consists of three innovative thrusts. Thrust I aims to establish a unified framework for representing, parsing, and learning the compositionality of physical objects, through disentangled modeling of large shape variations, constituent parts, and detailed deformations of each part as multi-granularity neural fields. Thrust II aims to develop a new compositional model that parses 3D dynamic scenes from streaming video into an explainable layout graph on the fly, by constructing distributed representations of low-level geometry and motion and performing explicit reasoning about high-level scene compositionality. Thrust III will extend the first two thrusts by modeling the compositionality of generic articulated objects and investigating test-time adaptation for 3D dynamic scene parsing. Distinct from purely data-driven methods, this new compositional paradigm reduces reliance on extensive 3D annotations, naturally handles the high dimensionality of geometry and motion, and enables a deeper, more explainable understanding of the physical world. This project will advance and enrich fundamental research in visual compositionality, physical object and scene understanding, and explainable parsing.

Computer Science Assistant Professor and EVL Faculty Member Wei Tang Receives NSF CAREER Award

Approximately forty Chicago Public School teachers will participate in the workshop &ldquo;Teaching Environmental & Climate Justice Across Boundaries&rdquo; held in EVL&rsquo;s Continuum environment, June 26, 2025, noon - 3:00 pm. The goal of this event is to gather CPS teacher perspectives on how to revitalize environmental science within CPS, which is currently undergoing restructuring. This will also be an opportunity to brainstorm new ideas for classroom projects that bridge the gap between classroom and community, as well as between disciplines -- for example, chemistry and computer science, or social studies and biology. 
The workshop is organized by Daniel Morales-Doyle and Kaleb Germinaro (UIC College of Education), Alejandra Frausto Aceves (Northwestern), Michelle Rabkin (Director of Science at CPS), and Fabio Miranda (EVL).

EVl Hosts &ldquo;Teaching Environmental & Climate Justice Across Boundaries&rdquo; for CPS Teachers

<a href="https://www.ucgis.org/site/symposium-2025">University Consortium for Geographic Information Science</a> 
30th Anniversary Symposium and Commemorative Celebration 
Navigating the Geospatial Frontier: Future Directions for Academia and its Partners 
June 23-27, 2025 | University of Wyoming | Laramie, WY 
Ryan Theriot (UH/LAVA) and Luc Renambot (UIC/EVL) held a workshop at UCGIS 2025 called &ldquo;Getting Started with SAGE3: A Collaborative Research and Visualization Platform&rdquo; 
SAGE3 (Smart Amplified Group Environment) is an open-source, NSF-funded platform designed to support collaborative research, data visualization, and remote team engagement. Built on decades of research in scalable display environments, SAGE3 enables users to share, analyze, and present complex data in real time across multiple devices, from high-resolution display walls to personal laptops. Its capabilities make it particularly useful for GIS teams working on disaster response, land use planning, environmental monitoring, and other geospatial projects where collaboration and large-scale visualization are essential. 
This workshop will introduce participants to SAGE3 and demonstrate how it enhances research collaboration, facilitates interactive meetings, and organizes complex data. Attendees will learn how to set up and navigate the platform, integrate data sources, and utilize its tools to streamline group discussions and decision-making. 
Whether new to SAGE3 or looking to incorporate it into your workflow, this hands-on session will provide the foundational knowledge needed to use the platform effectively. For more information, visit: <a href="https://sage3.sagecommons.org/">https://sage3.sagecommons.org/</a>.

Navigating the Geospatial Frontier: Future Directions for Academia and its Partners

&ldquo;Accelerating Graph Rendering in the Web&rdquo; received 2nd place in the 2025 Image of Research Competition in the Moving Images category. EVL graduate research assistant Landon Dyken, with supervision from assistant professor Sidharth Kumar, developed an application for visualizing graph data that uses new algorithms to allow for fast rendering on the web. 
The video submission was created by rendering several open-source scientific datasets, along with another created from the UIC logo. A comparison with the previous state-of-the-art methods shows how this method improves performance and enables larger-scale data than previously possible. 
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfcHj7v7FU0">See the video</a> on EVLTube. 
<a href="https://today.uic.edu/see-the-2025-image-of-research-winners/">See the 2025 Image of Research Winners</a> at UIC Today.

EVL Graduate Student Landon Dyken Awarded 2nd Place Moving Image 2025 Image of Research Competition

Candidate: Gustavo Moreira 
Committee: Fabio Miranda (Chair and Advisor), UIC 
G. Elisabeta Marai, UIC 
Michael Papka, UIC 
Remco Chang, Tufts University 
Ross Maciejewski, Arizona State University 
Date/Time: 1pm CT, May 12, 2025 
Location: UIC ERF 2068 (Continuum) 
Zoom details: 
<a href="https://uic.zoom.us/j/5980237609?pwd=b2p3SlZMekR5Vjlidllnb1F6Qm5XUT09">https://uic.zoom.us/j/5980237609?pwd=b2p3SlZMekR5Vjlidllnb1F6Qm5XUT09</a> 
Abstract: 
Urban environments generate a large amount of complex and heterogeneous data, which creates opportunities for all kinds of data analysis across domains such as accessibility, climate, real estate, and infrastructure. Interested in these analyses are a diverse range of stakeholders each bringing distinct expertise, analytical workflows, and priorities. However, among many others, urban planners, architects, environmental scientists, and public health experts employ different workflows while participating in a highly collaborative analytical setting. This reality results in gaps in contribution and communication, impacting the ability of such stakeholders to work together and the inclusion of important opinions and insights. Trying to solve some of those challenges, many urban analytics tools have been developed over the years. They offer powerful means to explore the complexity of data while accounting for the iterative nature of the process. However, these tools are often tailored to particular domains and are the product of disjointed collaborations between visualization and domain experts. That being said, the complexity of urban phenomena, combined with the fragmented nature of current urban visual analytics systems, limits the ability of researchers and practitioners to construct reproducible and adaptable workflows. Existing tools often require specialized technical expertise, treat domain experts primarily as end users, and lack mechanisms for integrating workflows across design, implementation, and evaluation. 
Aiming to tackle the complexity of urban data and the collaborative nature of urban analytics, while remedying for current gaps in urban visual analytics tools, this dissertation will propose an ecosystem of tools and theoretical frameworks that try to answer the following question: &ldquo;how to support accessible, flexible, extensible, reproducible, and scalable tools across domains and users?&rdquo;. Across this ecosystem of tools, there is a common thread of a meta approach. Meaning that the tools proposed enable a large spectrum of users to build urban visual analytics systems at different levels of expertise. This dissertation will present three solutions developed iteratively and a fourth ongoing work. They are a product of close cooperation with experts and practitioners who supported the evaluation through a series of real-life case studies. First, the Urban Toolkit (UTK) introduces a flexible grammar-powered visualization framework for urban data integration, showcasing an example library with public datasets from: Chicago Data Portal, OpenStreetMap, NYC Open Data, and Analyze Boston. Curio builds on UTK to add a collaborative, dataflow-driven approach, presenting three usage scenarios with public datasets from OpenStreetMap and Google Street View. Then, Urbanite extends the previous tools to propose a framework for human-AI collaboration, fostering alignment for a declarative construction of urban VA systems. Three usage scenarios are presented using public datasets from: OpenStreetMap, OpenTopography, Project Sidewalk, and Urban Pulse's paper. Finally, I present ongoing research that investigates challenges and opportunities in translating a domain problem into a VA system in an AI-assisted environment. The three tools bridge the gap between stakeholders by increasing accessibility to urban data analysis while making sure that solutions are extensible and scalable enough to be reused in different contexts, thus supporting an already existing diverse set of urban visual analytics workflows.

Illustration of the key concepts of the Curio dataflow model.

Prelim Announcement: &ldquo;Supporting Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration in Urban Data Analysis&rdquo;

Smart/Scalable Amplified Group Environment (SAGE3 & SAGE2), Computer Science, Luc Renambot and Jason Leigh (2025). To think more clearly, ideate more creatively, and reach decisions with speed, accuracy and confidence, people need help working collaboratively and making sense of complex information. <a href="https://sage3.sagecommons.org/">SAGE3</a> provides users with an intuitive framework that integrates state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence technologies with applications, workflows, smart visualizations and commercial collaboration services to help teams, both local and remote, access, share, explore and analyze their data. SAGE3 creates a unified platform, whether using laptops, tiled display walls, or rooms with projection technology. New Federal funding in 2020 motivated the UIC development team to take advantage of major technological advancements and the advent of hybrid home/work environments to create SAGE3, the successor to SAGE2, which was introduced in 2013. Several companies licensed SAGE2 and incorporated its concepts and codes in their products for collaboration, visualization, hybrid environments and critical decision making, though have expressed interest in SAGE3. SAGE3 is open source, and anyone can download from its <a href="https://www.sagecommons.org/">website</a> for use . Companies can use internally and can license it for use in products. 
SAGE3 is a collaborative research project with UIC, University of Hawaii Manoa and Virginia Tech, funded by NSF awards 2003800, 2004014 and 2003387. SAGE, SAGE2 and SAGE3 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 
<a href="https://today.uic.edu/top-10-innovations-from-uic-researchers/?j=153353&sfmc_sub=197729190&l=1247_HTML&u=2501189&mid=546003729&jb=4006&utm_source=MarketingCloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UICtoday_FS_042925&utm_content=From+the+first+infant+incubator+to+designing+election+ballots%2c+UIC+researchers+have+left+their+legacy">See the full UIC Today article.</a>

EVL&rsquo;s SAGE Research Among Top 10 Innovations from UIC

EVL graduate research assistant Landon Dyken under the supervision of Sidharth Kumar is recognized for the publication entitled &ldquo;Enabling Fast and Accurate Crowdsourced Annotation for Elevation-Aware Flood Extent Mapping&rdquo;.   Mapping the extent of flood events is an important aspect of disaster management.  In recent years, deep learning methods have evolved as an effective tool to label high-resolution imagery and provide necessary flood extent mappings quickly.  These methods, though, require large amounts of annotated training data to create models that are accurate and robust to new flooded imagery.  FloodTrace, a web-based application that enables effective crowdsourcing of flooded region annotation for machine learning applications, helps address these challenges.

