EVL alumnus Marco Cavallo was awarded with the UIC College of Engineering Outstanding Young Achievement Award in Computer Science for 2020. The award identifies alumni who, through their achievement in their field of engineering, have significantly enhanced the industry and who inspire and help to instill a sense of pride among the alumni, students, faculty and staff of UIC. Marco is among the 15 alumni award honorees in engineering and computer science who have used their UIC education to establish rewarding, productive, and high-impact careers.<bra> 
Marco currently works as a senior research engineer in Apple&rsquo;s technology development group, where he is in charge of creating data visualization tools and machine learning infrastructure to foster the development of new computer vision algorithms for augmented reality. 
He graduated with a dual master&rsquo;s degree in computer science and engineering from Politecnico di Milano in Italy and the University of Illinois Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on augmented reality while working at UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory. 
Congratulations Marco! 
See the award winner video on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oskk1icFSvE&feature=youtu.be">YouTube</a>.

EVL and UIC Computer Science Alumnus Marco Cavallo Honored with Outstanding Young Achievement Award

VGA Zine, a digital publication by the team at Video Game Art Gallery features an online VR exhibition in its <a href="https://www.videogameartgallery.com/oasis">Issue V: December 2020.</a> &ldquo;OASIS: A Collaborative Virtual Reality Design Exhibition Exploring the Post-Capitalist Mall&rdquo; exhibition features student work from EVL faculty, Design professor Daria Tsoupikova&rsquo;s DES 520 Graduate Seminar at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Design. OASIS is a collaborative virtual reality project, which examines the themes of destruction, growth, sustainability and mindfulness using the metaphor of a desolated shopping mall. Ten interactive spaces were developed to encourage participants&rsquo; engagement within a virtual environment and to alleviate the impact of social isolation during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. 
This is an ongoing collaboration at the University of Illinois at Chicago involving a team of 10 designers from Industrial Design and Graphic Design programs in the integrated multidimensional modes of creative production. This project was developed in remote collaboration using Unity game engine and collaboration tools enabling virtual teamwork and helped designers mitigate issues related to isolation during coronavirus pandemic. 
VGA Gallery is generously supported by the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, individuals, and private and corporate foundations.

The Arboretum

OASIS: A Collaborative Virtual Reality Design Exhibition Exploring the Post-Capitalist Mall

For the Supercomputing (SC20) Conference this year, a research community partnership was formed to design an international networking testbed using existing facilities, with several international extensions. Demonstrations and experiments were conducted prior to the conference with results discussed during a SC20 virtual forum. &ldquo;The Forum For Experiments and Demonstrations Showcasing Innovations In Large-Scale, Data-Intensive-Science Networking&rdquo; was organized by Research Consortium for Data-Intensive Science Networking to communicate: a) the motivation behind these experiments and demonstrations, b) their design, c) technologies used, d) results and e) future research in these areas. 
EVL senior research programmer, Lance Long participated to discuss EVL&rsquo;s research in Composable Infrastructure, specifically MRI: Acquisition of a Composable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning & Visualization (COMPaaS DLV) funded under NSF Award #CNS-1828265. Items discussed included the benefits of composable infrastructure, implementation for deep learning in an academic research environment, operating systems, dynamic workflows, orchestration middleware, current use cases and future work. 
Other participants included: Ciena Research Lab, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Naval Research Laboratory, iCAIR/Northwestern, StarLight, UCSD, FNAL, CalTech, SURFnet.

