Past Happenings

(January 12, 2018)

Dagstuhl Seminar Proposal Accepted. Happy New Year. Just heard that our proposal for a Dagstuhl Seminar on Data Physicalization has been accepted, and will take place in October, 2018, just before Vis. It's been great working with Yvonne Jensen, Jason Alexander and Andrew Vande Moere planning this event, and we're very excited to plan the details.

(August 23, 2017)

FABULOUS NEWS: The IS&T has just launched a new multidisciplinary journal that is an outgrowth of the Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging. The Journal of Perceptual Imaging is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. Thrasyvoulos Pappas (Northwestern University) and Bernice Rogowitz (Visual Perspectives and Columbia University) will the Editors-in-Chief.

(July , 2017)

Deadline for the Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging has been extended to August 9, 2017. Still time to submit a paper!

(June 5, 2017)

I'll be in Barcelona next week at EUROVIS, giving a keynote lecture in the Workshop on Environmental Visualization. My talk? Decoding the Mysteries of Color Perception. In retrospect, pretty ambitious...

(June 2, 2017)

Just started teaching Data Visualization and Design in the Columbia University School for Professional Studies. Loving it!

(April 20, 2017)

Here is HVEI 2018 Call for Papers. We will be celebrating our 30th anniversary! Deadline for submission is August 15. Multidisciplinary papers at the intersection of human perception/cognition, imaging/visualization, and art/aesthetics. Special sessions forming in Virtual/Augmented reality, Art, Science and Reality, and more.

(April 11, 2017)

Serving on the program committee for IEEE InfoVis 2017 in Phoenix this October. Reviewing an interesting and varied set of papers in visualization and visual analytics. http://ieeevis.org/

(October 20, 2016)

The Program for HVEI 2017 is online. We our proud to present an exciting set of papers, special sessions, panels and discussion sessions at the intersection of perception/cognition, imaging and art.

(September 26, 2016)

VisLies is back! Join us at the IEEE Visualization Conference in Baltimore, Tuesday October 25, 7:00 -9:00. Sign up to present your favorite visual misrepresentation at vislies.org. For fun, check out a selection of last year's offerings at: vislies.org/2015

(July 29, 2016)

The deadline for HVEI 2017 is coming up (August 15th). We will have four special sessions, including (1) Computational Vision inspired by Human Vision, (2) Art, Expression and Perception, (3) Lossless image quality for Mobile devices, and (4) Novel methods for understanding vision. Here the HVEI 2017 Call for Papers! Check out the new HVEI Brochure

(June 23, 2016)

The Open Access proceedings for the Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI 2016) is now available online. For a quick overview, check out the editor's introduction: http://ist.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/ist/ei/2016/00002016/00000016

(June 17, 2016)

Had a great time at the Fest for Eli Peii at Harvard Medical School. My talk was on "How (not) to lie with Medical Visualization").

(May 11, 2016)

We're starting work on the HVEI 2017 Conference, which will be in Burlingame, CA, Jan 29-Feb 2, 2017. Here the HVEI 2017 Call for Papers!

(February 26, 2016)

Fabulous HVEI 2016! This year we focused on fundamental perceptual, cognitive and neuropsychological processes in multisensory processing, spatial-color interactions and in individual differences, and explored applications in visualization, image quality and aesthetics. Here's a link to the final program. Enthusiastic thanks to Mark McCourt, Lora Likova, John McCann, Ale Rizzi, Kjell Brunnstrom, Ulrich Engelke, Mike Webster, David Peterzell, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, and Elena Federovskaya for their special sessions, to Judith Redi for chairing the Bst Student Paper committee, and a special call-out to my co-chairs Thrasos Pappas and Huib de Ridder. Great job everyone!

(January 3, 2016)

Happy New Year. I am delighted to share the advance program for HVEI, which will be in San Francisco February 14-18, 2016. We have four exciting keynote speakers plus a great set of special sessions, designed to stretch the scope and depth of our thinking at the intersection of human vision/perception, technology and art.

(November 3, 2015)

Great IEEE VisWeek! Lots of focus on the "human-in-the-loop." Over 250 people attended my tutorial on VIsion and Visualization on Sunday. We had a great panel on perceptual, artistic and application-oriented issues re: Color Scales, and VisLies was hilarious and educational, as always! I was on the committee for the Workshop on Business Visualization, but was unable to attend because it conflicted with my tutorial, but I heard it went very well.

