&lsquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rsquo; pays tribute to the city&rsquo;s contribution to video games and digital art 
EDITOR&rsquo;S NOTE: Chicago&rsquo;s Reader newsletter, on November 29, 2018, reviewed the art exhibition &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rdquo; currently at Gallery 400 on the UIC campus from November 1 until December 15, 2018. This exhibition prominently features the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), as it spans the dates EVL was founded (1973), through EVL&rsquo;s introduction of the CAVE&trade; automatic virtual environment (1992). This exhibition opened with an afternoon symposium featuring EVL co-founders and co-directors emeriti Tom DeFanti (distinguished professor emeritus of UIC Computer Science) and Dan Sandin (professor emeritus of UIC Art), as well as early students and collaborators. 
The show focuses on Chicago&rsquo;s contribution to new media history through a broad installation of video games, digital art, video art, and archival materials. Curator Jon Cates, Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media and Animation, Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is interviewed by Reader journalist Caroline Picard, and highlights the way &ldquo;new media&rdquo; - video art, video games, and electronic music - evolved through a radical community of Chicago-based early adopters in the early 70s. 
&ldquo;&lsquo;This creative culture of collaborative communities [in Chicago] gathered together regularly to perform in various configurations publicly during annual Electronic Visualization Events on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago,&rsquo; he says. &lsquo;Their connections were social, artistic, educational, and technological.&rsquo; The exhibition shows how people like Dan Sandin, Phil Morton, Tom DeFanti, Ted Nelson, Jamie Faye Fenton, and others connected commercial gaming, academic research, and independent art-making in a way that permanently impacted the industry. These figures, Cates says, &lsquo;fostered ethical commitments through new kinds of art, novel in their form and content.&rsquo;&rdquo; 
In summary, Picard writes: &ldquo;Most of these innovations have become so integrated in our daily lives, it&rsquo;s difficult to remember that they are not only recent but also shaped, at least partly, by Chicagoans. Cates and his partners have created a compelling installation with almost 100 contributing artists, scientists, developers, and public program participants. The resulting showcase of once-innovative equipment, archival materials, school curricula, interactive timelines, and video games not only captures the energy of play but also the processes by which we see ourselves today.&rdquo; 
Read the entire Reader article - <a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-new-media-1973-1992-gallery-400/Content?oid=63970577">&lsquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rsquo; pays tribute to the city&rsquo;s contribution to video games and digital art.</a> 
There is still time to visit Gallery 400 and see <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2404">&ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992,&rdquo;</a> which ends December 15. 
<a href="https://cada.webhost.uic.edu/Gallery_400/G400_homepage_a.html">Gallery 400 Website</a>

Dan Sandin, <a href="https://youtu.be/7rBDNxpJQQs ">&ldquo;A Volume of Two Dimensional Julia Sets&rdquo;</a> (frame from animation), 2002

Reader reviews &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&ldquo; exhibition featuring UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory

A November 27, 2018 story on the University of Illinois Cancer Center&rsquo;s website profiles leading-edge cancer and computer science research being conducted by G. Elisabeta (Liz) Marai, a UIC Associate Professor of Computer Science and the department&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), and a member of the Cancer Center. 
Specifically, this article highlights two major grants to Marai from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) to work with collaborators at other institutions on the design and development of computer programs to assist medical professionals determine the best treatment options for cancer patients, specifically those suffering from head and neck cancer. 
With collaborators at MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Iowa, and University of Minnesota (NIH/NCI R01 grant CA214825-01), Marai and her graduate students are developing a computing methodology that will precisely determine health outcomes for patients with head and neck cancers based on demographics, toxicity and complex imaging data. While there are &ldquo;large, rich repositories of patient data… risk prediction algorithms for cancers are rudimentary and incorporate minimal patient characteristics, largely due to a lack of computational methodologies....This research has the potential to change the standard of care and outcomes of treatment,&rdquo; Marai explains. 
A second NIH/NCI grant (R01 CA225190-01) enables Marai and the above-mentioned collaborators to develop computer models that combine imaging data, such as radiation dosage and spatial distribution, and nonspatial data, such as demographics and toxicity, in order to identify similar patients and assist medical professionals predict optimal treatment options. This research has the potential to improve the standard of care and the quality of life of surviving patients - not only for head and neck, lung, or brain cancer, but for other chronic conditions, such as mental health disorders, substance abuse diseases, or diabetes. 
<a href="https://cancer.uillinois.edu/marai-developing-computer-programs-to-aid-cancer-patients/">Read the entire story.</a>

Liz Marai with graduate students Tim Luciani and Juan Trelles Trabucco standing in EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2 hybrid reality system with diagrams of patient data depicting head and neck lymph nodes affected by disease spread.

