Geometric Modeling and Visualization for Science

Abstract

The incredible array of measurement technologies available to the scientific community is changing fundamentally our understanding of physical and biological processes. However, scientific data acquisition marks only the first step. To turn numbers into insight, computer graphics and visualization help us model complex systems, make predictions about their behavior, and finally harness the immense power of the human visual perception system to make insights into complex processes possible. In this talk I will present several novel geometric representations, computational modeling, and visual analysis tools to facilitate the simulation and analysis of such complex scientific phenomena. These representations and tools were developed at the Pitt Interdisciplinary Visualization Research lab I direct, and have applications in domains as diverse as neuroimaging, astronomy, biology, turbulent combustion, or machine translation.

Bio: Liz Marai is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint and adjunct appointments in the Pitt Department of Computational Biology and at the CMU Robotics Institute. She is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Visualization Research lab at Pitt, featuring interdisciplinary research in computational modeling, data visualization, and computer graphics. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, of a recent Best Paper Award at BioVis 2011, and of multiple teaching awards for courses that blend research and teaching.