Composable Infrastructure for Data Science

Lance Long Presents EVL&rsquo;s Composable Infrastructure Research at SC20

After six years at the helm as EVL director and twenty-six years as an associate director, Maxine Brown retires effective October 1, 2020. Over the years, Maxine has led and been instrumental in EVL&rsquo;s interdisciplinary research and development specializing in collaborative visualization, virtual reality, visual data science, and advanced computing and networking infrastructure. 
Most notable, during Maxine&rsquo;s tenure as director, EVL invented the CAVE2&trade; hybrid-reality environment, developed the Continuum Smart Environment and collaborative middle-ware SAGE&trade; scalable adaptive graphics environment, as well as the SAGE2&trade; scalable amplified group environment. In collaboration with Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, Maxine managed the EVL team to create STAR TAP (1997), Ithe research and education network connection facility for international traffic located in downtown Chicago. STAR TAP was followed by StarLight (2001), which is still the largest research and engineering advanced networking facility in the world. 
Maxine&rsquo;s contributions to EVL are numerous and significant. She will be sorely missed by faculty, staff, students and many colleagues worldwide. Andrew Johnson, EVL director of research and professor of Computer Science assumes the role of EVL&rsquo;s interim director. 
<a href="https://engineering.uic.edu/news-stories/maxine-brown-director-of-uics-electronic-visualization-laboratory-retires-after-34-years/">Read the complete College of Engineering article.</a>

Maxine Brown EVL Director Retires

October 19, 2020 - - Fabio Miranda joins the EVL faculty as an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science. Miranda interests include developing techniques that allow for the interactive visual analysis of large-scale data, combining methods from visualization, data management, machine learning, and computer graphics. Of particular concern is how visual data analytics can help address different problems cities face by integrating data on different resolutions and from different sources. 
Miranda&rsquo;s research in data science, human-computer interaction and visualization include: visual data analysis, data structures and indexing techniques for big data visualization, urban analytics, harnessing data sets of different types (images, land use information, 3D building geometry, etc.) to address concrete city problems, and machine learning. He has worked closely with domain experts from different fields, from urban planning to occupational therapy, and the outcome of these collaborations include not only research published in leading visualization, database, HCI, and AI venues, but also systems that were made available to experts in academia, industry, and government agencies. 
Miranda received his Ph.D. from New York University (2018).

Fabio Miranda Joins EVL Faculty

UIC Computer Science Professors Andy Johnson (PI) and Barbara Di Eugenio (co-PI) have been awarded a $333,000 NSF grant entitled &ldquo;CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Articulate+ - A Conversational Interface for Democratizing Visual Analysis&rdquo; project period October 2020 to September 2022. Dr. Moira Zellner, now of Northeastern University will also participate as co-PI on this grant. This project is part of a larger overall award of $500,000 that also includes Jason Leigh at University of Hawaii at Manoa. 
&ldquo;Articulate+&rdquo; continues EVL&rsquo; research in Natural Language Processing and Visualization also sponsored by NSF for the last 5+ years. See <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2522">Articulate+ - A Conversational Interface for Democratizing Visual Analysis</a> for more information on this project. 
NSF Award Number (FAIN): 2007257

NSF Grant &ldquo;CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Articulate+&rdquo; Awarded

October 1 - - EVL Director of Research Andrew Johnson has been named Interim Director of EVL following Maxine Brown&rsquo;s retirement from UIC. Johnson now assumes the responsibility of heading EVL - overseeing EVL&rsquo;s overall mission in education, research, development, and technology transfer. 
For over 23 years, Johnson has been a valued EVL faculty member (Professor of Computer Science) and researcher who has focused upon interaction and collaboration using advanced visualization displays and the application of those displays to enhance discovery and learning. 
His areas of expertise include visualization, virtual and augmented reality, natural language processing, visual analytics, and high-performance networking. 
Over the years, Johnson has been instrumental in the development of EVL instrumentation and systems, including the Continuum smart environment, CAVE2&trade;, LambdaVision high-resolution tiled displays, LambdaTable tabletop touch system, GeoWall portable geoscience display environment, PARIS augmented reality and ImmersaDesk virtual reality systems. He has overseen the development of numerous visualization and virtual reality applications across diverse domain disciplines from science and engineering to the humanities and art. Johnson is a highly regarded mentor and educator to EVL&rsquo;s graduate students and undergraduates alike. 
Johnson retains his position as Director of Research while leading EVL&rsquo;s future initiatives and innovations as Interim Director.