UIC Computer Science/EVL Marai Developing Computer Programs to Aid Cancer Patients

The &ldquo;SAGE2 10th Annual International SC BOF: Scalable Amplified Group Environment for Global Collaboration&rdquo; Birds of a Feather (BOF) meeting will be held: 
<ul><li>Tuesday, November 13</li>
<li>12:15PM - 01:15PM</li> 
<li>Room: D163, Dallas Convention Center</li>
<li><a href="https://sc18.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof137&sess=sess393">https://sc18.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof137&sess=sess393</a></li> 
SAGE2 (Scalable Amplified Group Environment) is an open-source, web-based, user-centered platform for local and/or distributed small or large groups of researchers, educators and students to communicate information and ideas as if they were in the same room. Think of it as WebEx or Skype for cyber-enabled, data-intensive science, engineering and education. SAGE2, like its predecessor SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment), is the defacto operating system for managing Big Data on tiled walls, providing the scientific community with persistent visualization and collaboration services for global cyberinfrastructure. This year&rsquo;s BoF will focus on eliciting community input on use cases and cybersecurity enhancements. 
To see SAGE2 demonstrations, visit us at the StarLight research booth on the exhibition floor from Tuesday-Thursday, Booth #2851. 
Together, we can advance scientific research and education by providing production-quality, community-driven, end-user open services for visualization and collaboration that utilize shared national and international cyberinfrastructure. 
See you at SC18! 
Jason Leigh 
University of Hawai&rsquo;i at Manoa 
leighj@hawaii.edu 
Maxine Brown and Luc Renambot 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) 
University of Illinois at Chicago 
maxine@uic.edu 
SAGE2 receives major funding from the National Science Foundation (award #ACI-1441963). 
SAGE and SAGE2 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 
<a href="http://www.sagecommons.org">More information.</a>

SAVE THE DATE: SAGE2 10th Annual International SC BOF @ SC18 - Tuesday, November 13, 12:15 - 1:15pm

NOVEMBER 11-16, 2018 - Members of the SAGE2&trade; Team who attended the IEEE/ACM SC18 conference - from University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa’s Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications (LAVA), University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), and University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo - were involved in many tech transfer activities, notably research demonstrations, a Birds of a Feather (BOF) meeting, and maintaining and developing content for three SAGE2 walls managed by the SCinet DevOps team. The SC18 conference was held at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. 
SAGE2 BOF 
The &ldquo;SAGE2 10th Annual International SC BOF: Scalable Amplified Group Environment for Global Collaboration&rdquo; meeting was held on Tuesday, November 13, 2018. The BOF provided a Forum for SAGE2 developers to meet with the SAGE/SAGE2 global user community and potential users; specifically: 
To introduce key SAGE2 team members 
To highlight new SAGE2 sites and use cases 
To introduce SAGE2 v4 (named &ldquo;Cahokia&rdquo;) 
To elicit community input on cybersecurity enhancements 
To provide a forum for discussion and feedback 
SAGE2 Presentation Materials (see download link at bottom of page) 
SAGE2 Videos 
<iframe width="420" height="345" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rmg9YnXLBsM">
</iframe>SAGE2 Introduction 2018 
<iframe width="420" height="345" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dn-k7wAhY-I">
</iframe>Quick Tips for Using SAGE2 
SAGE2 Demonstrations 
SAGE2 demonstrations took place in the StarLight research booth on the exhibition floor, November 12-15, 2017. Booth attendees saw firsthand SAGE2 v4&rsquo;s many new and advanced features, and talked with the key developers: 
SAGE2 Performance Improvements 
SAGE2 Quick Notes Improvements 
SAGE2 JupyterLab Extension 
SAGE2 Asset Management 
SAGE2 and Unity3D 
SAGE2 Identity Management and Security 
Model for Cybersecure SAGE2 
In addition, SAGE2 partners from Japan&rsquo;s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) organized and hosted a SAGE2 tutorial in their research booth on the show floor, and also participated in collaborative demos between their booth and the StarLight booth. 
SAGE2 partner Calit2-Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego, hosted a remote presentation on our SAGE2 display by Scott Stellars about their NSF CHASE-CI award (Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem, Community Infrastructure) and their use of Kubernetes. 
SAGE2 SCinet Participation 
SCinet is the SC conference&rsquo;s highly sophisticated, high-performance network infrastructure that is designed and implemented by a large group of academic, government and industry volunteers. SCinet&rsquo;s DevOps Team runs the internal software infrastructure for SCinet - including software to monitor and measure network flows to ensure services and provide alerts when there are issues. Starting in 2016, SCinet DevOps used SAGE2 on a tiled display wall outside their Network Operations Center in order to provide attendees with large-scale images about the network. This year, SCinet upgraded its SAGE2 display and computer technology and hosted three SAGE2 walls at the conference - one outside SCinet, one for a new venue called SC News (with live and recorded videos), and one at the special SC18 30th Anniversary booth. Andrew Burks, a member of the SAGE2 Team from EVL, oversaw the operation of the three walls with help from other SAGE2 Team members and produced several visual analytic diagrams over the course of the week that were displayed both on SCinet’s wall as well as in the SAGE2 research booth.

SAGE2 Presentation PDF (5MB)

Members of the SAGE2&trade; Team who attended the IEEE/ACM SC18 conference.

