Designed especially for neurobiologists, FluoRender is an interactive tool for multi-channel fluorescence microscopy data visualization and analysis.
Deep brain stimulation
BrainStimulator is a set of networks that are used in SCIRun to perform simulations of brain stimulation such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and magnetic transcranial stimulation (TMS).
Developing software tools for science has always been a central vision of the SCI Institute.

Visualization

Visualization, sometimes referred to as visual data analysis, uses the graphical representation of data as a means of gaining understanding and insight into the data. Visualization research at SCI has focused on applications spanning computational fluid dynamics, medical imaging and analysis, biomedical data analysis, healthcare data analysis, weather data analysis, poetry, network and graph analysis, financial data analysis, etc.

Research involves novel algorithm and technique development to building tools and systems that assist in the comprehension of massive amounts of (scientific) data. We also research the process of creating successful visualizations.

We strongly believe in the role of interactivity in visual data analysis. Therefore, much of our research is concerned with creating visualizations that are intuitive to interact with and also render at interactive rates.

Visualization at SCI includes the academic subfields of Scientific Visualization, Information Visualization and Visual Analytics.


chuck

Charles Hansen

Volume Rendering
Ray Tracing
Graphics
pascucci

Valerio Pascucci

Topological Methods
Data Streaming
Big Data
chris

Chris Johnson

Scalar, Vector, and
Tensor Field Visualization,
Uncertainty Visualization
mike

Mike Kirby

Uncertainty Visualization
ross

Ross Whitaker

Topological Methods
Uncertainty Visualization
alex lex

Alex Lex

Information Visualization
bei

Bei Wang

Information Visualization
Scientific Visualization
Topological Data Analysis

Centers and Labs:


Funded Research Projects:


Publications in Visualization:


Uncertainty Visualization of 2D Morse Complex Ensembles Using Statistical Summary Maps
T. M. Athawale, D. Maljovec. L. Yan, C. R. Johnson, V. Pascucci, B. Wang. In IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 1955-1966. April, 2022.
ISSN: 1077-2626
DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2020.3022359

Morse complexes are gradient-based topological descriptors with close connections to Morse theory. They are widely applicable in scientific visualization as they serve as important abstractions for gaining insights into the topology of scalar fields. Data uncertainty inherent to scalar fields due to randomness in their acquisition and processing, however, limits our understanding of Morse complexes as structural abstractions. We, therefore, explore uncertainty visualization of an ensemble of 2D Morse complexes that arises from scalar fields coupled with data uncertainty. We propose several statistical summary maps as new entities for quantifying structural variations and visualizing positional uncertainties of Morse complexes in ensembles. Specifically, we introduce three types of statistical summary maps – the probabilistic map , the significance map , and the survival map – to characterize the uncertain behaviors of gradient flows. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed approach using wind, flow, and ocean eddy simulation datasets.



Using Contour Trees in the Analysis and Visualization of Radio Astronomy Data Cubes,
P. Rosen, A. Seth, E. Mills, A. Ginsburg, J. Kamenetzky, J. Kern, C.R. Johnson, B. Wang. In Topological Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization VI, Springer-Verlag, pp. 87--108. 2021.

The current generation of radio and millimeter telescopes, particularly the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), offers enormous advances in observing capabilities. While these advances represent an unprecedented opportunity to facilitate scientific understanding, the increased complexity in the spatial and spectral structure of these ALMA data cubes lead to challenges in their interpretation. In this paper, we perform a feasibility study for applying topological data analysis and visualization techniques never before tested by the ALMA community. Using techniques based on contour trees, we seek to improve upon existing analysis and visualization workflows of ALMA data cubes, in terms of accuracy and speed in feature extraction. We review our development process in building effective analysis and visualization capabilities for the astrophysicists. We also summarize effective design practices by identifying domain-specific needs of simplicity, integrability, and reproducibility, in order to best target and service the large astrophysics community.



AMM: Adaptive Multilinear Meshes
Subtitled “arXiv:2007.15219,” H. Bhatia, D. Hoang, N. Morrical, V. Pascucci, P.T. Bremer, P. Lindstrom. 2021.