EVLers Pacific Vis 2025 Paper Recognize with an Honorable Mention

Dan Sandin, inventor of the Sandin Analog Image Processor (IP) participated in a panel presentation on &ldquo;The Radical Art of the Sandin Image Processor,&rdquo; sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The presentation not only featured Sandin, but artists who used the Sandin IP to create old and new works of art. The event was enhanced by the audience&rsquo;s capability to interact in person with a functioning IP! 
The Sandin Image Processor debuted in 1973 as a groundbreaking analog computer, enabling users to create astonishing video effects in real time. By encouraging other artists to &ldquo;copy-it-right,&rdquo; Sandin paved the way for producing dozens of image processors across the United States, making the machine one of the most influential tools for experimental video and performance art. More than 50 years later, the IP continues to inspire, connecting artists, hardware developers, and computer programmers across generations. To mark this anniversary, &ldquo;The Radical Art of the Sandin Image Processor,&rdquo; brings together a range of works created with the Sandin Image Processor over the years, including two new commissions by artists Lee Blalock and Jon Satrom. James Connolly engaged the audience with a live public performance of one of the SAIC&rsquo;s own IPs. 
The event was presented in partnership with <a Href="https://www.vdb.org/">Video Data Bank</a> and <a Href="https://mediaburn.org/https://mediaburn.org/">Media Burn Archive</a>. Special thanks SAIC. 
Thursday, April 17, 2025 
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. CDT 
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1, 164 N State Street, Chicago

Dan Sandin Presents &ldquo;The Radical Art of the Sandin Image Processor&rdquo;

Virtual Reality Exhibition in the CAVE2 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) 
Friday, March 21 @3-5pm 
842 W Taylor Street, Room 2036 
Global challenges pose significant threats to humanity&rsquo;s future. However, design and virtual reality offer innovative strategies to address the United Nations&rsquo; 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This VR exhibition showcases immersive projects that explore the intersections of design, theater, creative coding, and VR to tackle complex global issues - from combating climate change and improving health to promoting equality and protecting our oceans and forests. 
This VR exhibition highlights immersive projects that explore the intersections of design, theater, creative coding, and VR to tackle complex global issues. Between 2021 and 2024, CS+DES student teams collaborated on inspiring VR projects focused on global challenges within a Creative Coding course, advancing these crucial objectives. These projects have the potential to contribute meaningfully to the Sustainable Development Goals, fostering innovative solutions and promoting positive global change. 
We hope you can join us! 
Daria Tsoupikova 
CS+DES Chair I Design 
Professor, School of Design

VR Design for Sustainable and Inclusive Futures

EVL and Computer Science Professor G. Elisabeta Marai and Assistant Professor Sidhath Kumar participated in the 3rd AI Ecosystem Symposium held February 28, 2025, at UIC. The Symposium featured presentations on AI in Healthcare, Diagnostics, Informatics, and Wellness 
Dr. Marai&rsquo;s presentation focused on Bridging Human-Centered Data Science with Real World Problems. Dr. Kumar&rsquo;s presentation was &ldquo;﻿﻿Data to Decisions: A Topological Lens on High-Dimensional Biomedical Data.&rdquo; 
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the College of Engineering, and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory sponsored the event.

EVL Faculty Present Research at the UIC Ecosystem Symposium 3

EVL co-director and professor emeritus Dan Sandin is named keynote speaker at Stereoscopic Displays and Applications (SD&A) 2025 XXXVI. SD&A will be held February 3-6, 2025 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel, Burlingame, CA held during the IS&T Electronic Imaging Symposium. 
Over the past fifty years, Dan has been a keen proponent of a wide range of stereoscopic developments. His presentation will reflect on how these technologies have shaped interdisciplinary collaboration and the evolution of electronic art and visualization techniques. Dan is director emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) and a professor emeritus in the School of Art and Design at UIC. 
His presentation is scheduled for 9:30 am on Tuesday, February 4, 2025. 
See more details about SD&A 2025 on the <a href="http://www.stereoscopic.org/2025/">advance program web page</a>. 
Abstract: 
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), established in 1973 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), specialized in interactive electronic displays
even before the advent of the frame buffer. By ingeniously combining digital and analog systems, EVL enabled real-time interactive computer graphics through the Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS). This system was instrumental for animator Larry Cuba in creating the computer graphics for the original 1977 &ldquo;Star Wars&rdquo; film, which was done frame by frame on 35mm film), as well as contributing to lesser-known movies like &ldquo;UFO: Target Earth&rdquo; for which the special effects were captured on video. SpiralPTL is a work preserved in the Museum of Modern Art&rsquo;s video art collection. Throughout the decades, EVL advanced the technology of computer graphics but also deeply integrated art, science, and education researchers and teaching faculty. This collaboration led to the creation of an interdisciplinary MFA program in Electronic Visualization, bridging UIC&rsquo;s Engineering College with its School of Art and Design. EVL&rsquo;s later innovations include the development of numerous interactive stereoscopic and autostereoscopic systems, most notably the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). This paper will describe and analyze these technological advancements, discussing both their successes and their challenges in adoption by scientists, engineers, and artists. The narrative will reflect on how these technologies have shaped interdisciplinary collaboration and the evolution of electronic art and visualization techniques over the past fifty years. 
Biography: 
Daniel J. Sandin is director emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) and a professor emeritus in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). As an artist, he has exhibited worldwide, and has received grants in support of his work from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His video animation &ldquo;Spiral PTL&rdquo; is in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2007 Sandin received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award. He went on to develop a series of VR display systems including Varrier, a stereo VR display that does not require 3D glasses, and CAVE2, a large (20-foot) cylindrical display based on LCDs.

EVL&rsquo;s Daniel J. Sandin Named Keynote Speaker at ﻿SD&A

The SAGE3 development team hosts a one-hour Zoom event to introduce the SAGE3 AI-enhanced collaboration platform developed jointly by the University of Hawaii, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Virginia Tech January 21-23, 2025. 
Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), SAGE3 is available to a wide range of scientific research & education communities at no charge. SAGE3 enables researchers and educators to seamlessly work together with data and visualizations, across devices - from laptops to large display walls. ﻿﻿Unleash spaces to think, collaborate, analyze, and make decisions with greater speed and confidence. See <a href="https://go.hawaii.edu/a5o">meeting details and registration information</a>. 
To learn more, please register for one of the upcoming 1-hour informational sessions. We will introduce newcomers to SAGE3 and update long-time users about its latest improvements.

SAGE3 AI-Enhanced Collaboration Platform Introduced

EVL alumni Sai Priya Jyothula and Arthur Nishimoto presented their Virtual Reality (VR) research at the 17th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI'24) held December 11-13, 2024, in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The VR project &ldquo;Hummingbird: Collaborative Virtual Reality for Tele-Immersive Interactive Theater&rdquo; was developed by Daria Tsoupikova, Sai Priya Jyothula, Arthur Nishimoto, Jo Cattell, Andrew Johnson and Lance Long. Their publication documenting the &rsquo;adventure&rsquo; over the years of developing, demonstrating, and engaging audiences in an innovative theater experience is recognized as the &ldquo;Best Art Paper&rdquo; of the Conference. 
VINCI is the premier international forum for researchers and industrial practitioners to discuss the state of the art in visual communication theories, designs, and applications. Visual communication through graphical or sign languages has long been conducted among humans of different backgrounds or cultures and, in recent decades, between humans and machines. In today's digital world, visual information is typically encoded with various metaphors commonly used in daily life to facilitate rapid comprehension and easy analysis during the communication process. Visual information communication generally encompasses information visualization, graphical user interfaces, visual analytics, and visual languages. Visual information is increasingly used to facilitate human-human communication through the Internet and mobile devices.