SAGE2 @ SC18: Demonstrations, Birds of a Feather, and SCinet Participation

NOVEMBER 7, 2018 - Trina Roy, a UIC alumna who majored in Computer Science and worked as a research assistant at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), is being honored with an Outstanding Achievement Award by the College of Engineering (COE) and the Engineering Alumni Association. An annual Awards Dinner will celebrate and recognize the accomplishments and distinguished careers of several engineering and computer science alumni. This year&rsquo;s dinner is being held Wednesday November 7. 
Roy, currently a Senior Software Developer at Pixar Animation Studios, was previously invited to give the commencement address at the UIC COE Commencement in May 2017 because of her impressive computer-graphics career at major special-effects companies. She gave a motivating speech that focused on the value of good mentors, mutual respect and perseverance to achieve one’s dreams. While her focus was more on empowering young women, her presentation made clear that everyone needs to respect and help one another in today&rsquo;s world. Afterwards, young women graduates thanked her for her presentation. Young men graduates primarily thanked her for making great Pixar movies! <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2293">More details on her commencement speech.</a> 
Roy joins other EVL graduates who received campus-wide alumni awards from the UIC Alumni Association. Michael Papka (MS &rsquo;94) received the 2014 <a href="https://tinyurl.com/ya3pjfkv">UIC Alumni City Partner Award</a>. Steve Heminover (LAS &rsquo;79) received the 2007 <a href="https://tinyurl.com/ydychcdn">UIC Alumni Achievement Award.</a> 
<a href="http://engineeringalumni.uic.edu/awards/engineering-alumni-award-winners/">This year&rsquo;s award winners.</a> 
<a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/trina/">Roy&rsquo;s bio</a>.

UIC CS/EVL Alumna Trina Roy Receives Engineering Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award

NOVEMBER 1, 2018 -- Lance Long, Senior Research Programmer for the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), which is part of the Computer Science (CS) department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is a recipient of the 2018 UIC Award of Merit. This campus-wide honor annually recognizes Academic Professional and Civil Service employees who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in all aspects of their work. 
Of the 30 awards being given this year, Long is one of two from the College of Engineering, representing the Computer Science department. Long started his career as a UIC Computer Science graduate student, who early on contributed to EVL&rsquo;s successes and is now a dedicated staff member that retains the collective laboratory memory of how things were developed, while helping make new advancements. 
The Merit Award recognizes Long&rsquo;s service to the laboratory, the Computer Science department, and the campus. He is currently responsible for facilitating and expediting the design, development, acquisition and integration of EVL&rsquo;s advanced visualization, computing and networking technologies. In addition, he assists with EVL tours and demonstrations for campus visitors and for student recruitment, supports interdisciplinary faculty and students who use EVL resources, and spends many hours assisting other campus units who want to replicate EVL&rsquo;s technologies. In addition, he contributes to Federal grants, co-authors research papers, helps set up and demo EVL'&rsquo;s technologies at major conferences, and visits and consults with academic, government and industrial partners who use and/or license EVL&rsquo;s technologies. 
It is an honor long overdue. Congratulations to Lance! 
UIC Award of Merit recipients will be honored during the <a href="https://emails.uofi.uic.edu/newsletter/190970.html">Employee Recognition Award Ceremony</a> on Tuesday, November 6, 2018, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at the UIC Isadore and Sadie Dorin Forum.

UIC CS/EVL Lance Long Receives UIC Award of Merit

OCTOBER 22, 2018 - UIC EVL/MFA graduate JD Pirtle recently started his own company, <a href="https://www.depthandlight.com/">Depth and Light</a> which is an education, technology, and design studio+consultancy. Its mission is to help students, teachers, and learners of all ages feel confident using traditional and emerging technology for research, inquiry, and creativity. 
JD, as an EVL/MFA student, helped develop both the &ldquo;20 Foot Virtual Canvas&rdquo; multi-touch paint system and the &ldquo;Mega Tenori-on&rdquo; virtual sound instrument for EVL&rsquo;s large-scale tiled display wall, called Cyber-Commons. 
After graduating UIC, EVL retained JD to complete development of the CAVE2 sound library. He was then hired by Chicago&rsquo;s Catherine Cook School (preschool - 8th grade) as Director of Innovation, and promptly created IDEA (Innovation, Design, Engineering, Art) Lab, a school-wide, cross-divisional program that included 3D printers, a laser cutter/engraver, a large interactive display wall running EVL/LAVA&rsquo;s SAGE2 software, robotics, sewing equipment, and traditional shop tools. He ran several successful IDEA:TE Transforming Education workshops, too, targeted for preschool - 12th grade educators to discuss how best to integrate traditional and emerging technologies into their curriculum. 
Now JD brings us Depth and Light. As the website says &ldquo;Technology is magical, but it's not magic.&rdquo; JD is certainly a wizard behind the curtain, and we wish him luck in his new venture!