Adaptive representations are increasingly indispensable for reducing the in-memory and on-disk footprints of large-scale data. Usual solutions are designed broadly along two themes: reducing data precision, e.g., through compression, or adapting data resolution, e.g., using spatial hierarchies. Recent research suggests that combining the two approaches, i.e., adapting both resolution and precision simultaneously, can offer significant gains over using them individually. However, there currently exist no practical solutions to creating and evaluating such representations at scale. In this work, we present a new resolution-precision-adaptive representation to support hybrid data reduction schemes and offer an interface to existing tools and algorithms. Through novelties in spatial hierarchy, our representation, Adaptive Multilinear Meshes (AMM), provides considerable reduction in the mesh size. AMM creates a piecewise multilinear representation of uniformly sampled scalar data and can selectively relax or enforce constraints on conformity, continuity, and coverage, delivering a flexible adaptive representation. AMM also supports representing the function using mixed-precision values to further the achievable gains in data reduction. We describe a practical approach to creating AMM incrementally using arbitrary orderings of data and demonstrate AMM on six types of resolution and precision datastreams. By interfacing with state-of-the-art rendering tools through VTK, we demonstrate the practical and computational advantages of our representation for visualization techniques. With an open-source release of our tool to create AMM, we make such evaluation of data reduction accessible to the community, which we hope will foster new opportunities and future data reduction schemes



Translational computer science at the scientific computing and imaging institute
C. R. Johnson. In Journal of Computational Science, Vol. 52, pp. 101217. 2021.
ISSN: 1877-7503
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocs.2020.101217

The Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah evolved from the SCI research group, started in 1994 by Professors Chris Johnson and Rob MacLeod. Over time, research centers funded by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and State of Utah significantly spurred growth, and SCI became a permanent interdisciplinary research institute in 2000. The SCI Institute is now home to more than 150 faculty, students, and staff. The history of the SCI Institute is underpinned by a culture of multidisciplinary, collaborative research, which led to its emergence as an internationally recognized leader in the development and use of visualization, scientific computing, and image analysis research to solve important problems in a broad range of domains in biomedicine, science, and engineering. A particular hallmark of SCI Institute research is the creation of open source software systems, including the SCIRun scientific problem-solving environment, Seg3D, ImageVis3D, Uintah, ViSUS, Nektar++, VisTrails, FluoRender, and FEBio. At this point, the SCI Institute has made more than 50 software packages broadly available to the scientific community under open-source licensing and supports them through web pages, documentation, and user groups. While the vast majority of academic research software is written and maintained by graduate students, the SCI Institute employs several professional software developers to help create, maintain, and document robust, tested, well-engineered open source software. The story of how and why we worked, and often struggled, to make professional software engineers an integral part of an academic research institute is crucial to the larger story of the SCI Institute’s success in translational computer science (TCS).



Uncertainty Quantification in Brain Stimulation using UncertainSCI
J. Tate, S. Rampersad, C. Charlebois, Z. Liu, J. Bergquist, D. White, L. Rupp, D. Brooks, A. Narayan, R. MacLeod. In Brain Stimulation: Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research in Neuromodulation, Vol. 14, No. 6, Elsevier, pp. 1659-1660. 2021.

Predicting the effects of brain stimulation with computer models presents many challenges, including estimating the possible error from the propagation of uncertain input parameters through the model. Quantification and control of these errors through uncertainty quantification (UQ) provide statistics on the likely impact of parameter variation on solution accuracy, including total variance and sensitivity associated to each parameter. While the need and importance of UQ in clinical modeling is generally accepted, tools for implementing UQ techniques remain limited or inaccessible for many researchers.



Direct Volume Rendering with Nonparametric Models of Uncertainty
T. M. Athawale, B. Ma, E. Sakhaee, C. R. Johnson,, A. Entezari. In IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 1797-1807. 2021.
DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2020.3030394

We present a nonparametric statistical framework for the quantification, analysis, and propagation of data uncertainty in direct volume rendering (DVR). The state-of-the-art statistical DVR framework allows for preserving the transfer function (TF) of the ground truth function when visualizing uncertain data; however, the existing framework is restricted to parametric models of uncertainty. In this paper, we address the limitations of the existing DVR framework by extending the DVR framework for nonparametric distributions. We exploit the quantile interpolation technique to derive probability distributions representing uncertainty in viewing-ray sample intensities in closed form, which allows for accurate and efficient computation. We evaluate our proposed nonparametric statistical models through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with the mean-field and parametric statistical models, such as uniform and Gaussian, as well as Gaussian mixtures. In addition, we present an extension of the state-of-the-art rendering parametric framework to 2D TFs for improved DVR classifications. We show the applicability of our uncertainty quantification framework to ensemble, downsampled, and bivariate versions of scalar field datasets.



Uncertainty Visualization of the Marching Squares and Marching Cubes Topology Cases
Subtitled “arXiv:2108.03066,” T. M. Athawale, S. Sane, C. R. Johnson. 2021.