EVLers Present &ldquo;Hummingbird: Live Theater Adventure Empowering Collaboration in Virtual Reality&rdquo; & Win Best Art Paper Award at VINCI 2024

Candidate: Andrew Wentzel 
Committee: 
G.Elisabeta Marai (Chair), UIC 
Fabio Miranda, UIC 
Xinha Zhang, UIC 
Guadalupe Canahuate, University of Iowa 
Renata Raidou, TU Wien 
Date and Time: December 2nd, 10 AM CST 
Location: UIC ERF Room 2068 (Continuum) 
Zoom Details: 
<a href="https://uic.zoom.us/j/85300679588?pwd=UrRxqhWr6hcHbIrvGX1IMPaFPUVl3R.1">https://uic.zoom.us/j/85300679588?pwd=UrRxqhWr6hcHbIrvGX1IMPaFPUVl3R.1</a> 
Meeting ID: 853 0067 9588 
Passcode: fB6NnHyx 
Abstract: 
Research in visual computing (VC) focuses on integrating visual representations of datasets with computing systems, thus leveraging the complementary abilities of humans and machines. The resulting VC systems may include machine learning (ML) techniques, which have remarkable abilities in terms of processing vast amounts of data. However, creating VC+ML systems that can operate on spatio-temporal data is a largely unexplored, difficult topic. Challenges in this area include: capturing domain characterizations for spatial VC+ML problems, in particular when serving both ML model builders and ML model clients; creating explainable VC+ML models that can operate on spatial data, including measures that can capture spatial structure similarity; designing visual encodings for ML models that use spatial information and that enhance the modeler and client understanding of the model; and measuring the effect of deploying such VC+ML systems in practice. 
Based on several multi-year collaborations, I document several instances where spatial and explainable VC+ML solutions are required, and what role spatiality plays in these instances. Throughout this process, I extract and describe design requirements for explainable spatial VC+ML systems, and I identify necessary VC advances, including spatially-aware similarity measures and spatial visual explainability. I construct spatially-aware similarity measures to support ML problems in precision oncology, patient risk stratification in data mining, explainable interactive regression modeling for hypothesis testing in social science, and digital twin interfaces for cancer treatment planning. I introduce novel encodings for 3-dimensional and geospatial data and explore how to integrate such encodings with ML model explanations. I implement and evaluate several VC+ML systems and several resulting models that are explicitly designed to integrate domain-specific structural spatial information and unsupervised ML. Throughout this process, I also articulate design lessons related to model actionability.

PhD Dissertation Announcement: &ldquo;Human-Centered Design For Explainable, Spatial Machine Learning&rdquo;

Candidate: Pantea Habibi 
Date and Time: Friday, November 1, 2024; 3:30 PM - 6:00 PM 
Location: ERF 2068 
Abstract: 
When interacting with large displays, virtual reality, or augmented reality, people often use mid-air gestures. During these touchless interactions, they may need to alternate between hands or use both hands simultaneously. Most individuals have a hand preference, and preferred and non-preferred hands in lateralized individuals perform differently due to cerebral hemispheric specialization. For example, in right-handed individuals, the right hand is typically better at sequential motor tasks - those requiring (sensory) feedback control - whereas the left hand is better at parallel processing or open-loop behavior. In this thesis, we examine how lateral asymmetry impacts user performance in touchless input. My research provides an empirical investigation to characterize touchless performance when using preferred, non-preferred, and both hands. It explores binding the related tasks sequentially and in parallel, as well as different phrase structures, considering how much muscular tension is involved. 
In this work, we compared preferred and non-preferred hand performance in simple and compound tasks, such as pointing and select-and-dragging, respectively. In right-handed individuals, we did not find any significant performance differences between their preferred and non-preferred hands in touchless pointing or dragging. However, between-hand performance differences were significant when using mouse and stylus input. 
Additionally, we studied how phrasing with both hands can support volumetric multi-selection in touchless input. We present an empirical comparison of mid-air multi-selection techniques spanning dominant and non-dominant hand actions. The symmetric-synchronous and high-tension asymmetric-asynchronous bimanual techniques were not significantly different in terms of efficiency, and accuracy for within-reach targets. Furthermore, there were no significant differences between low and high-tension asymmetric-asynchronous bimanual techniques. The symmetric-synchronous bimanual technique was most preferred by users. 
Lastly, we explored how different phrase structures in bimanual phrasing impact compound task performance, such as touchless multi-selection and manipulation (e.g., drag-and-drop). Our findings revealed that while accuracy remained consistent across different tension levels, higher tension led to faster completion times through continuous gesture engagement. Interestingly, participants preferred half-tension phrasing for its ergonomic balance, as it minimized fatigue without compromising efficiency. These empirical findings can inform the design of future bimanual and multimodal interaction techniques involving touchless input.

PhD Dissertation Announcement: &ldquo;Understanding Lateral Asymmetry in Touchless Interaction&rdquo;

EVL faculty and UIC Design Professor Daria Tsoupikova is featured in the Fall 2024 College Engineering RISE magazine issue. The article covers Daria&rsquo; collaboration with the Chicago Design Archive and Columbia College Chicago.   The project entitled &ldquo;Chicago Design Milestones 1920-2019&rdquo; focuses on design milestones in the city of Chicago from 1920-2019.  The media design installation features 3,200 examples of design work done in the city, and premiered on the 150 Media Stream screens in the lobby of 150 North Riverside Plaza on the Chicago River July 1, 2019.

Daria Tsoupikova Featured in Fall 2024 RISE

Assistant professor Hy Kim, director of UIC&rsquo;s Human-Centered Engineering Lab will present his research: 
Friday 10/25/24, 1pm 
EVL Continuum (Room 2068 Engineering Research Facility) 
Abstract: 
Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally change the way we interact with information. Direct perception of computer-generated graphics atop physical reality can afford hands-free access to contextual information on the fly. However, as users must interact with not only information on the display but also environmental changes in the real world, the traditional User-Centered Design (UCD) approaches that focus on human-computer interaction, may not always adequately address the dynamic nature of human-environment interaction. This seminar will introduce, Ecological Interface Design (EID), a new approach to the design and evaluation of AR interfaces to complement UCD. EID is a framework for interface design that respects dynamic, environmental constraints imposed on users&rsquo; behavior. EID addresses two questions for interface design; what information should be displayed (the content and structure of information that represent the physical reality of the work environment), and how that information should be presented (the perceptual forms of interface elements compatible with human information processing). The talk will start with the theoretical background of EID and show how this approach can benefit AR user interface design and evaluation with an example of an AR head-up display for vehicle drivers. 
Bio 
Hy Kim is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is leading the <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/human-centered-engineering">Human-Centered Engineering lab</a>. His current research focuses on new methods for the requirements analysis, design, prototyping, and evaluation of extended reality (XR) applications, emphasizing human-technology partnerships at future workplaces. Sponsored by government agencies and industry partners, he has investigated basic topics on human factors in XR, such as human depth perception, visual attention, situation awareness, workload, and task performance while interacting with XR applications. Recently, his team has developed virtual environments to study how people would interact with future urban transportation services such as external human-machine interfaces for robotaxis & urban street robots (Honda), driver interfaces for SAE L3 automated vehicles (GM), and crew stations for remote operations of search & rescue vehicles (US Army). 
Dr. Kim received a Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering specializing in human factors and ergonomics from Virginia Tech in 2017. He has more than ten years of research experience in Human-Computer Interaction from academia and industry, including Oakland University, Virginia Tech Center for HCI, and General Motors. He has served as PI or Co-PI of more than 10 research projects and published more than 30 papers in top-tier conferences and journals such as IEEE Virtual Reality, IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, ACM Automotive User Interfaces, and ACM Intelligent User Interfaces, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and Human Factors. He actively serves the above research communities as an organizer of international conferences and workshops.

Beyond User-Centered Design: Ecological Approach to the User Interface Design and Evaluation in Augmented Reality

EVL-affiliated faculty and Communication Distinguished Professor Steve Jones was part of the program committee for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication day-long research forum - AI IMPACT. The forum discussed AI&rsquo;s benefits and challenges. From deep learning to deepfakes, from robotics to avatars, from ChatGPT to human augmentics, from virtual influencers to social bots and countless others, the symposium draws from a broad multidisciplinary understanding of AI to investigate how AI-supported technology can be used for the common good. 
Sessions included talks by EVL Director Mike Papka &ldquo;Computational Impact of AI&rdquo;, EVL alumn and Data Science Team Lead at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Venkat Vishwanath &ldquo;AI for Science&rdquo;, as well as project demonstrations (Playground Spaces) by EVL research students: 
&ldquo;Visualization of Protein-Protein Interactions for Drug Discovery using LLMS&rdquo; - Aaqel Shaik, Michael E. Papka, Shilpika and Venkatram Vishwanath 
&ldquo;AI Engagement is XR (Multimodal AI)&rdquo; - Abdullah Ali, Ricky Massa, Aaqel Shaik, Michael E. Papka 
For more information on the Symposium and to review the program see <a href="https://las.uic.edu/events/las-faculty-research-symposium-ai-impact/">https://las.uic.edu/events/las-faculty-research-symposium-ai-impact/</a>

AI Impact Symposium

EVL undergraduate researcher Athena Angara discussed her summer internship project with Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), &ldquo;Tele-robotics to Tele-autonomous Robotics for Isotope Production,&rdquo; during NVIDIA&rsquo;s weekly livestream, Community Spotlight: Unlocking Physical AI with Isaac Sim and OpenUSD. 
Angara is a senior studying data science. She spent her summer at the ALCF working on a DOE-funded project that leveraged virtual reality and augmented reality to create digital twins of critical components of robotic arms. Using Unreal Engine 5 and NVIDIA&rsquo;s Unity, Omniverse, and Isaac Sim, Angara developed an immersive display system with real-time, low latency, and high spatial resolution for remote control processes. She also converted data to ensure accurate representations between these digital platforms. 
NVIDIA&rsquo;s Omniverse is a real-time 3D graphics collaboration platform. It has been used for applications in the visual effects and &ldquo;digital twin&rdquo; industrial simulation industries. Omniverse makes extensive use of the Universal Scene Description format. 
To see more about the ALCF summer program see <a href="https://www.alcf.anl.gov/news/summer-students-tackle-supercomputing-and-ai-research-projects">&ldquo;Summer students tackle supercomputing and AI research projects&rdquo;</a> 
See the <a href="https://youtu.be/3jM1mjGqZ0Q?si=JWoxznDdeGTAv88H">YouTube video</a> of Angara&rsquo;s project.

