Save the date for June 11th for the preview of the &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo; project on the <a href="https://artonthemart.com/">Art ontheMART</a> at the Merchandise Mart Chicago. A collaboration between the Chicago Design Archive and EVL and School of Design professor Daria Tsoupikova and EVL assistant professor Fabio Miranda, who created the AI/ML visualization for the last contemporary decade - 2010s. 
The exhibition will showcase works from the Chicago Design Archive taking viewers on a journey that begins in the 1920s with the era&rsquo;s painterly and illustrative techniques, evolves through the decades, and ends in the 2010s with digital rendering using AI and machine learning (ML)-technologies becoming increasingly prevalent in the contemporary landscape. 
This preview will be held for one day only to align with the opening of the NeoCon Design Conference to be held at the Merchandise Mart June 13-15. This is a FREE OUTDOOR public event to be held at the corner of West Wacker Drive and North Orleans Streets on the Riverwalk.

Work by Choral, Marlena Novak & Jay Yim as part of Art onTheMart

Art ontheMart Features &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo;

School of Design and EVL professor Daria Tsoupikova has been recognized with the UIC Award for Creative Activity for 2022-2023. Daria is among 42 faculty members awarded to continue their pursuits of creative scholarship and activities at UIC. Daria will use this award to further enhance and showcase &ldquo;Hummingbird: Collaborative Virtual Reality for Tele-Immersive Interactive Theater
Virtual Reality&rdquo; developed in collaboration with Chicago&rsquo;s Goodman Theatre. This innovative work merges real and virtual worlds for tele-immersive interaction with the goal of encouraging stronger theater engagement with tech-savvy younger audiences. Participants follow the story&rsquo;s protagonist into an immersive virtual world reminiscent of Japanese paintings. This tele-immersive, interactive experience reimagines theatrical storytelling. 
The project bridges art, science and live theater through a collaborative research effort between computer science and design faculty and students at EVL and Chicago&rsquo;s Goodman Theatre. 
<a href="https://today.uic.edu/uic-awards-for-creative-activity-2?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today%2B05.24.22">See UIC News for more information.</a>

Project Development at EVL

Daria Tsoupikova Awarded with UIC Award for Creative Activity

Professor and EVL interim director and director of research, Andrew Johnson participated with Matt Bubabla and Judy Pielach on their radio <a href="https://post.futurimedia.com/wlsam/playlist/listen-12063.html">show WLS-AM 890</a> to discuss UIC&rsquo;s involvement on the first &ldquo;Star Wars&rdquo; movie. In 1976, California artist Larry Cuba was hired by George Lucas to produce the special effects for the film&rsquo; s &rsquo;Trench Scene&rsquo;. Exploring possibilities for the scene, Cuba sought out the expertise of experimental computer graphics artists Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin, co-directors of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory of the University of Illinois Circle Campus, as it was named at the time. Cuba proceeded to use EVL computer graphics technology to digitize the &rsquo;Death Star&rsquo;, which was later converted to film for the movie. Presently, the computer technology used to produce the scene is still functioning and archived by long-time EVL collaborator Steve Heminover.

Still of the Death Star

May the 4th be with you!

Candidate: Juan Trelles Trabucco 
Date: Friday, April 29, 2022 
Time: 11 am CT 
Committee Members: Dr. G. Elisabeta Marai, Dr. Andy Johnson, Dr. Wei Tang, Dr. Steven Drucker, Dr. Cecilia Arighi 
Abstract: 
Biomedical researchers need to search over an increasing number of publications to find knowledge. Among these researchers, biocurators specialize in identifying relevant publications and extracting information to populate structured databases. Efforts from biocuration groups benefit a much larger community who access this curated information daily. To effectively deal with the extensive collection of documents, the biocuration workflow uses text-mining approaches to automate tasks, such as predicting the relevance of a publication. While exploiting patterns in text data has yielded significant breakthroughs for biocuration, images in publications contain important cues to determine the document's relevance. Still, integrating these image content with textual features is underexplored due to difficulties collecting images, defining classification schemes, and having access to domain experts for data labeling. 
Rooted in a years-long collaboration with text-mining researchers and biocurators, I propose strategies for harvesting labels from biomedical publications and modeling image classifiers to support biocuration. First, I present two approaches for training image classifiers with deep learning for small and unbalanced datasets. Then, I characterize the labeling task in biocuration and introduce a labeling system tailored for domain experts. Next, I build on lessons from this labeling system to develop a labeling approach for model builders by combining visual analytics and machine learning techniques. These works provide the building blocks for the future design of search interfaces that leverage text- and image-based data for biomedical experts. In addition, it supports the development of novel multi-modal approaches for detecting publication's relevance and interpreting these predictions.