Andrew Johnson Named Interim Director, EVL

EVL alumna (MFA 2004) Brenda Lopez Silva is among four UIC faculty members who have been selected as Fulbright scholars for 2020-21. They are among 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the flagship international educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government. 
Brenda López Silva, a research and development specialist with the Learning Sciences Research Institute at UIC, will use her Fulbright award to teach in Portugal, where she will lead a course on problem-based learning for storytelling with the design of virtual reality environments. She is scheduled to teach at the Polytechnical Institute of Lisbon beginning in March 2021. 
Join us in congratulating Brenda on this well-deserved recognition! 
See the full article in <a href="https://today.uic.edu/four-uic-scholars-earn-fulbright-awards-for-research-teaching?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today%2B09.29.20">UIC Today.</a>

EVL Alumna Brenda López Silva Earns Fulbright Award for Research, Teaching

EVL faculty and Computer Science associate professor G. Elisabeta Marai (MPI) along with H. Shatkay (MPI) at the University of Delaware have been awarded supplemental funding for COVID-19 related research to their NIH research project entitled &ldquo;Uncovering Clinical Evidence in COVID-19 Publications: An Integrated Search via Text &amp; Images&rdquo;. This supplement expands the work done under current R01 funding &ldquo;Incorporating Image-based Features into Biomedical Document Classification&rdquo;, to support discovery within the CORD-19 collection -- a large, continually updated collection of more than 60,000 scientific articles pertaining to COVID-19. This supplement will create a comprehensive platform for retrieving and displaying well-focused, need-targeted medical information within COVID-19 biomedical publications. Our approach is unique compared to other text-mining methods because it leverages the image content in the dataset. 
Funding: NIH R01 NLM Covid-19 supplement to Parent Grant: 1R01LM012527 (&ldquo;Incorporating Image-based Features into Biomedical Document Classification&rdquo;)

EVL Faculty G.E. Marai Awarded NIH COVID-19 Supplement

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Professional University of Information and Management for Innovation (iU) announces a partnership with 7 international universities, including the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). More specifically, Osamu Kamatani, Dean of iU&rsquo;s Faculty of Information and Management for Innovation, previously worked for Japan&rsquo;s NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, which had a 20-year research collaboration with UIC/EVL focused on advanced networking and collaboration. NTT was an early adopter of EVL&rsquo;s SAGE visualization and collaboration software and was involved in EVL-related advanced networking projects. iU will adopt SAGE2 and SAGE3, and will participate in the Global Research Platform (GRP), which is being organized by UIC/EVL, University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Northwestern University. The MOU formalizes and strengthens iU&rsquo;s collaborations with UIC/EVL. 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
iU of Japan announces partnership with 7 international universities 
Friday, August 21, 2020 - The Professional University of Information and Management for Innovation (&ldquo;iU&rdquo;) commenced its first year of operation on April 1st 2020, and has now reached comprehensive partnership agreements with the following seven global prominent schools: The University of California, San Diego (UCSD); The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); The University of Sheffield; Raffles University Malaysia; The National University of Singapore; Nikola Tesla Graduate School in the U.K.; and the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA), Ondo State, Nigeria, with ongoing efforts for additional international collaborations. 
iU will continue to actively collaborate with major universities in Japan and abroad, with the aim to realize a &ldquo;Global University Network,"&rdquo; representing an intellectual hub for the IT and business industries centered around iU. 
Specifically, in addition to the exchange of students and faculty members and the implementation of joint research, the objectives are as follows: 
　1. A &ldquo;passport&rdquo; system that allows classes at partner universities and recognition of course credits 
　2. Joint development for research of new ventures and new products within a joint strategic special zone 
　3. Establishment of a special visa zone for international students 
　4. International collaborative research on the fields of eSports, super education, super sports, anime, otaku, etc. 
　5. Entrepreneurship support and Human Capital development 
The &ldquo;Global University Network&rdquo; advocated by iU, includes alliances with overseas universities. Through collaboration with each institution, iU will strive to develop and promote international joint lectures, joint experiments, implementation of various IT technologies, and joint research through exchanges of students and faculty from partner universities. iU will also work closely with prominent companies in Japan and overseas that support these activities. 
<a href="https://www.i-u.ac.jp/news/detail.php?id=199">Read the entire press release.</a> 
For Further Information, please contact: 
PR division 
Professional University of Information and Management for Innovation 
TEL: +81356551555 E-mail: <a href="mailto:info@i-u.ac.jp">info@i-u.ac.jp</a> 
For UIC/EVL collaboration information, contact Maxine Brown: <a href="mailto:maxine@uic.edu">maxine@uic.edu</a>