&ldquo;Tele-robotics to Tele-autonomous Robotics for Isotope Production&rdquo; Presented at NVIDIA&rsquo;s Livestream

EVL hosts Jorge Wagner as a guest speaker, presenting &ldquo;Designing and Evaluating HMD-Based Immersive Analytics Environments&rdquo;. 
Friday 10/18/24, 1pm 
EVL Continuum, Room 2068 (Engineering Research Facility) 
Abstract 
The potential of Immersive Analytics approaches to enhance how humans understand and interact with data has attracted the attention of visualization researchers for decades, as is well illustrated by the work done at the EVL. Quick technological advances in head-mounted displays over the last years led to devices such as Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, bringing those techniques closer to widespread adoption. However, the design space for Immersive Analytics applications is vast, and it is crucial to understand the advantages and disadvantages of alternative designs. Over the last eight years, during the development of my Master&rsquo;s and PhD dissertations, I have studied the design of HMD-based environments for Immersive Analytics, investigating different data exploration metaphors, frames of reference, and modes of interaction. As a result, I have also proposed a series of ideas to reimagine existing visualization applications to take advantage of the benefits of immersion. In this talk, I will present an overview of my research work and my current ideas on this topic, with a deeper focus on my most recent paper, &ldquo;Reimagining TaxiVis,&rdquo; which I believe sets forth concepts that can be useful for other applications. 
Bio 
PhD student in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, researching guidelines for efficient 3D data exploration with Immersive Analytics under the supervision of Prof. Luciana Nedel and Prof. Wolfgang Stuerzlinger. Jorge was a 2021-2022 Microsoft Research PhD Fellow and a Research Intern in Apple&rsquo;s Vision Products Group from April to October 2024. Recently, he was also a Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher at New York University, working under the supervision of Prof. Claudio Silva (2021-2022). Before that, he completed a six-month research internship with Prof. Stuerzlinger at Simon Fraser University, Canada, as part of the Emerging Leaders in the Americas program (2019).

Designing and Evaluating HMD-Based Immersive Analytics Environments

Andrew Wentzel presents his research entitled &ldquo;Digital Twins Visualization&rdquo; at the IEEE VIS2024 Conference at 3:30 (4:30 EDT) October 17, 2024. 
Abstract: 
Digital twin models are of high interest to Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) oncologists, who have to navigate a series of complex treatment decisions that weigh the efficacy of tumor control against toxicity and mortality risks. Evaluating individual risk profiles necessitates a deeper understanding of the interplay between different factors such as patient health, spatial tumor location and spread, and risk of subsequent toxicities that can not be adequately captured through simple heuristics. To support clinicians in better understanding tradeoffs when deciding on treatment courses, we developed DITTO, a digital-twin and visual computing system that allows clinicians to analyze detailed risk profiles for each patient, and decide on a treatment plan. DITTO relies on a sequential Deep Reinforcement Learning digital twin (DT) to deliver personalized risk of both long-term and short-term disease outcome and toxicity risk for HNC patients. Based on a participatory collaborative design alongside oncologists, we also implement several visual explainability methods to promote clinical trust and encourage healthy skepticism when using our system. We evaluate the efficacy of DITTO through quantitative evaluation of performance and case studies with qualitative feedback. Finally, we discuss design lessons for developing clinical visual XAI applications for clinical end users.

EVL PhD Candidate Andrew Wentzel Presents his Research at IEEE VIS2024

This year, students at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering participated in the <a href="https://ieeevis.org/year/2024/welcome">IEEE VIS 2024 Conference</a>. 
Prof. Liz Marai&rsquo;s students had several presentations. PhD Student Siyuan Zhao presented his work &ldquo;A Part-to-Whole Circular Cell Explorer&rdquo; at the Bio+Med+Vis Workshop on Oct 13. PhD Student Andrew Wentzel presented his paper <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/pubs/2827">&ldquo;DITTO: A Visual Digital Twin for Interventions and Temporal Treatment Outcomes in Head and Neck Cancer&rdquo;</a> on Oct 17. 
Prof. Fabio Miranda&rsquo;s PhD Student Gustavo Moreira presented his work <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/pubs/2843">&ldquo;Curio: A Dataflow-Based Framework for Collaborative Urban Visual Analytics&rdquo;</a> on Oct 16.
Dr. Saeed BoorBoor presented his two papers, &ldquo;VoxAR: Adaptive Visualization of Volume Rendered Objects in Optical See-Through Augmented Reality&rdquo; and &ldquo;Submerse: Visualizing Storm Surge Flooding Simulations in Immersive Display Ecologies&rdquo;. He will join as an EVL Faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago next term. 
UIC&rsquo;s EVL faculty Liz Marai, PhD Students Md Nafiul Alam Nipu, Siyuan Zhao, and Hossein Fathollahian also participated at the VIS Chicago Satellite Event hosted by the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. After the watch party for the plenary session, we heard from faculty and PhD students at UChicago, UIC&rsquo;s EVL, Northwestern, and DePaul.

IEEE VIS 2024: Visualization & Virtual Analytics Virtual Conference

A team of collaborating researchers from EVL and others from the Equitable Health Data Science Institute (EHDS) members placed 2nd out of 17 teams in the EPIC COSMOS <a href="https://ehds.uic.edu/events/hackathon/">Hackaton at UIC sponsored by the EHDS</a>. Team members consisted of Ranga Chandrasekaran, Runa Bhaumik, Tommy Cheng, Andrew Wentzel, Nafiul Nipu, Hossein Fathollahian, and Sanjana Srabanti. 
The problem they tackled was: 
The mental health symptoms/diseases in cancer patients are often not recognized and managed. Compare the prevalence of mental health disorders in different cancers. 
The Institute for Equitable Health Data Science Research&rsquo;s mission is to analyze and eliminate potential biases before they are unwittingly embedded in artificial intelligence algorithms in healthcare. In particular, the institute, with its fabric of interdisciplinary collaborations, will shape solutions for biomedical and health data science and technology while prioritizing health equity for Chicago&rsquo;s diverse population and beyond. The institute is co-directed by Prof. Andrew Boyd and Prof. Elisabeta (Liz) Marai.

EVL Team Gets 2nd Place in EPIC Hackathon at UIC

Congratulations to Mike Papka, one of nine speakers at <a href="https://www.tedxchicago.com/">TEDxChicago 2024: Lighting the Way</a> to be held Friday, September 27th at Harris Theater, Millennium Park fro 3pm - 7pm. 
Mike holds a joint appointment as a UIC Computer Science faculty member and serves as the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility director at Argonne National Laboratory. As director of ALCF, Mike oversees the development and deployment of <a href="https://www.anl.gov/aurora">Aurora</a>, the <a href="https://top500.org/">world&rsquo;s second exascale supercomputer</a> and the fastest <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-powered-aurora-supercomputer-breaks-exascale-barrier.html">AI supercomputer</a>. 
Mike is one of the inaugural recipients of the William S. McCulloch Collegiate Professorship of Computer Science. Warren S. McCulloch was a UIC professor of psychiatry who with Walter Pitts co-invented <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02478259">artificial neural networks in 1943</a>. Today, neural nets form the foundation of much AI technology, including deep learning and large language models. 
Mike is a professor of Computer Science, director of EVL, and co-director of the <a href="https://crabtree.uic.edu/">George Crabtree Institute for Discovery and Sustainability</a>.

