Chuck Hansen, University of Utah

Large-Scale Scientific Visualization

Computers have changed the way we live, work, and even recreate. Now, they are transforming how we think about science, engineering, and medicine. Advances in computational modeling, imaging, and simulation allow researchers to build and test models of increasingly complex phenomena and thus to generate unprecedented amounts of data. These advances have created the need to make corresponding progress in our ability to understand large amounts of data and information arising from multiple sources. Although these machines offer enormous potential for solving very large-scale realistic modeling, simulation, and optimization problems, their effectiveness will hinge upon the ability of human experts to interact with their computations and extract useful information. In fact, to effectively understand and make use of the vast amounts of information being produced is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st Century. In this talk, I will first provide several examples of ongoing visual computing research at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute as applied to problems in computational science, engineering, and medicine, then go on to discuss future research opportunities.

Charles (Chuck) Hansen is Professor of Computer Science and an Associate Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, USA. His research interests span scientific visualization, computer graphics, and high performance computing. Scientific visualization of large scale problems is of key interest and recent work involves taking into consideration time-varying data and exploiting this for speeding up the visualization process. Other methods for visualizing large amounts of data are multi-resolution models and view dependent algorithms. The interest in computer graphics is driven from the scientific visualization perspective but includes parallel algorithms for speeding up global illumination. Prof. Hansen was awarded the Technical Achievement Award, by the IEEE Technical Committee for Visualization and Graphics.