JD Pirtle presenting at the IDEA:TE 2015 workshop

UIC EVL/MFA Graduate JD Pirtle Starts Depth and Light Consultancy Firm

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - &ldquo;Herstory: Digital Innovations Symposium and Book Signing,&rdquo; celebrates the book &ldquo;New Media Futures (NMF): The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts.&rdquo; The Symposium will take place at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 1205 West Clark, Room 1030, Urbana, IL, on October 26, 2018, from 8:30am - 2:00pm. 
The NMF chronicles 22 women who went to school or worked at UIUC, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the 1980s and beyond, during a pivotal time for the digital arts media in the Midwest. Nine of the 22 women profiled in the book are PhD/MS/MFA/BFA graduates and/or employees of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), which, at the time, was a formal collaboration between the UIC Computer Science department and UIC School of Art and Design. 
Thirteen of the book&rsquo;s contributors will attend the Symposium - including the woman who designed the first graphical web browser, the first female gaming company founder, and the woman who helped build the first room-sized virtual reality room environment - and will give TED-inspired Lightning Talks, and meet with attendees. They will discuss their passions, digital innovations and their herstories - both formally in short presentations and informally in small group breakouts - to inspire and mentor a young and diverse audience. Seven of the speakers have an affiliation with EVL: Maxine Brown, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Margaret Dolinsky, Copper Giloth, Dana Plepys, Mary Rasmussen and Barbara Sykes. 
For more information about the Symposium, see the flyer below and <a href="http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/events/herstory-digital-innovations-symposium">go to the website.</a> 
<a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2369">More information about the NMF book.</a>

UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory Graduates and Staff Participate in Symposium &ldquo;Herstory: Digital Innovations&rdquo;

OCTOBER 15, 2018 - &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rdquo; is a public exhibition, to be held November 1 - December 15, 2018, that illuminates the largely untold story of Chicago&rsquo;s computer-based art and design legacy, and provides new historical understanding of the artists and organizations that contributed to digital art and technology in the latter half of the 20th Century. The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is prominently featured. The exhibition spans the dates EVL was founded (1973) as a joint effort of the UIC Computer Science (CS) department and the School of Art and Design, through EVL&rsquo;s introduction of the CAVE&trade; automatic virtual environment (1992). 
The &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rdquo; exhibition is part of Terra Foundation&rsquo;s major citywide celebration of the unique and vital role Chicago plays as America&rsquo;s crossroads of creativity and commerce. It is curated by VGA Gallery, an art organization devoted to video games and new media, and will be held at Gallery 400, 400 South Peoria St., Chicago, IL 60607. <a href="https://www.artdesignchicago.org/events/chicago-new-media-1973-1992">More information.</a> 
On November 1, 2018, 2:00-4:00pm, &ldquo;Chicago New Media&rdquo; will host a Symposium, to include EVL co-founders and professors emeritus Tom DeFanti (CS) and Dan Sandin (Art & Design). Reservations are free, but REQUIRED. <a href="https://www.artdesignchicago.org/events/chicago-new-media-symposium">Information.</a> 
On November 1, 2018, 5:00-8:00pm, &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rdquo; will host an opening event. Exhibiting artists and guests from near and far plan to attend. <a href="https://www.artdesignchicago.org/events/chicago-new-media-exhibition-opening">Information.</a> 
On November 7, 2018, 6:00-7:30pm, &ldquo;Chicago New Media&rdquo; is organizing a &ldquo;CAVE2&trade; Demonstration with Dan Sandin&rdquo; to be held at EVL. Sandin will demo his experiential artwork &ldquo;Particle Dreams in Spherical Harmonics&rdquo; in the CAVE2 hybrid-reality environment. Reservations are free, but REQUIRED. <a href="https://www.artdesignchicago.org/events/cave2-demonstration-with-dan-sandin-and-robert-kooima">Information.</a> 
<a href="https://www.artdesignchicago.org/">Information on the Terra Foundation&rsquo;s overall citywide art and design show.</a> 
CAVE and CAVE2 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti, and Mimi Shevitz, Spiral PTL, Video, 1980, In the collections of the Museum of Modern Art&rsquo;s video art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago&rsquo;s Video Data Bank.

UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory to be Featured in &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rdquo; Exhibition