UIC CS William McCulloch Professor Mike Papka speaking at TEDxChicago 2024

Computer Science (CS) Professor and EVL faculty Micheal E. Papka is being honored among only a few of his colleagues with the Warren S. McCulloch Professorship of Computer Science. This recognition is the first-ever CS Professorship Investiture. Dr. Papka and fellow CS Professor Barbara DiEugenio are the first two faculty to receive this award. 
Among the other honorees are Professor Cornelia Caragea - first holder of the Robert V. Kenyon Professorship of Computer Science and Distinguished Professor Bing Liu - first holder of the Peter L. and Deborah K. Wexler Professorship of Computing. 
At this inaugural event, both Bob Kenyon and his wife Cynthia Vahlkamp and Peter and Deborah Wexler will be reconginized for their very generous donations of professorships. 
The investiture will be held: 
Friday, September 20, 2024 
3:00 PM Reception, 3:30 PM Ceremony 
ERF West Atrium 
842 W Taylor St, Chicago, IL 60607 
For questions, contact <a href="mailto:rszandra@uic.edu">Ms. Renata Szandra</a>

Micheal E. Papka Honored with Warren S. McCulloch Professorships of Computer Science

September 16, 2024 - The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is proud to become an Intel AI/oneAPI Center of Excellence, advancing computational science education for AI and next-generation heterogeneous programming. The Center will integrate the open, standards-based oneAPI programming model and the latest AI development techniques into UIC&rsquo;s courses, preparing students to meet the demands of AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and data visualization in today&rsquo;s scientific and engineering landscapes. The Center of Excellence builds on the efforts of Dr. Michael E. Papka, who has supported Chicago-area university oneAPI workshops for the past two years and has been a strong advocate for oneAPI since its inception. 
UIC&rsquo;s AI/oneAPI Center of Excellence will be a hub for developing focused modules to enhance current AI, HPC, and visualization courses. The center will initially focus on developing modules to integrate seamlessly into regular classes and outreach activities, expanding access to advanced computational education for a wider audience. The goal at UIC is to prepare students to interpret and visually represent complex data sets using cutting-edge technologies such as Intel Embree and OSPRay and to teach them how to use SYCL in HPC to meet the challenges of exascale computing. 
&ldquo;The AI/oneAPI Centers of Excellence are aiding the next generation of developers in advancing future software innovation using the power of CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators,&rdquo; says Dr. Michael E. Papka, Professor of Computer Science at UIC and the Director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility at Argonne National Laboratory. &ldquo;This UIC-based collaboration with Intel offers valuable, real-world experience and opportunities for our students.&rdquo;
The UIC Center&rsquo;s AI and HPC curriculum will present essential tools and libraries, such as the oneAPI infrastructure for AI and Intel rendering tools, empowering students to optimize code for parallel architectures and high-performance multiarchitecture environments. Through hands-on labs and coding assignments, UIC students will tackle real-world optimization challenges, preparing them to leverage the immense power of exascale systems for scientific discovery. The next phase will consider adding AI curriculums addressing HPC and large-scale AI problems harnessing the power of Intel hardware. 
&ldquo;We are excited to see the impact of these educational advancements on our students and the broader scientific community,&rdquo; says Dr. Peter Nelson, Dean of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at UIC. &ldquo;By integrating cutting-edge tools and technologies, we are fostering a versatile, technologically adept workforce capable of leveraging AI and HPC for scientific discovery.&rdquo;
Students will engage in projects such as visualizing climate change effects, showcasing energy resource distributions with interactive maps, and rendering materials science structures at the atomic level. These projects bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, connecting students&rsquo; work with real-world scenarios and emphasizing HPC&rsquo;s role in solving global challenges. Moreover, HPC supports the rise of AI applications in scientific computing by training complex AI models, from natural language processing to autonomous systems. This interaction between HPC and AI is crucial for advancing both fields, fostering innovation, and driving technological progress. 
&ldquo;UIC&rsquo;s Intel AI/oneAPI Center of Excellence will challenge students to drive complex and important computational projects such as simulating climate change impacts, modeling energy resource distributions, and exploring new materials properties. This brings real-world applicability of AI and HPC into the classroom, enabling the next generation of scientists and engineers to push the boundaries in helping to solve global challenges,&rdquo; says Joe Curley, vice president, and general manager of Intel Software Products and Ecosystems. 
This initiative represents a strategic alignment between academic curriculum development and industry needs. By equipping students with the skills and knowledge necessary to leverage AI, HPC, and visualization technologies, UIC is contributing to cultivating a highly skilled workforce capable of advancing the frontiers of science and engineering. 
For more information, please contact: 
Professor Michael E. Papka – <a href=mailto:"papka@uic.edu">papka@uic.edu</a>

University of Illinois Chicago Establishes a Center of Excellence focused on AI

Michael E. Papka has been announced as the new Director of EVL. Mike has a long history with EVL, starting in 1994 when he graduated with his Masters degree in Computer Science - - through many long-term collaborations between Argonne National Laboratory and EVL. 
After receiving his MS at UIC, Mike completed a second MS and PhD with the University of Chicago. Mike holds a joint appointment as a full UIC CS professor and at Argonne, where he has research and senior leadership positions. 
As the Director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ACLF), Mike leads one of the U.S. Department of Energy&rsquo;s premier facilities for open science. He has spearheaded numerous efforts to build and deploy world-class computing capabilities for open science, notably advancing AI and large-scale data analysis. Under his leadership, ALCF recently joined the exascale era with the development of the Aurora supercomputer. 
We welcome Mike as EVL&rsquo;s new leader!

Michael E. Papka Named EVL Director

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

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

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

OSCUR

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

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

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

Typical steps in a workflow for urban data analysis.

Urban Visual Analytics Systems Research Published in Computer Graphics 2024 Journal

EVL faculty and Computer Science assistant professor Fabio Miranda along with colleagues Froehlich (UW, CS), Li (UW, CS), Hosseini (Berkeley, Planning), Sevtsuk (MIT, Planning), Eisenberg (UIC, Health) are organizing a virtual workshop focused on the role of AI in enhancing urban accessibility. All researchers and practitioners interested in Urban+AI and disability should consider submitting a proposal to the <a href="https://accessiblecities.github.io/UrbanAccess2024/">ASSETS&rsquo;24 Workshop &ldquo;The Future of Urban Accessibility: The Role of AI&rdquo;</a>. The deadline is September 20, 2024 
How will AI transform urban infrastructure for people with disabilities--from public transportation and sidewalks to the design and use of buildings, housing, parks, and transit stations? What new mobility tools and techniques will AI enable from autonomous vehicles and micro-mobility solutions to personalized routing and accessible interactive maps? How can AI be used to effectively and ethically to solve urban accessibility problems and improve the quality of life for all? How can and should people with disabilities be involved with decisions about how AI is used in cities? 
In this workshop, we examine the emerging role of AI in the design of equitable and accessible cities, transportation systems, and interactive tools for mapping and navigation. We invite short papers (broadly construed), including experience reports, position papers, vision pieces, demonstrations, pictorials, or research summaries up to approximately 2,000 words on this topic (approximately 3 pages of formatted, two-column output). See example topic areas. For the word count, you can exclude figures, tables, captions, and the reference list. As we aim for a broad representation of viewpoints, disciplines, and work practices, please choose a format that you feel best conveys your work (e.g., single column, double column, ACM template). 
Submitted artifacts should not be anonymized and, in addition to their primary content, should include a bio of each author and rationale for attending the workshop. PDF submissions should be accessible following the ASSETS&rsquo;24 Accessibility Guidelines. Artifacts will be reviewed and selected by the co-organizers to balance topics, geographies, and communities of focus. Accepted authors will be required to register and virtually attend the workshop via Zoom on a date in October. 
Our overarching goals are to identify open challenges in Urban AI + disability, share current work across disciplines, and spur new collaborations in Urban AI + disability. As a secondary goal, we aim to synthesize and publish our discussions together in a jointly authored report perhaps to the SIGACCESS Newsletter or beyond. 
The Workshop will be held the week of October 21st (tdb).

Call for Participation ASSETS&rsquo;24 Workshop &ldquo;The Future of Urban Accessibility: The Role of AI&rdquo;

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

Chicago Design Milestones 1920–2019 Showcased at 150 Media Stream

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

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

EVL affiliated faculty and Computer Science assistant professor Wei Tang has been awarded his first NSF grant entitled &ldquo;CCSS: Modeling and Learning Space-time Structures for Real-time Environment Perception&rdquo;. 
Amount: $240,000 
Dates: August 1, 2024-July 31, 2027 
Brief abstract: 
Developing sensing circuits and systems capable of perceiving the physical environment is an essential step toward next-generation cyber-physical systems that leverage computation, communication, and sensing integrated with the physical domain. The recent introduction of a class of artificial intelligence (AI) methods known as deep learning has drastically advanced vision-based environment perception. However, the applicability of these methods is significantly limited by their reliance on vast amounts of 3D annotations for training, which are expensive, unnatural, and often unobtainable. Acquiring 3D annotations necessitates specialized data captured by 3D sensors rather than utilizing abundant and readily available images or videos. Moreover, it requires a controlled environment or compromises with inaccurate subjective labeling. This project aims to address real-time environment perception in a very challenging, largely unexplored, yet highly practical setting, where only 2D annotations are available during training, by modeling and learning rich space-time structures of the environment. The outcomes of this project will significantly impact cyber-physical systems and facilitate a wide range of applications, from robots in manufacturing and personal services to autonomous vehicles that enhance people&rsquo;s mobility and safety. Furthermore, this project will tightly integrate research and education at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), which is a Minority Serving Institution (MSI), through curriculum development, research training for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, broadening the participation of female and minority students, and community outreach.

