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

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

EVL Graduate Researcher Kunting Qi HiPC 2025 Distinguished Paper Award Nominee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BioMedVis 2025 Accepted Papers

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

Professor Liz Marai Delivers Keynote at the Visual Analytics in Healthcare

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

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

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

EVL Hosts COE Advisory Board Fall Meeting 2025

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

Researchers Michael Papka and Zhiling Lan Receive New NSF CISE Award

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

Overview of the ChromPolymerDB database.

EVL Researchers Co-Author Prestigious Nucleic Acids Research Publication

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

Why Must We Make It All Burn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVL Director Emeritus Maxine Brown 6GRP Workshop Chair

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

2025 Interdisciplinary Bootcamp (UIC and UI Health)

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

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

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

SAGE3 Annual All Hands Meeting (AHM) 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration of the key concepts of the Curio dataflow model.

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

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

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

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

EVLers Pacific Vis 2025 Paper Recognize with an Honorable Mention

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

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

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

VR Design for Sustainable and Inclusive Futures

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

EVL Faculty Present Research at the UIC Ecosystem Symposium 3

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

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

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

Events - 2025

EVL Graduate Researcher Kunting Qi HiPC 2025 Distinguished Paper Award Nominee

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

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

“Lessons from the Development and Deployment of an Interactive Oncological Risk Estimator” to be Presented at VAHC 2025

BioMedVis 2025 Accepted Papers

Professor Liz Marai Delivers Keynote at the Visual Analytics in Healthcare

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