(August 24, 2015)

Thanks to Hans-Joerg Schulz for the invitation to Rostock, Germany for the International Summer School on Visual Computing, sponsored by the Fraunhofer Institute and the University of Rostock. My course kicked off the week, focusing on "Visual Perception and Cognition." Other topics included data management, computer vision, HCI, and visual analytics.

(July 19, 2015)

The new deadline for HVEI 2016 is August 15, 2015! Here is the HVEI 2016 brochure and here is the link to the Call for Papers: http://www.imaging.org/IST/conferences/ei2016/C-HVEI.cfm

(July 14, 2015)

Spent a great day at Clemson University with Vetria Byrd and her students in the NSF Research Experience for Undergragudates( REU) summer program in data visualization she manages http://citi.clemson.edu/viz/reu/.

The students collaborate with university professors to visualize real data, in projects that run the gamut from scientific visualization to info-vis, image processing, and virtual reality. Very impressive!

(July 2, 2015)

Had a great time speaking at the Data Visualization NY Meet-up at McKinsey in NYC today. What a diverse audience interested in visual communication and analysis.

(June 24, 2015)

Just returned from a visit to the SANDIA National Labs. I presented a 2-day course on Perception, Cognition and Visualization to a great group of scientists, engineers and psychologists. Thanks to Laura McNamarra and the team for interesting discussions and great interactions.

(June 5, 2015)

Here's the call for papers for HVEI 2016. The International Imaging Society, IS&T, is now the sole sponsor for the Electronic Imaging Symposium, and there's a lot of new, creative energy. Check out our special sessions: multisensory interaction, individual differences, art and perception, visual coding in visualization, and psychophysiology. San Francisco February 14-19, 2016

(February 26, 2015)

Just learned that I have received the highest recognition from IS&T-- I've been named Honorary Member for 2015. I really feel honored. I was cited for "outstanding leadership, teaching, research, and building a multi-disciplinary community of scientists and technologists as conference chair of the Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference.

(February 15, 2015)

Check out the CD-ROM for the 25th Anniversary of HVEI, including 1500 papers, a slide show, and videos. The cost is $135 ($105 for members). I mention the price because it is double on Amazon.

(February 8-14, 2015)

HVEI 2015 was exciting and well-attended, with papers and posters spanning the range from low-level vision to high-level analysis and cognition. We enjoyed session on texture, gloss and color, lighting, light and Lightness, color, attention and saliency, visualization and computer graphics, image quality, and digital humanities. There were also two short courses and an excursion led by Christopher Tyler to the deYoung museum, focused on art and perception. Special thanks to our fabulous keynotes, Patrick leCallet, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, and Sergio Goma.

(January 31, 2015)

Spent a great week at the Dagstuhl Seminar on "Empirical Evaluation for Graph Drawing“, where I was honored to be one of the invited trainers. Six groups designed hypothesis-driven experiments and frameworks. A great, interactive time was had by all.

(November 14, 2014)

The IEEE Visualization meeting was in Paris this year. To me, the highlight was the exhibit of Bertin's visualizations put togetehr by Jean-Daniel Fekete and his students. Georges Grinstein and I led the Vis Lies meet-up, which revealed humorous and painful ways that visualization can misrepresent data. There was also a panel where several of us (Georges Grinstein, Sheelagh Carpendale, Jim Foley, Theresa-Marie Rhyne, Ben Schneiderman and I) shared wisdom with the next generation. Could have been hokey, but it wasn't.

(October 20, 2014)

The program for the Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging 2015 is now available.

(August 20, 2014)

My patent on "Pervasive Network for Environmental Sensing" has just issued. US 20080183389 This is a patent on gathering information from cell phones, analyzing the collected input centrally, then broadcasting synthesized messages. With Nitindra Rajput and Tim Chainer.

(August 13-14, 2014)

Had a great visit at Los Alamos National Lab, where I taught in the Summer Data School and visited with Jim Ahrens, David Rogers and their colleagues. Talked about representing data using perceptual guidance, analysis tasks, and the analysis process.

(June 8-13, 2014)

I attended the first Gordon Conference on Imaging, which focused on imaging matched to the task. My poster was on uses and misuses of color in medical imaging.