EVL Director Maxine Brown of UIC Computer Science, PI, and co-PIs Andrew Johnson, Robert Kenyon and G. Elisabeta Marai received a three-year NSF MRI award entitled &ldquo;Acquisition of a Composable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning &amp; Visualization (COMPaaS DLV).&rdquo; Senior Personnel are from several COE departments: Tanya Berger-Wolf (CS), Sybil Derrible (CME), Barbara Di Eugenio (CS), Chris Kanich (CS), Alex Leow (BioEng/Psychiatry), Bing Liu (CS), Lance Long (EVL), Farzad Mashayek (MIE), Roberto Paoli (MIE), Luc Renambot (CS), Philip Yu (CS), Milos Zefran (ECE), Xinhua Zhang (CS), and Brian D. Ziebart (CS). 
The COMPaaS DLV system, being designed by EVL staff and faculty, will be based on a new computer architecture (&ldquo;composable infrastructure&rdquo), and will focus on large-scale (Big Data) deep learning and visualization problems. It will be a resource for COE faculty and students to use for research and research training. 
NSF Award ID: CNS-1828265 
Project Period: 10/1/18-9/30/21 
Award Amount: $997,363 
Abstract: 
This project is about acquiring a much-in-demand Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based instrument, to develop a Service Instrument for Deep Learning and Visualization called &ldquo;COMPaaS DLV: COMposable Platform&rdquo;. The project aims to complement available campus computing resources via the campus&rsquo;s research network. It will be able to access local and remote computing and storage facilities funded, including XSEDE, Blue Waters, Deep Learning Instrument and Chameleon. This critical instrumentation will provide a platform to pursue fundamental science and engineering research training in deep learning (data mining and data analytics, computer vision, natural language processing, artificial intelligence), visualization (simulation, rendering, visual analytics, video streaming, image processing), and a combination of deep learning and visualization (e.g., when data is so large that it cannot be easily visualized, then deep learning is used to extract features of interest to be visualized). The instrumentation also enables investigation and contribution to societal issues in disciplines such as anthropology, biology, cybersecurity, data-literacy, fraud detection, healthcare, manufacturing, urban sustainability, and cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous cars). 
Its design utilizes state-of-the-art computer architecture, known as composable architecture, in which the computer&rsquo;s components (traditional processor, GPU, storage, and networking) form a fluid pool of resources, such that different applications with different workflows can be run simultaneously, with each configuring the resources it requires almost instantaneously, at any time. Given composable infrastructure scalability and agility, it is more beneficial than traditional clouds and clusters that are rigid, overprovisioned, and expensive. 
See <a href="https://today.uic.edu/nsf-grant-to-fund-advanced-deep-learning-and-visualization-computing-platform">UIC Today News Release</a> for more information.

An application that will benefit from COMPaaS DLV is “SENSEI Panama,” which applies Deep Learning and Visualization to help anthropologists walk inside their data using virtual reality to study animal behavior.

&ldquo;Acquisition of a Composable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning &amp; Visualization (COMPaaS DLV)&rdquo; Awarded

Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) researchers are awarded a supplemental subaward from the University of Hawaii to contribute to the research on &ldquo;SI2-SSI: SAGEnext: Next Generation Integrated Persistent Visualization and Collaboration Services for Global Cyberinfrastructure&rdquo;. The UIC lead on this project is Maxine Brown, director of EVL. Other UIC participants include Computer Science Research Associate Professor Luc Renambot, Senior Research Programmer Lance Long, and Associate Professor Andy Johnson, Research Director of the EVL. 
This new funding is part of a $527,000 supplement to the overall SAGE2 software project, with PI Jason Leigh at University of Hawaii. The supplement brings the overall project funding to roughly $5.5 million, with roughly 20% at the University of Hawaii and 80% at UIC. 
The overall project is for the SAGE2 software that allows groups to collaborate on large, multi-screen devices such as EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2&trade;. This new supplement is for the research team to consider the cybersecurity of SAGE2, in this era when cybersecurity is of such paramount importance. 
NSF Award ID: OAC-1441963 
Project Period: 10/1/18-9/30/19 
Award Amount: $386,000

The SAGE2 team at UIC/EVL remotely collaborated with the University of Chicago’s Research Computing Center during its fourth annual research computing symposium and exposition, Mind Bytes.

&ldquo;SI2-SSI: SAGEnext: Next Generation Integrated Persistent Visualization and Collaboration Services for Global Cyberinfrastructure&rdquo; Awarded

PhD Candidate John Novak and Prof. Kenyon&rsquo;s paper &ldquo;Effects of User Controlled Speech Rate on Intelligibility in Noisy Environments&rdquo; Interspeech 2018, in Hyderabad, India this September! 
Their paper was one of twelve nominated out of hundreds of accepted papers and over 2,500 submissions for Interspeech 2018 being held in Hyderabad, India September 2-6. Interspeech is the world&rsquo;s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. 
Novak explained their research in more detail. &ldquo;The difficult situation is a type of background noise called
&lsquo;cocktail party noise,&rsquo; which is exactly what it sounds like: multiple people talking in the background of a target voice,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The computer mediated tool was a method of artificially slowing speech without causing distortion, especially without dropping the pitch of the voices. This is something that talkers do naturally [in addition to speaking louder] to help their listeners, but we wanted to put some control in the hands of the listener. We believe this is very important, although very
difficult to achieve.&rdquo; 
<a href="https://www.cs.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/interspeech-2018.pdf">Read the full UIC Computer Science, College of Engineering release.</a>