Wei Tang Awarded NSF Grant &ldquo;CCSS: Modeling and Learning Space-time Structures for Real-time Environment Perception&rdquo;

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

Visual analysis of contrails using multiple coordinated views.

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

<a href+"https://cs.uic.edu/profiles/g-marai/">Professor G. Elisabeta Marai</a> has been appointed by the <a href="https://www.nih.gov/">National Institutes of Health (NIH)</a> as a chartered member of the <a href="https://public.era.nih.gov/pubroster/roster.era?CID=105251">Clinical Informatics and Digital Health (CIDH) Study Section</a> within the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR). Marai&rsquo;s 4 term-year appointment runs from July 2024 through June 2028. The appointment was issued by the CSR Director on behalf of the Director of NIH. This is a tremendous achievement and well-deserved recognition of Marai&rsquo;s leadership role in clinical informatics, digital health and computational approaches to improved health. 
Chartered membership on an NIH study section represents a major commitment of professional time and energy as well as a unique opportunity to contribute to the national biomedical research effort. Study sections review applications submitted to NIH, make recommendations on the applications to the appropriate NIH national advisory council or board, and survey the status of research in their fields of science. These functions are of great value to the medical and allied research field, serving to advance science for our nation and the world. 
Marai&rsquo;s appointment letter cites Marai&rsquo;s demonstrated competence and achievement in her scientific discipline as evidenced by the quality of her research accomplishments, publications in scientific journals, and other significant scientific activities, achievements, and honors. It further notes that service on a study section also requires mature judgment and objectivity as well as the ability to work effectively in a group, additional qualities NIH believes Marai will bring to this important task. 
Marai is the director of graduate admissions for the computer science department, a director of UIC&rsquo;s Institute for Health Data Science Research, and was named a 2023-2026 University Scholar by the University of Illinois System.

Marai Appointed to Prestigious NIH Study Section

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

Participant in CAVE2 Hybrid Reality Environment

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

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

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

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

Did you know that UIC has a Star Wars connection?

EVL PhD candidate Andrew Wentzel is recognized by the UIC College of Engineering for his extraordinary research with the annual Exceptional Research Promise Award. The award recognizes PhD students who are within a year of graduating (i.e., have completed their prelim examination) and have demonstrated excellence in scholarship, academic publication, and other research-focused activities. Andrew&rsquo;s publication record during his doctoral studies so far is remarkable: 14 publications. He is the first author of six journal publications in top-tier venues, three in core visual computing venues, and three in clinical venues. He is the first author of two additional workshop papers in competitive venues (<30% acceptance rate), and a co-author and significant contributor of six other journal publications. Results from Andrew&rsquo;s work have been included in a 2023 European textbook in the visual computing field, and have been featured on the cover of the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology. 
Learn more about the origins of this <a href="https://engineering.uic.edu/news-stories/new-award-honors-promising-phd-students/#:~:text=Called%20the%20Graduate%20Student%20Award,and%20other%20research%2Dfocused%20activities">College of Engineering special program</a>. 
Join us in congratulating our colleague on this well deserved honor!

EVL PhD Candidate Andrew Wentzel Wins CoE Exceptional Research Promise Award

Candidate: Sai Priya Jyothula 
Committee: 
Dr. Andrew Johnson, Advisor and Chair 
Dr. Steve Jones (Department of Communication) 
Dr. Debaleena Chattopadhyay 
Dr. Joseph Michaelis 
Dr. Venugopal Vasudevan (Procter and Gamble) 
Location: 2068 ERF 
Date and time: Thursday, April 25, 11:30 AM - 1 PM CST 
Abstract: 
Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are shared virtual spaces that bring users together and allow them to interact with each other and virtual objects. In asymmetric CVEs, users have varied roles, interaction capabilities, perspectives, and device configurations, which can be leveraged to achieve user objectives. The main objective of my research is to use these asymmetric virtual environments as a means to augment people and enable them to transcend their physical, sensory and cognitive limitations. Specifically, I focus on facilitating the expression and access of deeper metaphors of the mind. 
The two exploratory studies that I discuss in this dissertation aim to understand the usage context and evaluate the effectiveness of utilizing asymmetrical virtual environments to augment metaphor elicitation. Understanding the usage context helps to design guidelines for future systems that not only focus on the efficiency of the system individually but also consider how the system augments human capabilities. With this objective, this work also introduces a systematic approach for developing future systems, which integrates the insights from the two studies to improve the prototype system and the metaphor elicitation process.

The left image shows a participant while using the VR system during the metaphor elicitation interview; the right image shows the participant&rsquo;s view mirrored on the display screen during the interview.

PhD Dissertation Announcement &ldquo;Supporting Metaphor Elicitation in Asymmetric Virtual Environments&rdquo;

Candidate: Ashwini G. Naik 
Committee Members: 
Dr. Andrew Johnson (Advisor and Chair) 
Dr. Robert Kenyon (Co-Advisor) 
Dr. Debaleena Chattopadhyay 
Dr. Nikita Soni 
Dr. Steve Jones (External Member - Dept. of Communication) 
Date and Time: Wednesday, April 24th, 2024, 10 AM - 12 PM AM CST 
Location: ERF 2036 
Abstract: 
Meetings and conversations today are multimodal in nature, including the usage of diverse technologies in the form of text, video, images, voice, AI agents, and also immersive technologies. If it were possible to replay important multimodal conversations in their spatial and chronological contexts, it would benefit several audiences, such as - researchers to study and analyze multimodal conversations, novices in any field who could learn from experts, experts who have missed being part of crucial conversations. However, recreating such multimodal interactions requires integrating all of the modalities used in the conversation. Immersive environments provide a convenient setting to present data with its spatial and temporal referents through the use of situated analytics. We present MuSA (Multimodal Situated Analytics), an immersive environment prototype, as a way to recreate multimodal conversations for exploration and analysis in immersive environments. Our development pipeline consisted of various stages such as data capturing, data cleaning, data synchronization, prototype building, and deploying the final product to end-user hardware. We conducted two comprehensive user studies to evaluate the usability, user adoption, and space usage during the exploration of multimodal conversations with our application. In the first study, we explore conversations between seated participants (n=12), and in the second, we explore conversations between non-seated moving participants (n=13). We share insights gained during the development phase, as well as empirical results and feedback collected through both user studies.

(a)Data Collection: 2 participants +  visual conversational AI agent (b)User Study: Replaying (a) in VR - MuSA in Quest2. (c)Data Collection: 2 participants exploring AR (d)User Study: Replaying (c) in Mixed Reality through MuSA in HoloLens2.

PhD Dissertation Announcement: &ldquo;Multimodal Situated Analytics (MuSA) for Analyzing Conversations in Extended Reality&rdquo;

The George Crabtree Institute for Discovery and Sustainability is an institutional partnership between Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), enabling transformative solutions for complex scientific challenges. This collaboration aims to advance knowledge in science and technology, propel sustainable innovation, promote diversity in perspectives, and be supportive of the next generation of researchers. 
EVL and Computer Science professor Michael E. Papka and Jordi Cabana will lead the institute as its founding co-directors, actively engaging with Argonne and UIC in their current leadership roles. Their co-director roles will bring forward collaboration opportunities, coordinate within and across both institutions and support future scientists and interdisciplinary, inclusive research. 
Some of the institute&rsquo;s initial programming includes faculty engagement via the Argonne Collaborative Research Fellowship Program, which is supported through strategic use of the Joint Appointment Program, recruitment of undergraduate and graduate students, and scientific workshops.

EVL Professor Michael Papka co-Directs the George Crabtree Institute for Discovery and Sustainability

Honors Faculty Fellows are individually assigned to provide personalized advising and mentoring to students. Each year, Honors College students nominate Fellows to be honored as &ldquo;Fellow of the Year&rdquo;s for excellence in mentoring.  This year&rsquo; Faculty Fellow is EVL Professor G. Elisabeta Marai.  Join us in celebrating this noteworthy achievement and honorable recognition.  Congratulations, Liz!

EVL Professor G. Elisabeta Marai Awarded Faculty Fellow of the Year

In 2023, the University of Illinois Chicago&rsquo;s (UIC) Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research launched a program to fund interdisciplinary research by forming and funding pilot research institutes to bring together the unique strengths of UIC&rsquo;s colleges. The newest pilot research institute - the Institute for Equitable Health Data Science Research (EHDSR) - will leverage UIC&rsquo;s cutting-edge data science and artificial intelligence (AI) expertise together with the university&rsquo;s health enterprise. The goal is to unite researchers from seven colleges to ensure that medical applications of new technologies benefit all populations without bias. 
EHDSR is co-directed by Andrew Boyd and Elisabeta Marai, who bring their expertise in data science and healthcare to manage this highly interdisciplinary endeavor. The mission of the Institute is to analyze and eliminate potential healthcare biases before they are unwittingly embedded in artificial intelligence algorithms in healthcare. With its interdisciplinary collaborations, the effort will shape solutions for biomedical and health-data science and technology while prioritizing health equity for Chicago&rsquo;s diverse population and beyond.