Biomedical Image Classification Application User-Interface

PhD Prelim Announcement: Integrating Image Features to Support the Biocuration Workflow

Long-time EVLer and PhD candidate Arthur Nishimoto has been recognized by the UIC College of Engineering with the 2022 Exceptional Research Promise Award.  Arthur began his work with EVL in 2009 as a Research Experience Undergraduate developing virtual reality and visualization applications for collaborative research between EVL and NASA.  After graduating with his bachelorette degree, Arthur pursued a MS in computer science with focus on advanced visualization, virtual reality and real-time interactive application development.  Since 2014, Arthur has been working towards his PhD (expected Summer 2022), has been an incredibly prolific and valued member of EVL.  Arthur is well-deserving of this honor.  We look forward to seeing him continue his exceptional research over his career.

EVL PhD Candidate Arthur Nishimoto Recognized with the COE Exceptional Research Promise Award

This year, UIC Computer Science PhD students and Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) research assistants Sai Priya Jyothula and Arthur Nishimoto received an Honorable Mention in the campus&rsquo; 2022 Image of Research competition. Priya Jyothula&rsquo;s and Nishimoto&rsquo;s work &ldquo;Dōkutsu&rdquo; (cave in Japanese) is a representation of HummingbirdVR, a multi-user interactive virtual reality theatrical experience presented during the New Stages 2021 festival by the Chicago Goodman Theatre. The project aims to make live theater more accessible to younger audiences and bring cutting-edge virtual reality interaction techniques into a live theatrical performance. 
It should be noted that as in previous years&rsquo; judging, EVL&rsquo;s large tiled display system, the CAVE2 hybrid reality environment was used to display all the entries at once in high resolution for easy comparison and grouping. 
EVL students have participated in and received recognition in all previous annual Image of Research competitions beginning in 2008 through 2018. 
<a href="https://grad.uic.edu/funding-awards/the-image-of-research/ior-winners-hm/">See the complete list of Image of Research 2022 winners.</a>

Dōkutsu

EVL Students Recognized in 2022 UIC Image of Research Competition

EVL at the University of Illinois Chicago has joined Chameleon! Chameleon is a large-scale, deeply reconfigurable experimental platform built to support Computer Sciences systems research. Publicly available since 2015, Chameleon supports projects ranging from systems research developing new operating systems, virtualization methods, performance variability studies, and power management research to projects in software-defined networking, artificial intelligence, and resource management. 
Chameleon supports a bare metal reconfiguration system giving users full control of the software stack including root privileges, kernel customization, and console access. Chameleon adapted OpenStack, a mainstream open source cloud technology, to provide its capabilities. 
The EVL site brings back 8 Haswell nodes retired from <a href="https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/">Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)</a> with 13 more nodes coming online next month, for a total of 21. The EVL site can be accessed with an existing Chameleon Account, Projects, and Allocations, either by going directly to <a href="https://chi.evl.uic.edu/">https://chi.evl.uic.edu/</a>, the experiment dropdown on <a href="https://chameleoncloud.org">https://chameleoncloud.org</a>, or the dropdown on horizon for any other sites. 
Each node is equipped with 24 cores (48 threads), 128 GB of RAM, 2x 1G network connections, and a 250GB hard drive. Hardware details and availability can be reviewed on the hardware discovery page. 
<a href="https://github.com/ChameleonCloud/chi-in-a-box">https://github.com/ChameleonCloud/chi-in-a-box</a>