iU of Japan announces partnership with 7 international universities

Researchers at University of Hawai&rsquo;i at Mānoa, University of Illinois Chicago, and Virginia Tech were awarded a $5 million National Science Foundation grant to synergize two complementary technologies - large-scale data visualization and artificial intelligence - to create the Smart Amplified Group Environment (SAGE3) open-source software. 
SAGE, soon to be on its third iteration as SAGE3, is the most widely used big-data visualization and collaboration software in the world. 
SAGE and SAGE2 are software to enable data-rich collaboration on high-resolution display walls. SAGE2 moved SAGE into cloud computing and SAGE3 ushers in the inclusion of artificial intelligence. 
Principal investigator Jason Leigh is a computer and information science professor at University of Hawai&rsquo;i at Mānoa and the inventor of SAGE. SAGE is software to enable teams of collaborators to work together with data in the form of data visualizations. 
SAGE3&rsquo;s novel interactive artificial intelligence methods will learn from human analytic activity and use the knowledge gained to assist people in synthesizing relevant data connections that lead to new hypotheses and findings, explained Chris North, a professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and a co-principal investigator. 
Scientists analyzing their data in SAGE3 will collaborate with each other and with artificial intelligence through large interactive visualization spaces, such as multi-monitor workstations, tiled display walls, and virtual reality headsets. 
Leigh said the applications for the SAGE3 technology are endless. &ldquo;It will be tremendously useful to enable evidence-based response during natural disasters and events like the current COVID-19 pandemic,&rdquo; Leigh said. 
He created SAGE in collaboration with researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago 16 years ago. They&rsquo;ve since further developed SAGE and SAGE2 with 15 years of research funding by the National Science Foundation. 
&ldquo;This new funding provides us with an opportunity to take SAGE to the next level - providing smart end-user services to amplify users&rsquo; productivity, making commercial and open-source artificial intelligence solutions available that can autonomously and transparently analyze data while continually learning and improving through user interactions,&rdquo; said Maxine Brown, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. Brown has been involved with SAGE since its inception. 
&ldquo;SAGE3 also supports resource orchestration services that integrates these smart services with applications, workflows, and visualizations and collaboration services, and makes it easy for users to connect to local and remote display walls and computational systems and to securely run reproducible work models,&rdquo; explained Luc Renambot, Electronic Visualization Laboratory associate research professor and co-architect with Leigh of the SAGE software since its inception. 
&ldquo;As a &rsquo;co-pilot&rsquo; to individuals or teams who are trying to examine large datasets, SAGE3 will provide a discovery pathway from data sources to human insights and knowledge, which is currently a gap in the e-Science pipeline that the National Science Foundation has called the &rsquo;&ldquo;missing middle,&rsquo;&rdquo; said Mahdi Belcaid, assistant professor at University of Hawai&rsquo;i at Mānoa and the artificial intelligence co-principal investigator on the project. 
According to the researchers, SAGE3 will make artificial intelligence technologies broadly accessible, not just a privilege for the technically savvy. North said the project will conduct user-centered design research studies to ensure usability of this novel combination of data visualization and artificial intelligence in SAGE3. 
Through seed funds provided by Virginia Tech&rsquo;s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Hawai&rsquo;i Data Science Institute, North had the opportunity to work side-by-side with Leigh in the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications at the University of Hawai&rsquo;i during the spring 2020 semester. This in-person exchange, and numerous video-teleconferences with the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, was essential to helping plan and initiate the five-year SAGE3 collaboration, noted North. SAGE3 will serve the Institute&rsquo;s missions of bringing together computer scientists, domain scientists, engineers, artists, and designers to tackle some of the world&rsquo;s most complex challenges. 
The user base goes well beyond scientists. Leigh said he sees SAGE3 helping teachers use and share artificial intelligence concepts to future generations of students. And for those who work in creative media, such as filmmakers and video game designers, Leigh envisions it being a highly visual tool to brainstorm new ideas and analyze all forms of digital media to see how they relate to each other, which ones were most popular and why. 
Written by Jenise L. Jacques, Virginia Tech 
For further information or queries, contact Maxine Brown <a href="mailto:maxine@uic.edu">maxine@uic.edu</a>. 
Also, see <a href="https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/data-visualization-gets-artificial-intelligence-boost-with-5-million-nsf-grant/">UIC&rsquo;s Computer Science News Story</a>.