John Novak&rsquo;s Interspeech 2018 paper nominated for best student award

Committee: 
Dan Schonfeld (Chair/Advisor) 
Daniel J. Sandin 
Andrew E. Johnson 
Hulya Seferoglu 
Mojtaba Soltanalian 
Date & Time: July 20th, 2018, 12:00PM - 2:00PM 
Location: 2068 ERF (Electronic Visualization Laboratory Cyber-Commons) 
Abstract: 
In my proposal thesis, we propose a novel stereoscopic panoramic video generation strategies based on sparsely distributed features from the same object, feature, or area. This proposal can improve stitching quality of single-frame stereoscopic panoramas. Additionally, the consistency of these control points for stitching between the consecutive frame in the temporal domain can ensure the stability of the stitched video and avoid most discontinuities. Our proposed strategies begin with the construction of the commonly identified features set. Each set describes the identical features observed and described from two pairs of adjacent camera views. To remove redundant information and repetitive control points in the first frame, we incorporate human visual importance sensitivity to refine these initially detected feature set, producing more reliable and consistent control points in the latter frames of the video sequence. To remove the outliers and to maintain consistency of the selected consensus set, we also extend the conventional random-sample consensus-based homography estimation to stereo mode. Extensive experiments on synthesized and real-captured data indicate that our proposed framework can get better stitching performance than standard feature-based panoramic video generation pipeline in PanoTools.

Prelim Announcement:  &ldquo;Commonly Identified Feature-based Stitching System for Stereoscopic Panoramic Video Generation&rdquo;

JUNE 6, 2018 - Maxine Brown, Director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) in the department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is a &ldquo;Perennial&rdquo; - the name given to individuals who have had perfect attendance in the 30-year history of the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing (SC) professional conference. One of 17 people with this distinction, Brown is profiled with the other Perennials in the latest SC Blog, titled &ldquo;30 Years - and the Journey Continues: Perspectives from the SC Perennials.&rdquo; 
Though this year marks the official 30th anniversary of the SC conference, 2018 actually marks the Perennials&rsquo; 31st consecutive attendance. The first conference was held in 1988 in Orlando, Florida, with fewer than 1,500 attendees, while this year&rsquo;s event in Dallas, Texas, is expected to attract 11,000 international participants. Over the years, the conference has also broadened its scope, from being supercomputer-centric to being about high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. 
In 1988, Brown had been at UIC for two years and was EVL&rsquo;s Associate Director. She had approached the chair of this fledgling conference to propose they hold a Visualization Theater, showcasing films and videos from researchers who used computer graphics to visualize complex data from supercomputers and instruments; and, when the chair enthusiastically agreed, she organized and hosted it. EVL also had a research booth with collaborator Ellen Sandor of (Art)n Laboratory to display &ldquo;phscolograms&rdquo; (auto-stereo 3D images) of scientific and mathematical images, in order to meet potential collaborators. 
As Brown mentions in the SC Blog article, her fondest memory of early SC conferences was attendee enthusiasm for the CAVE&trade; Virtual Reality Theater, which was invented by EVL and premiered at a different conference in the summer of 1992. SC folks saw it, and requested EVL bring it to SC92 in Minneapolis, and then again to SC93 in Portland - and again to SC95 in San Diego! 
Brown, and EVL, continue to be active in SC conferences, participating in the large research exhibition, most recently demonstrating the lab&rsquo;s SAGE2 collaboration software (a joint project of UIC and University of Hawaii at Manoa), and holding SAGE2 Birds-of-a-Feather sessions to meet with its global user community. 
<a href="https://sc18.supercomputing.org/30-years-and-the-journey-continues-perspectives-from-the-sc-perennials/">Read the SC Blog article.</a>

Perennials gather for a group photo at SC18. (Maxine Brown is on the right.)

Perspectives from the SC Perennials

MAY 24, 2018 - The 1980s and beyond were a pivotal time for the digital arts media in the Midwest, and many of the women who went to school or worked in the Midwest are now chronicled in the new book &ldquo;New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts&rdquo; published by University of Illinois (UI) Press. Foundational events at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced scientific research. 
Interweaving historical research with interviews and full-color illustrations, &ldquo;New Media Futures&rdquo; captures the spirit and contributions of 22 women working within emergent media as diverse as digital games, virtual reality, medicine, supercomputing visualization, and browser-based art. Of the 22 women profiled, nine are PhD/MS/MFA graduates and/or employees of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), a research laboratory that, at the time, was a formal collaboration between the UIC Computer Science department and UIC School of Art and Design. They are: Maxine Brown, Carolina Cruz-Niera, Margaret Dolinsky, Copper Giloth, Lucy Petrovic, Dana Plepys, Mary Rasmussen, Sally Rosenthal and Barbara Sykes. 
This beautiful coffee-table book is edited by long-time EVL collaborators Donna Cox of the UIUC National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Ellen Sandor of (art)n, and Janine Fron, an independent game artist and creative director of (art)n. 
The book can be ordered from the <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y9s9dq86">UIPress website</a> and from <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y95352sf">Amazon.com</a>. 
UIPress is offering a 30% discount through July 15, 2018; go to the UIPress website and use the Promo Code S18UIP. 
UIPress has a special price of $25 for professors who want to use this book in courses; go to the UIPress website and click on &ldquo;Exam and Desk Copies&rdquo; in lower left.