(May 12-14, 2014)

The International Congress on Imaging Science (ICIS) in Tel Aviv was a great experience! Devices, imaging physics, medical imaging, and perception! I was invited to talk about imaging tasks, and how different tasks involved different perceptual and cognitive capabilities.

(May 7-8, 2014)

I served on the Department of Energy (DOE) Review Panel for Lucy Nowell's program on Scientific Data Management, Analysis and Visualization at Extreme Scale, which included, for the first time, proposals expressly focused on visualization and data analytics matched to human perception and cognition.

(May 2, 2014)

NITRD/NSF Frontiers of Visualization Workshop. 23 scientists were invited for a day of brainstorming to help the government identify key research trends. To begin, we were asked to introduce ourselves, identify areas we are passionate about, and define our wish list for research in visualization. Here's a YouTube video of my 6-minute presentation!

(May 1, 2014)

HVEI 2015 will meet Feb 8-12 in San Francisco. Here's the HVEI 2015 call for papers. This year, we are planning some interesting special sessions--

• • Using Lighting to Improve Visibility, Aesthetics, and Emotion in Real-World Environments

  • Future Directions in Perceptual Image Quality

  • Matching Imaging and Visualization to the Task: Taxonomies, Rules, and Design Approaches

  • Digital Humanities: Combining Imaging and Visualization with Literature, History, and Sociology

  • Texture Perception: Cross-Sensory Interactions

  • Risk and Uncertainty: Approaches from Visualization, Art, and Imaging

  • Perception in the Cinema

  • Art, Aesthetics and the Brain: A Multisensory Exploration

  • How Artists and Perceptual Scientists Think About Visual Representation

(March12, 2014)

ICIS 2014. Excited about my upcoming trip to Israel. I've been invited to speak at the International Congress of Imaging Science, May 12-14, in Tel Aviv.

(January 28, 2014)

HVEI 2014. Getting ready for HVEI 2014 next week.

This year's keynote speakers are: Christopher Tyler (Smith-Kettlewell). Perceiving, measuring, and modeling 3D material appearanc​e​​; Damon Chandler (Oklahoma) Seven challenges for image quality research; Shi-Fu Chang (Columbia) Images shared in social media: a window into human sentiment and emotion; and Ed Chi (Google) The science of social interactions on the web.

Special sessions on (1) Visual/Auditory Interactions, (2) perceptual issues in video, and (3) the emotional, social, aesthetic experience of the user.

My short course will be on Sunday morning, Feb 2: Perception and Cognition for Next Generation Imaging.

(December 17, 2013)

Online talk: Perceptual approaches to finding features in data. The presentation I gave at HVEI last year is now online (33 min).

http://river-valley.tv/perceptual-approaches-to-finding-features-in-data/

(December 5, 2013)

HVEI Program. Here's a link to the program for HVEI2014. Keynote speakers: Damon Chandler (Oklahoma), Ed Chi (Google), Shi-Fu Chang (Columbia), Christopher Tyler (Smith-Kettlewell). http://spie.org/EI/conferencedetails/human-vision-electronic-imaging

(November 25, 2013)

VisLies overview. Ken Moreland created a blog entry with examples from VisLies session we led at the IEEE Visualization conference. Very funny! http://drmoron.org/vislies-2013/

(October 7, 2013)

Lateral Thinking Workshop. I'll be participating in a workshop on Using Visualization to Foster Lateral Thinking next Wednesday at IEEE Vis, organized by Chandan Gokhale. Excited to encourage focus on the analysis process.

(September 25, 2013)

VisLies. Georges Grinstein (U Mass), Ken Moreland (Sandia) and I will be hosting VisLies at the IEEE Visualization Conference! The audience will provide an array of visualizations that lie, deceive, or mislead. The lively discussions are fun and educational. Tuesday, October 15th in Atlanta. http://ieeevis.org/year/2013/bof/visweek/vis-lies

(July 10, 2013)

HVEI 2013 Call for Papers. HVEI 2013 will be in San Francisco. We have special sessions on brain imaging, spatial-temporal issues in video coding, art and perception, visual/auditory interactions, texture, and perceptual issues in big data. Check out the call for papers! Paper deadline: August 5th.