An example of SAGE2 at work, using cloud-based and web-browser technologies in order to enhance data intensive co-located and remote collaboration.

Announcing SAGE3: Data visualization gets artificial intelligence boost with $5 million NSF grant

EVL PhD candidate Juan Trelles Trabucco has been recognized among the UIC Computer Science Department&rsquo;s 2020 Outstanding Graduate TAs. This award typically recognizes graduate TAs for their work over an entire year, but given Juan&rsquo;s stellar performance during the spring semester, and especially during the pandemic, Juan is being duly recognized for his contributions to courses CS426 and CS529. 
&ldquo;Juan&rsquo;s TA performance in CS426 was beyond spectacular. The course had 60 students enrolled and made use of a variety of technologies. Yet with Juan&rsquo;s help, we had a flawless transition to online teaching, when the pandemic lockout was instituted.&rdquo; 
CS associate professor Elisabeta Marai was the instructor for both courses. CS426: Video Game Design and Implementation covers tools and techniques for the design and implementation of 3D interactive video games. CS529: Visual Data Science is an introduction to key design principles and techniques for interactively visualizing and analyzing data in data science. 
In addition, to the usual TA assignments of tutoring students, grading papers, etc. assisting in the transition of these courses to an online virtual platform posed additional challenges, and makes Juan truly deserving of this recognition. 
Please join us in congratulating Juan!

EVL PhD Candidate Juan Trelles Trabucco Receives CS 2020 Outstanding TA Award

Good Gamer 
Pearl Shin <a href="https://emails.uofi.uic.edu/newsletter/2432950.html">(UIC Magazine, Spring 2020)</a> Lindsay Grace, MFA &rsquo;09 - Knight Chair of Interactive Media at the University of Miami (Fla.) School of Communication - has turned his passion for video games into a career, and in the process, created innovative games with a positive social impact. 
WHAT LED YOU TO GAME DESIGN? 
I had an off-again/on-again romance with games until I became a web developer. Then I really started to see the long-term potential for games to offer positive social impact and engagement. 
HOW DID YOUR TIME AT UIC CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR WORK? 
I took my first game course at UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Lab. I wasn&rsquo;t the best student, but I was eager, and I found UIC to be an invigorating environment, especially when you mixed arts-focused students and faculty with engineers and computer scientists, as EVL did. 
IN WHAT WAYS DO YOU THINK GAMES HAVE A SOCIETAL IMPACT? 
Play helps us learn; it helps us be creative and serves many other functions. Games help shape our play, by giving us new challenges and frameworks. So, when we create educational games, we tap into the innate propensities of play to produce social good. I find it rewarding when teaching opens whole new perspectives for my students - the moment they go from media consumers to producers and critics. They can peek behind the curtain, understand how things work and identify how they can be improved.