EVL Joins Chameleon

On January 25, 2022, EVL faculty member assistant professor Fabio Miranda was interviewed by Univision TV to discuss environmental contamination and the implication to Chicagoland Latino communities.  According to an investigation and recent study by UIC and Miranda &ldquo;the southwest of the city has a large presence of pollutants disproportionately affecting Latino communities.&rdquo; The study explores issues of local government perpetuating environmental racism. Miranda&rsquo;s research focuses on how visual data analytics can help address different problems cities face by integrating data on different resolutions and from different sources.

Interview with Fabio Miranda

EVL Faculty Assistant Professor Fabio Miranda Discussed Environmental Issues Impacting Chicago&rsquo;s Latino Communities

EVL faculty member and computer science assistant professor Fabio Miranda has been researching how visual data analytics can help address different problems cities face by integrating data on different resolutions and from different sources. His most recent collaboration is with the UIC School of Public Health&rsquo;s investigator Michael Cailas. Collectively, Miranda and Cailas have assembled Chicagoland data on pollution levels to create an interactive map that allows residents to find out what sources of pollution are near their schools and homes. Not surprisingly to those living in the highly industrialized southwest side of Chicago, Latino neighborhoods are seemingly hit the hardest. 
Read the full article on <a href="https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/01/25/new-map-shows-pollution-near-your-kids-school-and-confirms-latino-neighborhoods-are-hit-the-hardest/">Block Club Chicago</a>

Environmental Justice Landscape Map

EVL Faculty Assistant Professor Fabio Miranda Collaborates with UIC&rsquo;s School of Public Health to Visualize Pollution

EVL faculty assistant professor Fabio Miranda has teamed up with researchers from UIC&rsquo;s School of Public health studying environmental hazards to develop an interactive online map that illustrates the proximity of environmental hazards such as industrial pollution to Chicagoland neighborhoods. The current research provides a number of new tools and information that expands on earlier groundwork measuring environmental justice issues, including industry proximity to schools, nearby emissions sources and environmental justice impacts by community area. 
A recent <a href="https://mckinleypark.news/news/2493-environmental-justice-issues-inspire-new-pollution-sites-map">McKinley Park News article</a> features this research lead by Michael Cailas from the School of Public Health, entitled &ldquo;Midwest Comprehensive Visualization Dashboards: A New Environmental Justice Tool for Chicago Communities&rdquo;. The MCVD has been created by Joel Flax-Hatch, Fabio Miranda, Apostolis Sambanis, and Michael D. Cailas, with the
participation of Michael Siciliano, Sybil Derrible, Yuan Shao, and Greg Arling. 
<a href="https://univofillinois.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/nearby/index.html?appid=486f6e438ecf4b048deebc8dafd9f2c1&sliderDistance=1">Link to the MCVD interactive map.</a>

Environmental Justice Issues Inspire New Pollution Sites Map

Assistant professor Nikita Nandish Soni has joined the faculty of computer science at UIC, specializing in human-computer interaction. As affiliated EVL faculty, Dr. Soni will continue her research in designing natural user interactions for multi-touch spherical displays that support collaboration and learning. We look forward to her contributing to the design, development and evaluation of intelligent user-interface technologies, especially for children and families. 
<a href="https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-department-adds-a-new-human-computer-interaction-researcher/">Read the full article in the COE/CS News.</a>

Events - 2022

Art ontheMart Features “Chicago Design Through the Decades”

Daria Tsoupikova Awarded with UIC Award for Creative Activity

May the 4th be with you!

PhD Prelim Announcement: Integrating Image Features to Support the Biocuration Workflow

EVL PhD Candidate Arthur Nishimoto Recognized with the COE Exceptional Research Promise Award

EVL Students Recognized in 2022 UIC Image of Research Competition

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