UIC/EVL Featured in new book: New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts

Date & Time: May 8th, 2018, 10am 
Location: 1000 SEO 
Defense committee: 
Andrew Johnson, Chair and Advisor 
G. Elisabeta Marai 
Marco D. Santambrogio, Politecnico di Milano 
Abstract: 
The video game industry is growing year after year, but one of the main problems that most developers have is how to address the right difficulty of a game to satisfy all the players that have different skills and different attitudes toward the game. The most used method to achieve this goal is the performance-based dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA), i.e. modifying the difficulty of the game according to the score of the player. Often, it is not enough to rely only on the score to adjust the game&rsquo;s difficulty. It is important to consider the emotional state of the person because each player is different and can enjoy playing the game in different ways. This is why affective-based DDA methods should be considered to adjust the difficulty of a game. Moreover, thanks to Virtual Reality, people can do physical exercises while playing the game and motivating them by implementing the best DDA method is even more important. In this thesis I first discuss the performance-based and affective-based methods implemented in other games and researches, and the background theory related to flow, arousal, and skin conductance. Then, a Virtual Reality game called ETNA (Entertaining Training Neuro Affective) has been developed in 3 variants, one implementing a performance-based only DDA, one implementing an affective-based DDA only, and one implementing a mixed perfo-affective DDA, with both of them active at the same time. A user study was conducted and the results showed that affective gaming can be implemented in Virtual Reality to improve the overall gaming experience. Moreover, the perfo-affective method was the one which obtained the best results.

MS Thesis Defense: &ldquo;ETNA: a Virtual Reality Game with Affective Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment based on Skin Conductance&rdquo;

Data &Time: Friday, May 4th, 2018, 11 am - 1pm 
Location: Room 3036 ERF 
Defense committee: 
Angus G. Forbes (Chair and Advisor) 
Andrew Johnson 
G. Elisabeta Marai 
Abstract: 
Simulating real-life light in a virtual world is computationally very expensive even in a limited capacity. The quality of images synthesized using computer graphics algorithms for offline rendering used in movies has increased significantly over the years. Real-time applications such as games still rely on non-physics based approximation methods for computing light to meet the time budget to render a frame. The demand for higher quality graphics for more realism in games is high which requires a better approximation technique. Acceleration data structures are used for speed up the rendering process by skipping the unwanted parts of the virtual scene for light calculations. Even with such structures rendering can take a very long time depending on the size of the 3D scene. Recently, deep learning approaches have shown great success in image processing problems. Although neural networks are extensively used for training AI agents and other parts of a game, only a handful of research exists in the 3D rendering space. 
In this work, I explore deep learning based approaches to 1) approximate indirect illumination and soft shadow from image space buffers, and 2) build acceleration structure for faster rendering. I also show evaluations of these networks to get insights about their performance and limitations.

MS Thesis Defense Announcement: &ldquo;Exploring Deep Learning Techniques for Real-time Graphics&rdquo;

Professors J. Aerts (Leuven University, Belgium), N. Gehlenborg (Harvard), G.E. Marai (UIC), and K. Nieselt (University of Tuebingen, Germany) organized a week-long international meeting on &ldquo;Biological Data Visualization: Crossroads&rdquo; at Dagstuhl, at the Leibniz Center for Informatics, Germany, with support from the German federal and local government. The center hosts invitation-only week-long meetings on cutting-edge/current research topics in computer science. 45 invitees from academia, research labs, industry, bioinformatics, biology and computer science attended the event from April 15-20th. 
Motivation 
The rapidly expanding application of experimental high-throughput and high-resolution methods in biology is creating enormous challenges for the visualization of biological data. To meet these challenges, a large variety of expertise from the visualization, bioinformatics and biology domains is required. These encompass visualization and design knowledge, algorithm design, strong implementation skills for analyzing and visualizing big data, statistical knowledge, and specific domain knowledge for different application problems. 
In particular, it is of increasing importance to develop powerful and integrative visualization methods combined with computational analytical methods. Furthermore, because of the growing relevance of visualization for bioinformatics, teaching visualization should also become part of the bioinformatics curriculum. 
With this Dagstuhl Seminar we want to continue the process of community building across the disciplines of biology, bioinformatics, and visualization. We aim to bring together researchers from the different domains to discuss how to continue the BioVis interdisciplinary dialogue, to foster the development of an international community, to discuss the state-of-the-art and identify areas of research that might benefit from joint efforts of all groups involved. 
 Thus during the seminar we envision to address the following topics: 
<ul><li>Challenges in the integrative and visual analysis of high-dimensional and complex medicine data</li>
<li>Visual analysis of stochastic biological networks</li>
<li>Beyond genomes: visual representations of metagenomes and pangenomes</li>
<li>On the BioVis crossroads: Continued collaborations between the visualization and bioinformatics communities</li>
<li>Designing a curriculum for teaching visualization in bioinformatics</li></ul> 
While emphasis of topics is put on different, highly challenging problems in biology, it is also envisioned to identify newly needed visualization paradigms and developments that can help to solve these challenges. Thus further topics may be added, depending on the specific interest of the participants. 
 As one outcome of the seminar, we plan to summarize the results in a white paper, in which the computational, the visualization and the application domain aspects are collected and published to not only ensure that a broad audience is reached but also that our crossroads journey may continue.