Lindsay Grace, EVL alumnus

EVL Alumnus Lindsay Grace Profiled in the UIC Magazine Spring 2020 Edition

JUNE 3, 2020 - While medical personnel and engineers apply their brains to finding cures and vaccines for COVID-19, it&rsquo;s computers that apply their brawn to crunch the numbers and run the simulations that empower researchers&rsquo; insights and discoveries. Given the computing power available at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the Lab recently began providing access to its excess computing capacity to the Folding@home (FAH) project, a crowd-sourced, distributed &ldquo;supercomputer&rdquo; that supports open-science research at labs and startups studying protein folding in structure-based drug design. To date, the FAH website lists &rsquo;Team EVL&rsquo; in the Top 400 of over 250,000 teams (groups of individuals and/or institutions) that support this effort with resources. 
Viruses have proteins that they use to suppress our immune systems and reproduce themselves, so to design therapeutics to stop them, researchers need to understand how these viral proteins work. FAH specializes in computer simulations of protein folding, so researchers can see and understand proteins&rsquo; moving parts, thereby gaining more insight than viewing a static snapshot of a protein&rsquo;s shape. 
With the recent rush to discover COVID-19 treatment therapies, FAH suddenly went from 30,000 users running software applications in February to 400,000 in March - and another 300,000 users in April. FAH&rsquo;s compute engines and data servers became overloaded until March, when chip manufacturer Nvidia began donating processing power and emailing and tweeting others to participate. 
According to an article in the Ars Technica e-zine, by April, FAH&rsquo;s computer processing (CPU) and graphical processing (GPU) power zoomed to a peak performance of 1.5 ExaFLOPs, making it more than seven times faster than the world&rsquo;s fastest supercomputer, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. FAH partitions massive application and simulation codes into very small jobs that it distributes to individual computers for execution. For individuals and/or teams providing resources, they can specify whether a distributed application runs when their PC is idle or runs in background mode when their PC is being used. 
As of June 3, 2020, &rsquo;Team EVL&rsquo; ranked 337 out of over 253,786 teams who were providing resources and completed over 23,678 work units (the time needed to finish a particular process, which varies based on the algorithms being run). Team EVL was conceived by Arthur Nishimoto, a UIC Computer Science PhD student and EVL research assistant, who initially provided FAH with access to his personal computer at home. However, as most people are now working on their laptops from home to reduce the spread of the disease, EVL&rsquo;s large computer systems have been under-utilized. So, Nishimoto approached EVL research staff member Lance Long about providing FAH with access to the Lab&rsquo;s CAVE2 cluster and COMPaaS Deep Learning & Visualization system. Long agreed, enabling EVL to play a small but significant role in helping scientists tackle the coronavirus while we shelter at home. It&rsquo;s not the first time Long has supported citizen science projects; he also provides access to EVL computing resources to NSF/DOE Open Science Grid researchers to process and analyze data from NSF&rsquo;s IceCube Neutrino Observatory located in Antarctica - but that is another story! 
Life after COVID-19? FAH started almost 20 years ago, but continues today, dedicated to understanding protein folding, the diseases that result from protein misfolding and aggregation (which include Alzheimer&rsquo;s, Huntington&rsquo;s, cystic fibrosis, BSE [Mad Cow disease], an inherited form of emphysema, and many cancers), and novel computational ways to develop new drugs in general. It is is reliant on the simulations run on volunteers&rsquo; personal computers, so a cause EVL will most likely continue to support. 
By <a href="mailto:maxine@uic.edu">Maxine Brown</a>, UIC/EVL 
# # # # 
REFERENCES 
Folding@home: <a href="https://foldingathome.org/">https://foldingathome.org/</a> 
Folding@home Team Statistics: <a href="https://foldingathome.org/statistics/">https://foldingathome.org/statistics/</a> 
Folding@home EVL Team Statistics: <a href="https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/263148">https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/263148</a> 
Nvidia: <a href="https://ngc.nvidia.com/catalog/containers/hpc:foldingathome:fah-gpu?ncid=em-targ-21378">https://ngc.nvidia.com/catalog/containers/hpc:foldingathome:fah-gpu?ncid=em-targ-21378</a> 
Wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home</a> 
Andy Patrizio, &ldquo;The coronavirus pandemic turned Folding@Home into an exaFLOP supercomputer,&rdquo; Ars Technika, April 14, 2020, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-revived-a-distributed-computing-project-and-made-history/">https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-revived-a-distributed-computing-project-and-made-history/</a>

Image courtesy Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Coronavirus image

UIC EVL Supports Open-Science Folding@home COVID-19 Research with Computing Resources