Chicago Health Atlas map of Life expectancy in Community areas-2

EVL Profesor G. Elisabeta Marai Co-Directs UIC Institute for Equitable Health Data Science Research

EVL Professor Liz Marai has been appointed as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications publication. 
As per André Stork, CG&A Editor in Chief, &ldquo;IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications uniquely combines leading-edge technical papers with sometimes-provocative opinion articles. Together, they explore the various applications of computer graphics in our lives - including entertainment, industry, culture, society, and health - from academic and practitioner perspectives.&rdquo; 
Join us in congratulating Liz on her latest achievement and contribution to the field of visualization!

Marai Appointed Associate Editor IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications

Oren Safdie&rsquo;s visionary play &ldquo;Façade&rdquo; will be performed in EVL&rsquo;s Continuum, Friday February 9th, 6:30pm - 8:30pm. The program will consist of the staged reading followed by a questions & answers session with Playwright Oren Safdie, EVL, and Lira Luis FRIBA FRSA NCARB
RA LEED AP. 
Safdie&rsquo;s provocative script explores contemporary architecture&rsquo;s high-stakes world, tackling themes of ambition, ego, and the clash between architectural vision and commercial reality. Visualized by architect Lira Luis, FRIBA, FRSA, NCARB, RA, LEED AP, the staged reading pushes the boundaries of storytelling with a unique blend of live actors, cutting-edge immersive technology, and a metaverse-inspired setting. 
Presented in Partnership with Chicago Architecture Biennial.

&ldquo;Façade&rdquo; Press Release

EVL Hosts &ldquo;Façade&rdquo; - A Metaverse Reading Experiment

EVL Professor Michael Papka is among 52 ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery Distinguished Members inducted into the International Computing Society for significant contributions towards pivotal education, engineering, and science. Each Distinguished Member is a longstanding ACM Member selected by their peers for work that has advanced computing, fostered innovation across various fields, and improved computer science education. 
Dr. Papka is recognized for his contributions in virtual reality, collaborative environments, scientific visualization, as well as research and operations in high-performance computing. EVL faculty, staff and students congratulate him on this prestigious honor! 
See the <a href="https://www.acm.org/media-center/2024/january/distinguished-members-2023">ACM Media Center</a> for the full press release and information on the other recognized members for 2023.

ACM Distinguished Members 2023 Press Release

EVL Professor Michael Papka Recognized as ACM Distinguished Member

EVL SAGE3 developers Luc Renambot and Lance Long with collaborators from the University of Hawaii Manoa and Virginia Tech present the latest advances in SAGE3 at the <a href="https://www.agu.org/fall-meeting">American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2023</a> held December 11-15, 2023 in San Francisco, CA. 
The AGU Fall Meeting convenes annually, attracting >25,000 attendees from 100+ countries to showcase their research and network among colleagues. Researchers, scientists, educators, students, policymakers, exhibitors, journalists and communicators attend AGU Fall Meeting to better understand our planet and environment, and our role in preserving its future. It is a results-oriented gathering, rooted in celebrating and advancing positive individual and collective outcomes. 
The SAGE3 team presented the latest version of the SAGE environment to the AGU 2023 attendees on the exhibition floor, focussing on data visualization, no-code dashboard building, and advanced collaboration, with examples using geoscience applications.

SAGE3 Developers and Colllaborators from EVL/UIC, University of Hawaii Manoa and Virginia Tech at AGU 2023 booth.

EVL Presents SAGE3 at AGU Fall Meeting 2023

PhD Student: Andrew Wentzel 
Committee members: 
Dr G.Elisabeta Marai (chair) 
Dr. Xinhua Zhang 
Dr. Fabio Miranda 
Dr. Guadalupe Canahuate (University of Iowa) 
Dr. Renata Raidou (Vienna University of Technology) 
Date Time: Wednesday, Dec 6th at 10 am CST 
Location: ERF 2068 
Zoom Details: 
<a href="https://uic.zoom.us/j/83499037419?pwd=MFhvVHg2aXNZWnZwZHBhM0RKUE5ZQT09">Join Zoom Meeting</a> 
Meeting ID: 834 9903 7419 
Passcode: L1fCBhu9 
One tap mobile 
+13126266799,,83499037419#,,,,*43232065# US (Chicago) 
+13092053325,,83499037419#,,,,*43232065# US 
Abstract: 
Research in visual computing (VC) focuses on integrating visual representations of datasets with computing systems, thus leveraging the complementary abilities of humans and machines. The resulting VC systems may include machine learning (ML) techniques, which have remarkable abilities in terms of processing vast amounts of data. However, creating VC+ML systems that can operate on spatio-temporal data is a largely unexplored, difficult topic. Challenges in this area include: capturing domain characterizations for spatial VC+ML problems, in particular when serving both ML model builders and ML model clients; creating explainable VC+ML models that can operate on spatial data, including measures that can capture spatial structure similarity; designing visual encodings for ML models that use spatial information and that enhance the modeler and client understanding of the model; and measuring the effect of deploying such VC+ML systems in practice. 
Based on several multi-year collaborations, I document several instances where spatial and explainable VC+ML solutions are required, and what role spatiality plays in these instances. Throughout this process, I extract and describe design requirements for explainable spatial VC+ML systems, and I identify necessary VC advances, including spatially-aware similarity measures and spatial visual explainability. I construct spatially-aware similarity measures to support ML problems in precision oncology, patient risk stratification in data mining, and explainable interactive regression modeling for hypothesis testing in social science. I introduce novel encodings for 3-dimensional and geospatial data and explore how to integrate such encodings with ML model explanations. I implement and evaluate several VC+ML systems and several resulting models that are explicitly designed to integrate domain-specific structural spatial information and unsupervised ML. Throughout this process, I also articulate design lessons related to model actionability. In my proposed work, I expand my focus to exploring the issue of spatial VC+ML explainability, this time in a supervised deep-learning setting.

Presentation Slides

PhD Prelim Announcement: Visual Computing Design for Explainable, Spatially-aware Machine Learning

&ldquo;MouseScholar: Evaluating an Image+Text Search System for Biocuration&rdquo;, Juan Trelles Trabucco, Carla Floricel, Cecilia Arighi, Hagit Shatkay, Daniela Raciti, Martin Ringwald, and G. Elisabeta Marai is an accepted paper at 2023 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM 2023). Of the 1084 paper submissions submitted to BIBM this year, only 211 regular papers were accepted (acceptance rate: 19.5%). 
Project Description: 
In this work, we instantiate and evaluate a first-in-kind, hybrid image+text document search system for biocuration (the process of analyzing biological or biomedical articles to organize biological data into data repositories using taxonomies and ontologies). The system, MouseScholar, leverages an image modality taxonomy derived in collaboration with biocurators, in addition to figure segmentation, and classifiers components as a back-end and a streamlined front-end interface to search and present document results. We formally evaluated the system with ten biocurators on a mouse genome informatics biocuration dataset and collected feedback. The results demonstrate the benefits of blending text and image information when presenting scientific articles for biocuration. 
Congratulations EVL research team on being accepted for publication with this prestigious Conference!

Biocuration taxonomy of figures in scientific publications, with examples.

EVLers Juan Trelles Trabucco, Carla Floricel and Professor Elisabeta Marai Biocuration Research Recognized by IEEE BIBM 2023

EVl graduate student Hal Brynteson&rtsquo;s research in fluid dynamics will be showcased in Washington, DC at the Gallery of Fluid Motion during the 76th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics. The Gallery of Fluid Motion is a visual record of the aesthetic and science of contemporary fluid mechanics shared with researchers in the discipline, as well as the general public. Submissions are judged on an annual basis for their visual qualities and scientific interest. 
Brynteson&rsquo;s poster entitled &ldquo;Effects of employing liquid-liquid emulsions on heat transfer within a turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection&rdquo; (Authors: H. Brynteson, A. Moradi Bilondi, N. Scapin, L. Brandt, P. Mirbod, M.E. Papka) will be presented November 20th.

EVL Researcher Hal Brynteson&rsquo;s Work Showcased at the Gallery of Fluid Motion

PhD student Ke Fan&rsquo;s research in profiling and visualizing performance data at scale is recognized with a best poster nomination at SC23. &ldquo;Two-phase IO Enabling Large-scale Performance Introspection&rdquo; focuses on developing an effective and interactive exploration of the profiles of large-scale parallel programs, which remain a challenge due to the high I/O overheads of profiles and the difficulties in scaling downstream visualization tools. 
The poster presents Viveka, a lightweight end-to-end system for profiling and visualizing the performance of MPI-based applications. 
- A simple data format for the generated logs that minimizes metadata, leading to a smaller storage footprint and faster load times. (on average 3x more lightweight than Caliper). 
- Development of a custom two-phase data aggregation system to scale parallel I/O (of performance data) to high core counts, ensuring minimal overhead. 
- A lightweight web-based visualization dashboard that is capable of performing interactive analysis of performance data collected at high process counts. 
- A case study on real parallel applications to demonstrate the efficacy of our profiling and visualization system. 
Funding in part by NSF RII Track-4 award 2132013, NSF PPoSS planning award 2217036, NSF PPoSS large award 2316157 and, NSF collaborative research award 2221811. Compute hours provided on Theta Supercomputer Argonne Leadership Computing Facility&rsquo;s Directors Discretionary (DD) program.