Prof. Marai co-organizes Dagstuhl meeting on visualization of biological data

Tom Cicero 
March 20, 2018 
- - - - - - - - - - 
EDITOR&rsquo;S NOTE: One of the nine University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) students is Arthur Nishimoto, a Computer Science PhD student and a Research Assistant in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory. His advisor is Andy Johnson, CS Associate Professor and EVL Director of Research. 
- - - - - - - - - - 
UIC had the largest number of winners, with 11 students being honored at the Illinois Technology Foundation (ITF) 11th Annual &ldquo;Fifty for the Future&rdquo; (F4F) Awards, held March 15, 2018 at Robert Morris University in Chicago. The award honors 50 local college students and 10 local high school students for their aspirations in the field of technology along with their academic achievements, and builds awareness of tomorrow&rsquo;'s workforce talent for the Illinois technology ecosystem. 
The UIC College of Engineering (COE) was represented by nine PhD Computer Science Department students (see photo below for Computer Science honorees), as well as one COE Electrical and Computer Engineering Department student and one College of Business&rsquo;s Management Information Systems Department&rsquo;s student. 
<a href="https://www.cs.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/50-for-future3.pdf ">Read the entire article.</a>

UIC CS PhD students honored at the ITF 11th annual &ldquo;Fifty for the Future&rdquo;awards. Left to right: Arthur Nishimoto, David Randolph, Sara Amini, Mehrdad Alizadeh, Sepideh Roghanchi, Yiji Zhang, Shuai Wang, Mohammad Taha Khan, Nasim Mobasheri.

Nine UIC CS students honored at ITF &ldquo;Fifty for the Future&rdquo; Awards

The University of Illinois System&rsquo;s YouTube channel posted the video &ldquo;Altogether Extraordinary&rdquo; to promote its &ldquo;one system, three universities, endless possibilities&rdquo; in November 2017, as part of the University&rsquo;s Ignite campaign. The video was created by the U of I President&rsquo;s Office and features some of the areas of excellence that its three campuses have to offer. 
Three segments highlighting the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) briefly feature the Computer Science department&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), which is part of the UIC College of Engineering. The segments show Computer Science PhD graduate student Arthur Nishimoto and undergraduate student Isabel Lindmae in EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2 Hybrid Reality Environment, navigating through connectome data provided by the UIC Psychiatry department. 
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MDHMTl0gMcM" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Screen image from the YouTube video &ldquo;Altogether Extraordinary&rdquo; by the University of Illinois System

U of I System&rsquo;s &ldquo;Altogether Extraordinary&rdquo; Video Highlights UIC and EVL

Committee: 
G. Elisabeta Marai (Chair) 
Robert Kenyon 
Andrew Johnson 
Angus Forbes (University of California, Santa Cruz) 
Tamara Munzner (University of British Columbia) 
Date & Time: Feb 5th, 2018, 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm 
Location: 2036 ERF (Electronic Visualization Laboratory CAVE2) 
Abstract: 
Recent neuroscience research indicates that cognitive operations are performed not by individual brain regions working in isolation, but by networks that consist of several discrete brain regions. These discrete brain regions act in synchrony and share functional connectivity. The study of brain networks contains both non-spatial data - dynamic functional connections within the brain - and spatial data - 2D/3D medical scans of the brain. To further understand the relationships between dynamic functional connectivities and physical structures of the brain, researchers analyze dynamic brain networks over multiple experiments or with different models. Similarly, bioinformatics research also contains problems about dynamic biological networks that require the integration of spatial and nonspatial data and multi-run comparison. Due to the complexity of biological data that can be collected, modeled and analyzed thanks to technological and algorithmic advancements, the difficulty in studying biological networks has increased over the last decades. Visualization provides an efficient way to help biologists understand, communicate, and gain insight into their biological data through visual exploration and analysis. 
In this dissertation, I propose a set of visual approaches for the analysis of ensemble dynamic biological networks. This set of approaches took shape through the development of multiple prototype visual analytics tools which were aimed to solve complex problems in multiple biological subdomains. The steering of the approach was supported through an in-depth understanding of both the encompassing biological domains and problem space, as well through a survey of existing visual approaches helping to generalize the paradigms used when confronting these problems and the complexity of their data.

Events - 2018

Reader reviews “Chicago New Media 1973-1992“ exhibition featuring UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory

UIC Computer Science/EVL Marai Developing Computer Programs to Aid Cancer Patients

SAVE THE DATE: SAGE2 10th Annual International SC BOF @ SC18 - Tuesday, November 13, 12:15 - 1:15pm

SAGE2 @ SC18: Demonstrations, Birds of a Feather, and SCinet Participation

UIC CS/EVL Alumna Trina Roy Receives Engineering Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award

UIC CS/EVL Lance Long Receives UIC Award of Merit

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