EVL research experience undergraduate (REU) employee and Electrical Computer Engineering (ECE) student Zhongyi Chen has contributed to the development of an electronic method for tracking hospital workers exposed to patients with COVID-19 and at high risk of contracting the disease themselves. The new system replaces a manual method implemented at UI Health that requires sign-in at a patient&rsquo;s room - scanned and manually entered into a database by hospital personnel. 
Under the supervision of ECE associate professor Alan Feinerman, Chen began working on pairing Raspberry Pi&rsquo;s with thousands of radio frequency identification readers (RFIDs) already installed in the hospital to track employee movements. Chen&rsquo;s design includes 22 trackers consisting of one RF reader and one Raspberry Pi for each room, which can ping the hospital server, store data and provide a visual signal for room entry with a time/date stamp and employee&rsquo;s name upon entry. 
This new system has yet to be rolled-out at UI Health, but implementation is imminent. Other applications might include using the devices to track students, employees, and faculty as UIC&rsquo;s campus is reopened. 
Read the full article in <a href="https://engineering.uic.edu/about/coe-news/rise/fall-2020/news-briefs-fall-2020/">UIC News Briefs (Fall 2020)</a> and <a href="https://engineering.uic.edu/news-stories/ece-student-zhongyi-chen-pivots-from-teaching-arduino-workshops-to-developing-tool-to-track-covid-19-exposure/">College of Engineering News (Andrea Poet, May 22, 2020)</a>.

Zhongyi Chen programs an RF reader for UI Health

EVL Undergraduate Computer Specialist and ECE Student Zhongyi Chen Helps Develop COVID-19 Tracking Tool

Maxine Brown (UIC PI), Andrew Johnson (UIC co-PI), Luc Renambot (UIC co-PI) 
Jason Leigh (University of Hawaii Manoa PI) Christopher North (Virginia Polytechnic PI) 
NSF Award Number: 2003800 
Award Period of Performance: 05/15/2020 - 04/30/2025 
Total Amount Obligated: $2,250,000 
UIC Computer Science Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) Director Maxine Brown, PI, co-PIs UIC CS Professor Andy Johnson and UIC CS Research Associate Professor Luc Renambot, and Senior Personnel EVL Senior Research Programmer Lance Long are awarded a $2.25 million dollar National Science Foundation grant entitled &ldquo;Collaborative Research: CSSI Frameworks: SAGE3: Smart Amplified Group Environment for Harnessing the Data Revolution.&rdquo; The grant runs from May 2020 to April 2025. It&rsquo;s part of an overall $5 million project, that also includes a team from University of Hawaii Manoa led by Jason Leigh and a team from Virginia Polytechnic led by Christopher North. 
ABSTRACT 
The Big Data revolution necessitates the use of sophisticated tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Visualization to harness the sheer volume, velocity and variety of datasets that are becoming the norm. However, it is the research community that must make sense of the data being amassed, so cyberinfrastructure must extend to people. SAGE3 (Smart Amplified Group Environment) puts the &ldquo;human in the loop&rdquo; by providing scientists with an intuitive framework that integrates state-of-the-art AI technologies with applications, workflows, smart visualizations and collaboration services to help them access, share, explore and analyze their data, come to conclusions, and make decisions with greater speed, accuracy, comprehension and confidence. 
SAGE3 builds upon the NSF-funded first-generation SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) and second-generation SAGE2 (Scalable Amplified Group Environment), which are today&rsquo;s de facto operating systems to manage Big Data on tiled display walls. Its development focuses on two fundamental components: AI-enhanced &ldquo;smart&rdquo; services and advanced computing resource orchestration to support reproducible work models for secure collaborative work. SAGE3 amplifies user productivity, providing them with commercially available and open-source AI solutions, which autonomously and transparently analyze data while continually learning and improving through user interactions. SAGE3 makes AI technologies broadly accessible, not just a privilege for the technically savvy. SAGE3 further democratizes AI by using Data Visualization to help interpret and explain AI models so users better understand how AI came to its decisions, which engenders user trust and can help identify potentially prejudiced or biased models. 
SAGE3 augments every step of the scientific discovery enterprise - from quickly summarizing large data, to finding trends and similarities or anomalies among one or more linked datasets, to communicating findings to scientists, public policy and government officials, and the general public, to educating the next-generation workforce. Ultimately, it is the scientists and future scientists who must Harness the Big Data revolution to solve the nation&rsquo;s grand challenge problems that will benefit society as a whole - from studying the diversity of life on Earth, to understanding the Earth and its systems from satellite imagery of its poles, to developing response scenarios for natural disasters such as landslides and pandemics that impact the citizens and economies of the world.