Two-phase IO Enabling Large-scale Performance Introspection

The challenges of profiling and visualizing large-scale parallel programs

EVL Affiliated Faculty Sidharth Kumar&rsquo;s Advisee Recognized with Best Poster Nomination at SC23

A team led by researchers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) including EVL Professor Mike Papka was recognized with the Best Paper Award for an innovative scientific visualization study presented at the 2023 In Situ Infrastructures for Enabling Extreme-scale Analysis and Visualization (ISAV) at the SC23 conference in Denver, Colorado. 
The paper, &ldquo;Scaling Computational Fluid Dynamics: In Situ Visualization of NekRS using SENSEI,&rdquo; (Mateevitsi, V.A., Bode, M., Ferrier, N., Fischer, P., Göbbert, J.H., Insley, J.A., Lan, Y., Min, M., Papka, M.E., Patel, S., Rizzi, S., Windgassen, J.) details the team&rsquo;s efforts to equip the NekRS computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code with in situ analysis and visualization capabilities. The winning paper explores the benefits of instrumenting the NekRS code with SENSEI, an open-source in situ interface developed with support from DOE&rsquo;s Exascale Computing Project. The researchers demonstrated the capabilities and scalability of their approach by running two real scientific use cases on the ALCF&rsquo;s Polaris supercomputer and JSC&rsquo;s JUWELS Booster supercomputer. They found that the ability to &ldquo;see&rdquo; the data in real-time significantly augmented their analytical capacities.

Visualization of the pb146 use case simulation, illustrating flow dynamics within a pebble-bed nuclear reactor.

ALCF Team Including EVL Professor Michael Papka Wins Best Paper at SC23 ISAV 2023 Workshop

EVL&rsquo;s professor Marai is part of UIC&rsquo;s brain research now funded by a $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The project incorporates brain tissue research at UIC, Northwestern University, Lurie Children’s Hospital, Rush University, and the University of Chicago, utilizing the INTUITION data platform that combines tissue data with clinical, functional, genetic, and 3D imaging information. The goal of the project is to assist clinicians in treating patients and help researchers better understand the mechanisms of brain disorders by developing a new resource for clinical care and research on epilepsy, brain tumors, and neurological disorders. 
The project is led by Dr. Jeffrey Loeb, the John S. Garvin Endowed Chair in Neurology at UIC, professor, and head of neurology and rehabilitation in the College of Medicine. INTUITION was initially supported by funding from the Discovery Partners Institute to create I-BRAIN, an initiative exploring commercialization opportunities around brain tissue data and research. Other UIC researchers include Dr. Anna Serafini, Biswajit Maharathi, Fozia Mir and Dr. Ahmad Daher from the Department of Neurology and Rehabilitation; Dr. Francesco Pucci from the Department of Neurosurgery; and Dr. Tibor Valyi-Nagy from the Department of Pathology. 
For the full article see <a href="https://today.uic.edu/nih-grant-expands-uic-brain-bank-into-citywide-effort-to-study-epilepsy-brain-cancer/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today%2B02.14.23">UIC today</a>.

The Percival Bailey Brain Collection, located in UIC&rsquo;s Neuropsychiatric Institute.

EVL Professor G. Elisabeta Marai Part of Research Team Awarded NIH Funding to Expand UIC&rsquo;s Brain Bank

EVL Research Associate Professor Luc Renambot joins collaborators from the University of Hawaii Manoa and Virginia Tech to present the latest advances in SAGE3 with a tutorial session at the <a href="https://iss2023.acm.org/">ACM ISS 2023</a>. 
SAGE3, the newest and most advanced generation of the Smart Amplified Group Environment, is an open-source software designed to facilitate collaboration among scientists, researchers, students, and professionals across various fields. This tutorial aims to introduce attendees to the capabilities of SAGE3, demonstrating its ability to enhance collaboration and productivity in diverse settings, from co-located office collaboration to remote collaboration to both at once, with diverse displays, from personal laptops to large-scale display walls. Participants will learn how to effectively use SAGE3 for brainstorming, data analysis, and presentation purposes, as well as installation of private collaboration servers and development of custom applications. 
Presenters: 
Jesse Harden, Virginia Tech 
Nurit Kirshenbaum, University of Hawaii at Manoa 
Roderick S. Tabalba Jr., University of Hawaii at Manoa 
Jason Leigh, University of Hawaii at Manoa 
Luc Renambot, University of Illinois Chicago, EVL 
Chris North, Virginia Tech 
In-person and on-line Sunday Nov 5, 3 to 4:30PM, and Wed. Nov 8 1PM to 2:30 PM.

SAGE3 Tutorial Sessions at ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces Conference (ACM ISS 2023)

EVL alumnus Khairi Reda presents his research at EVL tech meeting: 
Friday, November 3, 2023, 12PM - 1PM 
EVL Continuum, Room 2068 ERF 
Towards Trustworthy Visual Analytics 
Abstract: Interactive visualization tools, such as Tableau, Jupyter notebooks, and R with ggplot, have become vital instruments in the data science ecosystem. These systems empower users to explore data and search for new patterns that might lead to insights. However, these tools can also expose analysts to noise and random data fluctuations. Analysts can frequently misinterpret these spurious patterns and mistake them for reliable effects. This phenomenon has led to a &ldquo;replication crisis,&rdquo; with many previously published results failing to replicate, eroding trust in the scientific process. 
In this talk, Reda will discuss his research on reducing the risk of spurious visualizations and describe techniques we have developed to operationalize analyst hypotheses and beliefs in the visual analytics process. Empirical results showing that these unobtrusive interactions can promote good analytical practices and reduce the incidence of false discoveries will be discussed. Finally, Reda will show how using visual inference as a benchmark can provide a complementary account of visualization utility, leading to new insights into visualization design beyond what can be learned from traditional &ldquo;graphical perception&rdquo; studies. 
Bio: Khairi Reda is an Associate Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics & Computing at Indiana University Indianapolis. He is an alumnus of EVL, having earned a PhD in CS from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research employs a variety of methods, weaving together techniques from human-computer interaction, machine learning, and design thinking to investigate new approaches for visualizing and interacting with data.

EVL Alumnus Khairi Reda Presents his Research &ldquo;Towards Trustworthy Visual Analytics&rdquo;

EVL researchers M. Mantovani, A. Wentzel, J. Trelles, J. Michaelis, G.E. Marai have an image of their visualization research featured on the cover of the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, Vol 67 No 6, Nov/Dec 2023 issue. &ldquo;Kiviat Defense: An Empirical Evaluation of Visual Encoding Effectiveness in Multivariate Data Similarity Detection&rdquo; was presented in January 2024 at the Electronic Imaging Conference in Burlingame, CA. 
Congratulations EVL student and faculty researchers!

EVL Research Team&rsquo;s Visualization Featured on the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology

EVL alumni Tommy Marrinan, Victor Mateevitsi and Mike Papka (also EVL Professor) are recognized at <a href="https://sciviscontest2023.github.io/">2023 IEEE VIS SciVis Contest</a> for their research in the visualization of neuronal network simulations of plasticity changes in the human brain. 
The first award was for Best Workflow; enabling a scientific workflow was identified as one of the 4 main tasks for this year&rsquo;s contest. The goal of this component was to combine the functionality of the other tasks into a combined framework and interface that enables experts to explore the data and investigate several questions interactively. Which tools help the users to mark, select, and analyze the data on different levels of complexity and transfer information among these levels? 
The second award was for 1st Place Overall; judges took into account how the submission addressed all 4 main tasks, as well as any additional features. The judging was based on a short paper description of the visualization system and an 8-minute video demo. 
Congratulations, Tommy, Victor, and Mike! 
See <a href="https://insidehpc.com/2023/11/alcf-team-wins-first-place-and-best-workflow-at-2023-ieee-scivis-contest/">Inside HPC</a>, &ldquo;ALCF Team Wins First Place and Best Workflow at 2023 IEEE SciVis Contest&rdquo;

Events

EVL Researchers Invited to Present “Optimizing Datalog for the GPU” at MIT PLR Workshop 2026

Dr. Andrew Wentzel Receives the UIC 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award

Best Paper Award @ ACM SAC'26

Just published: SAGE’s 22-Year Journey in Support of Research, Education and Practice

Design Professor and EVL Faculty Daria Tsoupikova Presents “Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique in the Age of AI and Immersive Technologies” at CAA 114

Prelim Announcement: “From Scenarios to Counterfactuals: Towards Visual Analytics for Definition and Analysis of Urban Futures”

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