Marching squares (MS) and marching cubes (MC) are widely used algorithms for level-set visualization of scientific data. In this paper, we address the challenge of uncertainty visualization of the topology cases of the MS and MC algorithms for uncertain scalar field data sampled on a uniform grid. The visualization of the MS and MC topology cases for uncertain data is challenging due to their exponential nature and the possibility of multiple topology cases per cell of a grid. We propose the topology case count and entropy-based techniques for quantifying uncertainty in the topology cases of the MS and MC algorithms when noise in data is modeled with probability distributions. We demonstrate the applicability of our techniques for independent and correlated uncertainty assumptions. We visualize the quantified topological uncertainty via color mapping proportional to uncertainty, as well as with interactive probability queries in the MS case and entropy isosurfaces in the MC case. We demonstrate the utility of our uncertainty quantification framework in identifying the isovalues exhibiting relatively high topological uncertainty. We illustrate the effectiveness of our techniques via results on synthetic, simulation, and hixel datasets.



Data-Driven Estimation of Temporal-Sampling Errors in Unsteady Flows
H. Bhatia, S. N. Petruzza, R. Anirudh, A. G. Gyulassy, R. M. Kirby, V. Pascucci, P. T. Bremer. 2021.

While computer simulations typically store data at the highest available spatial resolution, it is often infeasible to do so for the temporal dimension. Instead, the common practice is to store data at regular intervals, the frequency of which is strictly limited by the available storage and I/O bandwidth. However, this manner of temporal subsampling can cause significant errors in subsequent analysis steps. More importantly, since the intermediate data is lost, there is no direct way of measuring this error after the fact. One particularly important use case that is affected is the analysis of unsteady flows using pathlines, as it depends on an accurate interpolation across time. Although the potential problem with temporal undersampling is widely acknowledged, there currently does not exist a practical way to estimate the potential impact. This paper presents a simple-to-implement yet powerful technique to estimate the error in pathlines due to temporal subsampling. Given an unsteady flow, we compute pathlines at the given temporal resolution as well as subsamples thereof. We then compute the error induced due to various levels of subsampling and use it to estimate the error between the given resolution and the unknown ground truth. Using two turbulent flows, we demonstrate that our approach, for the first time, provides an accurate, a posteriori error estimate for pathline computations. This estimate will enable scientists to better understand the uncertainties involved in pathline-based analysis techniques and can lead to new uncertainty visualization approaches using the predicted errors.



Reusing Interactive Analysis Workflows
Subtitled “OSF Preprints,” K. Gadhave, Z.T. Cutler, A. Lex. 2021.

Interactive visual analysis has many advantages, but has the disadvantage that analysis processes and workflows cannot be easily stored and reused, which is in contrast to scripted analysis workflows using a programming language such as Python. In this paper, we introduce methods to semantically capture workflows in interactive visualization systems for different interactions such as selections, filters, categorizing/grouping, labeling, and aggregation. We design these workflows to be robust to updates in the dataset by capturing the semantics of underlying interactions, and, hence, they can be applied to updated datasets. We demonstrate this specification using a prototype that visualizes the data, shows interaction provenance, and allows generating workflows from this provenance. Finally, we introduce a Python library that can consume the workflow and apply it to the datasets, providing a seamless bridge between computational workflows and interactive visualization tools. We demonstrate our techniques using our UI prototype and Jupyter notebooks.



Towards replacing physical testing of granular materials with a Topology-based Model
Subtitled “arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.08777,” A. Venkat, A. Gyulassy, G. Kosiba, A. Maiti, H. Reinstein, R. Gee, P.-T. Bremer, V. Pascucci. 2021.

In the study of packed granular materials, the performance of a sample (e.g., the detonation of a high-energy explosive) often correlates to measurements of a fluid flowing through it. The "effective surface area," the surface area accessible to the airflow, is typically measured using a permeametry apparatus that relates the flow conductance to the permeable surface area via the Carman-Kozeny equation. This equation allows calculating the flow rate of a fluid flowing through the granules packed in the sample for a given pressure drop. However, Carman-Kozeny makes inherent assumptions about tunnel shapes and flow paths that may not accurately hold in situations where the particles possess a wide distribution in shapes, sizes, and aspect ratios, as is true with many powdered systems of technological and commercial interest. To address this challenge, we replicate these measurements virtually on micro-CT images of the powdered material, introducing a new Pore Network Model based on the skeleton of the Morse-Smale complex. Pores are identified as basins of the complex, their incidence encodes adjacency, and the conductivity of the capillary between them is computed from the cross-section at their interface. We build and solve a resistive network to compute an approximate laminar fluid flow through the pore structure. We provide two means of estimating flow-permeable surface area: (i) by direct computation of conductivity, and (ii) by identifying dead-ends in the flow coupled with isosurface extraction and the application of the Carman-Kozeny equation, with the aim of establishing consistency over a range of particle shapes, sizes, porosity levels, and void distribution patterns.