(May 23, 2013)

DICTA. I'll be serving on the technical program committee for the international conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), which will be held in Tasmania (!), Nov 26-28, 2013.

(March 1, 2013)

Cybersecurity. Joined the Program Committee for the IEEE Workshop on Visualization for Cybersecurity Key focus-- evaluating how well visualization supports analytical reasoning and decision-making.

February 18, 2013)

Colormaps for CERN. I've been working with Olivier Couet at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, to visualize candidate Higgs-Boson data. By eliminating the rainbow colormap and using a surface to redundantly encode the mass at the detector, a stunning visualization of the Higgs Boson mass signature emerged. Higgs-Boson Data Visualization, CERN, 2013..

(February 4, 2013)

HVEI 2013. This week we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging. Our keynote speakers are Aude Oliva (MIT), Jan Koenderink (Delft) and Don Hoffman (UC Irvine); our banquet speaker is Walter Bender (Sugar Labs). There will also be a dozen invited "theme" talks that explore the development of key trends in imaging and perception over the past 25 years, and outline future research and technology opportunities.

(November 9, 2012)

Radcliffe Workshop on Data Understanding. Just concluded the 3-day Radcliffe Workshop Data Understanding, co-chaired with Alyssa Goodman, Hanspeter Pfister and Michelle Borkin. Trying to create a multidisciplinary research roadmap for integrating perceptual and algorithmic approaches to finding features in data, encompassing the full range of data types, algorithms, and interaction methodologies. Exhilarating and exhausting!

(October 23, 2012)

The program for the 25th Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging is now online. This year our keynotes are Aude Oliva, Jan Koenderink, and Don Hoffman. Walter Bender is our banquet speaker.

(September 21, 2012)

Lovely visit at the University of Michigan! Presented "Nuggets of Wisdom from Research in Vision and Cognition" in the Data Visualization seminar series. Fun discussions about color maps, risk modeling, and visualizing gene expression array data.

(August 22, 2012)

I will be teaching a tutorial on "Perception and Cognition for Imaging, Visualization and Graphics" at the IEEE Visualization conference in Seattle on October 14, 2012. Hope to see you there.

(August 1, 2012)

We are making great progress on our anniversary celebration for HVEI, which will be held at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt, February 3-7, 2013. Here is the call for papers, which includes information on submitting an abstract. Keynote speakers this year include Pat Hanrahan (Stanford), Aude Oliva (MIT), Jan Koenderink (Delft) and Don Hoffman (UCI). There will also be a dozen "theme" papers tracing the evolution of research at the intersection between human vision and electronic media.

(July 2, 2012)

The patent Paul Borrel and I wrote on a novel haptic input/output device has issued: US Patent: 8,203,529 B2. We coupled a dynamic pin array with a robotic control system to provide a mechanism that allows the user to sense and edit surfaces for visualization and virtual reality applications.

(March 9, 2012)

Here's a link to the paper Alyssa Goodman and I wrote on integrating human- and computer-based approaches for extracting features in visualization, graphics and imaging data. The next step will be to strengthen this framework by exercising it with scenarios from a number of different fields.

(January 27, 2012)

The Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference, January 23- 26, 2012 was very exciting. Our keynote speakers were Marc Levoy (Stanford) on computational photography, John McCann (McCann Imaging) on color constancy and high dynamic range imaging and Larry Maloney (NYU) on the perception of materials. Carol O'Sullivan (Trinity College) gave the banquet talk on human motion perception and computer animation, and we enjoyed Art and Perception day, which culminated in a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There were special session on perceptual and cognitive approaches to computational photography, perceiving materials, medical imaging, stereo imaging, image quality, and brain plasticity. I presented a paper with Alyssa Goodman (Harvard) on a framework for integrating human- and machine-based approaches in exploratory image and data analysis, and taught a short course on Perception and Cognition for Emerging Imaging Technologies.

(January 6, 2012)

Our Radcliffe workshop proposal has been accepted! With Alyssa Goodman and Hanspeter Pfister, I'll be organizing a workshop on integrating human- and algorithmic approaches to carving out and characterizing features in complex data.

(October 9, 2011)

Just out! - the advance program for the Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference, January 23- 26, 2012. This year there are special sessions on perceptual and cognitive issues in Representing Materials, Computational Photography, Medical Imaging, Art, Stereo Imaging, and Image Quality, plus, tutorials on January 22nd.