UIC Computer Science/EVL awarded $2.25 Million from NSF for SAGE3

In October 2018, the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) received an equipment grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF #1828265) for a GPU-based system for College of Engineering research and education. Since that time, EVL staff has surveyed vendors, analyzed UIC faculty&rsquo;s application requirements, and then designed, purchased, received and installed its GPU-based system from Liqid. EVL refers to its new computing system as Composable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning & Visualization (COMPaaS DLV). 
<a href="https://www.liqid.com/">Liqid</a> is a start-up company specializing in systems integration (and has major industrial partners such as Dell, Intel, Nvidia and Mellanox), who currently sells its next-generation &ldquo;composable infrastructure&rdquo; computer systems primarily to data centers. Working with UIC faculty, it became apparent that this advanced architecture could address their diverse application requirements as their data moves through the computational pipeline (e.g., data gathering, filtering, computing, storing). 
EVL worked with Liqid to educate them about how its product could be tailored to meet the needs of the academic research market, helping them realize that science and engineering research is a potential market for their product. Working together, Liqid has configured a system to suit the needs of EVL&rsquo;s research focus. 
Liqid has published a <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2495">case study, &ldquo;UIC Utilizes Liqid Composable Infrastructure for Uneven Applications in Scientific Research&rdquo;</a> that explores EVL&rsquo;s use of COMPaaS DLV.

EVL&rsquo;s COMPaaS DLV system

Liqid publishes a case study on how EVL is using their GPU-based system COMPaaS DLV

Ph.D. Student: Abeer Alsaiari 
Committee: 
Prof. Andrew Johnson, Chair and Advisor 
Prof. Joseph Michaelis 
Prof. Wei Tang 
Prof. Steve Jones (Department of Communication) 
Prof. Khairi Reda (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) 
Date: Monday, March 9th 
Time: 1:30 pm 
Location: ERF 3036 
Abstract: 
There is a steadily growing interest in leveraging ecosystems of digital devices that go beyond a single desktop for visual data analysis and exploration. This new thrust of multi-device interfaces supports new models for complex collaboration scenarios, and have great potential to support analysts in their data analysis by utilizing each device&rsquo;s capabilities. However, there are some challenges inherently associated with visual data analysis in multi-device environments (MDE). As the analytical process is underway, analytical components become scattered among different devices and displays. Building a mental model of the analysis flow can render the analytical process more challenging as it would be difficult to track many visualizations and therefore difficult for analysts to keep track of all the prior analyses. The primary goal of my thesis research is to understand the characterization of the analysis process, with regard to the use and formation around devices, and to support the design with visualization of the search space, which will allow users to efficiently explore their data.

Preliminary Examination Announcement: &ldquo;Supporting Collaborative Visual Data Analysis in Multi-device Environment&rdquo;

After graduating with his bachelor&rsquo;s degree in astrophysics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ryan Nishimoto began his pursuit of blending his interest in astrophysics and computer science. He liked the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) and heard good things about the computer science graduate program. 
Upon acceptance into the graduate program, Ryan selected a coursework-only option for his degree. This afforded him the opportunity to participate in a number of project-based classes through EVL. One project, he collaborated with Adler Planetarium astronomer Aaron Gellar, and astronomer Mark SubbaRao, who also directs Adler&rsquo;s Space Visualization Laboratory, on virtual reality and displays to be used as educational tools in the museum. In addition, Ryan received a Research Assistantship under Professor Andy Johnson to work on developing virtual reality applications for patient rehabilitation with the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. 
These experiences helped round out Ryan&rsquo;s graduate education for which upon graduating with his master&rsquo;s degree in Computer Science, he will begin a yearlong rotational program with Optum Pharma Inc., a consultancy company specializing in pharmaceuticals and healthcare insurance. 
<a href="https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/get-to-know-computer-science-graduate-student-ryan-nishimoto/">View the complete Computer Science Department article featuring Ryan Nishimoto.</a>

Events - 2020

EVL and UIC Computer Science Alumnus Marco Cavallo Honored with Outstanding Young Achievement Award

OASIS: A Collaborative Virtual Reality Design Exhibition Exploring the Post-Capitalist Mall

Lance Long Presents EVL’s Composable Infrastructure Research at SC20

Maxine Brown EVL Director Retires

Fabio Miranda Joins EVL Faculty

NSF Grant “CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Articulate+” Awarded

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