Visualizing Interactions Between Solar Photovoltaic Farms and the Atmospheric Boundary Layer
T. M. Athawale, B. J. Stanislawski, S. Sane,, C. R. Johnson. In Twelfth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems, pp. 377--381. 2021.

The efficiency of solar panels depends on the operating temperature. As the panel temperature rises, efficiency drops. Thus, the solar energy community aims to understand the factors that influence the operating temperature, which include wind speed, wind direction, turbulence, ambient temperature, mounting configuration, and solar cell material. We use high-resolution numerical simulations to model the flow and thermal behavior of idealized solar farms. Because these simulations model such complex behavior, advanced visualization techniques are needed to investigate and understand the results. Here, we present advanced 3D visualizations of numerical simulation results to illustrate the flow and heat transport in an idealized solar farm. The findings can be used to understand how flow behavior influences module temperatures, and vice versa.



Predicting intent behind selections in scatterplot visualizations
K. Gadhave, J. Görtler, Z. Cutler, C. Nobre, O. Deussen, M. Meyer, J.M. Phillips, A. Lex. In Information Visualization, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 207-228. 2021.
DOI: 10.1177/14738716211038604

Predicting and capturing an analyst’s intent behind a selection in a data visualization is valuable in two scenarios: First, a successful prediction of a pattern an analyst intended to select can be used to auto-complete a partial selection which, in turn, can improve the correctness of the selection. Second, knowing the intent behind a selection can be used to improve recall and reproducibility. In this paper, we introduce methods to infer analyst’s intents behind selections in data visualizations, such as scatterplots. We describe intents based on patterns in the data, and identify algorithms that can capture these patterns. Upon an interactive selection, we compare the selected items with the results of a large set of computed patterns, and use various ranking approaches to identify the best pattern for an analyst’s selection. We store annotations and the metadata to reconstruct a selection, such as the type of algorithm and its parameterization, in a provenance graph. We present a prototype system that implements these methods for tabular data and scatterplots. Analysts can select a prediction to auto-complete partial selections and to seamlessly log their intents. We discuss implications of our approach for reproducibility and reuse of analysis workflows. We evaluate our approach in a crowd-sourced study, where we show that auto-completing selection improves accuracy, and that we can accurately capture pattern-based intent.



Leveraging Topological Events in Tracking Graphs for Understanding Particle Diffusion
T. McDonald, R. Shrestha, X. Yi, H. Bhatia, D. Chen, D. Goswami, V. Pascucci, T. Turbyville, P‐T Bremer. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 251-262. 2021.

Single particle tracking (SPT) of fluorescent molecules provides significant insights into the diffusion and relative motion of tagged proteins and other structures of interest in biology. However, despite the latest advances in high-resolution microscopy, individual particles are typically not distinguished from clusters of particles. This lack of resolution obscures potential evidence for how merging and splitting of particles affect their diffusion and any implications on the biological environment. The particle tracks are typically decomposed into individual segments at observed merge and split events, and analysis is performed without knowing the true count of particles in the resulting segments. Here, we address the challenges in analyzing particle tracks in the context of cancer biology. In particular, we study the tracks of KRAS protein, which is implicated in nearly 20% of all human cancers, and whose clustering and aggregation have been linked to the signaling pathway leading to uncontrolled cell growth. We present a new analysis approach for particle tracks by representing them as tracking graphs and using topological events – merging and splitting, to disambiguate the tracks. Using this analysis, we infer a lower bound on the count of particles as they cluster and create conditional distributions of diffusion speeds before and after merge and split events. Using thousands of time-steps of simulated and in-vitro SPT data, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method, as it offers the biologists a new, detailed look into the relationship between KRAS clustering and diffusion speeds.