(August 15, 2011)

The IEEE Visualization conference is coming up. Here's the outline for the tutorial I'll be presenting on Perception and Cognition for Visualization, Visual Data Analysis and Computer Graphics. I'll be posting the charts in October.

(April 26, 2011)

The 2012 Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging call for papers is now available. The conference will be held at the San Francisco Hyatt airport hotel, January 22-26. This year, we are planning special sessions on 1) perceiving material properties, 2) attention and visual search, 3) artistic rendering, 4) semiotics of perception, 5) object recognition, 6) computational photography, 7) auditory/visual integration, and 8) perceptual image quality. Hope you can join us for another year of multidisciplinary exploration at the frontier of human perception and electronic media.

(March 15, 2011)

Although scientific software often provides complementary functions, it is difficult to create an application that supports interactive exploration across applications. To address this problem, Naim Matasci and I have just published a paper on an architecture for sharing data between components, which we call the Metadata mapper. In this system, the user can identify metadata in one component (e.g., a region of interest) and corresponding regions can be highlighted in another. Rules guide the data mapping, and the choices the user makes are constrained by the capabilities of the target component and guidance on human perception and cognition. For example, the analyst may select a geographic region, in one application, and have all the species living in that region highlighted on a phylogenetic tree. If the tree component can support the representation of continuous variables, then the user may select a color map to represent the number of represented species in a particular branch (clade) of the tree. Which colormap are offered to the analyst depend on the data type and principles of magnitude and color perception. Although this work was done in the context of bioinformatics data analysis, the principles are generalizable to any component architecture.

(February 10, 2011)

The 2011 Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging was fabulous. I especially enjoyed the keynotes: Georges Grinstein on visualization and visual analysis opportunities, Anton Koning on 3-D medical environments, Jan Koenderink on the visual "priors" we bring to any visual experience, and Nao Tsuchiya on new research in attention and consciousness. We'll be posting their presentations on the HVEI website. I really enjoyed our special sessions Attention, and Perceptual challenges for bioinformatics data visualization. The joint sessions on Stereo and Image Quality brought several communities together. I'll be posting the charts from my short course soon. And, thanks again to iPlant and RIT for sponsoring social events for us.

(December 9, 2010)

I participated in the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) Future of Imaging Conference in Irvine, sponsored by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, November 16-19. This was a fabulous multi-disciplinary conference, focused on defining research challenges in this emerging area. The main activities were poster presentations and workshops. I presented a poster called "Perception, Cognition and Semantics in Imaging". My workshop team developed a framework for integrating human and machine intelligence for representing and comparing features in visual representations, combining approaches from human vision and cognition, machine vision, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. More details can be shared after the report is filed!

(October 23, 2010)

IEEE Visualization Conference October 21-28, 2010. I served on the Theory of Visualization Panel, where my contribution focused perceptual guidance for mapping data onto visual representations and interactive tools for finding features in the data. Georges Grinstein and I hosted the VisLies session on Tuesday night, a riotous exploration of the ways in which data can be misrepresented, contorted, or tortured through visualization.

(September 24, 2010)

Here is the Advance Program for the SPIE/IS&T Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI), which I chair with Thrasos Pappas. HVEI will be held at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt, January 24-27, 2011. Some highlights of this year's program include:

• Special Sessions on: Perceptual and Cognitive Issues in Visualizing Bioinformatics data and Attention and Visual Search

• Joint Sessions with other Conferences on: Stereo and Attention and Image Quality.

• Keynote speakers: Georges Grinstein, Jan Koenderink, Anton Koning, and Kristof Koch.

• Banquet Speaker: Mark Changizi.

(July 28, 2010)

The ViVA visualization and visual analysis software package that my group developed at IBM Research is now available for download on Source Forge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/iplant-viva/

(January, 2010)

I'm working for the University of Texas, Austin's Center for Advanced Computing (TACC) on an NSF grant called iPlant. My contribution is at the interface between plant and computer science, providing discovery tools and methods that will enable new scientific insights. I'm participating in two working groups, one on Visualization and Visual Analysis for genome to phenome (G2P) data analysis and one on visualizing a 500,000 species tree of life. I'm eager to hear about relevant work you are doing in these areas.