Investigating In Situ Reduction via Lagrangian Representations for Cosmology and Seismology Applications,
S. Sane, C. R. Johnson, H. Childs. In Computational Science -- ICCS 2021, Springer International Publishing, pp. 436--450. 2021.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-77961-0_36

Although many types of computational simulations produce time-varying vector fields, subsequent analysis is often limited to single time slices due to excessive costs. Fortunately, a new approach using a Lagrangian representation can enable time-varying vector field analysis while mitigating these costs. With this approach, a Lagrangian representation is calculated while the simulation code is running, and the result is explored after the simulation. Importantly, the effectiveness of this approach varies based on the nature of the vector field, requiring in-depth investigation for each application area. With this study, we evaluate the effectiveness for previously unexplored cosmology and seismology applications. We do this by considering encumbrance (on the simulation) and accuracy (of the reconstructed result). To inform encumbrance, we integrated in situ infrastructure with two simulation codes, and evaluated on representative HPC environments, performing Lagrangian in situ reduction using GPUs as well as CPUs. To inform accuracy, our study conducted a statistical analysis across a range of spatiotemporal configurations as well as a qualitative evaluation. In all, we demonstrate effectiveness for both cosmology and seismology—time-varying vector fields from these domains can be reduced to less than 1% of the total data via Lagrangian representations, while maintaining accurate reconstruction and requiring under 10% of total execution time in over 80% of our experiments.



Scalable In Situ Computation of Lagrangian Representations via Local Flow Maps
S. Sane, A. Yenpure, R. Bujack, M. Larsen, K. Moreland, C. Garth, C. R. Johnson,, H. Childs. In Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, The Eurographics Association, 2021.
DOI: 10.2312/pgv.20211040

In situ computation of Lagrangian flow maps to enable post hoc time-varying vector field analysis has recently become an active area of research. However, the current literature is largely limited to theoretical settings and lacks a solution to address scalability of the technique in distributed memory. To improve scalability, we propose and evaluate the benefits and limitations of a simple, yet novel, performance optimization. Our proposed optimization is a communication-free model resulting in local Lagrangian flow maps, requiring no message passing or synchronization between processes, intrinsically improving scalability, and thereby reducing overall execution time and alleviating the encumbrance placed on simulation codes from communication overheads. To evaluate our approach, we computed Lagrangian flow maps for four time-varying simulation vector fields and investigated how execution time and reconstruction accuracy are impacted by the number of GPUs per compute node, the total number of compute nodes, particles per rank, and storage intervals. Our study consisted of experiments computing Lagrangian flow maps with up to 67M particle trajectories over 500 cycles and used as many as 2048 GPUs across 512 compute nodes. In all, our study contributes an evaluation of a communication-free model as well as a scalability study of computing distributed Lagrangian flow maps at scale using in situ infrastructure on a modern supercomputer.



Distributed merge forest: a new fast and scalable approach for topological analysis at scale
X. Huang, P. Klacansky, S. Petruzza, A. Gyulassy, P.T. Bremer, V. Pascucci. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, pp. 367-377. 2021.

Topological analysis is used in several domains to identify and characterize important features in scientific data, and is now one of the established classes of techniques of proven practical use in scientific computing. The growth in parallelism and problem size tackled by modern simulations poses a particular challenge for these approaches. Fundamentally, the global encoding of topological features necessitates inter process communication that limits their scaling. In this paper, we extend a new topological paradigm to the case of distributed computing, where the construction of a global merge tree is replaced by a distributed data structure, the merge forest, trading slower individual queries on the structure for faster end-to-end performance and scaling. Empirically, the queries that are most negatively affected also tend to have limited practical use. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability of both the merge forest construction and the parallel queries needed in scientific workflows, and contrast this scalability with the two established alternatives that construct variations of a global tree.



NViSII: A Scriptable Tool for Photorealistic Image Generation
Subtitled “arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.13962,” N. Morrical, J. Tremblay, Y. Lin, S. Tyree, S. Birchfield, V. Pascucci, I. Wald. 2021.

We present a Python-based renderer built on NVIDIA's OptiX ray tracing engine and the OptiX AI denoiser, designed to generate high-quality synthetic images for research in computer vision and deep learning. Our tool enables the description and manipulation of complex dynamic 3D scenes containing object meshes, materials, textures, lighting, volumetric data (e.g., smoke), and backgrounds. Metadata, such as 2D/3D bounding boxes, segmentation masks, depth maps, normal maps, material properties, and optical flow vectors, can also be generated. In this work, we discuss design goals, architecture, and performance. We demonstrate the use of data generated by path tracing for training an object detector and pose estimator, showing improved performance in sim-to-real transfer in situations that are difficult for traditional raster-based renderers. We offer this tool as an easy-to-use, performant, high-quality renderer for advancing research in synthetic data generation and deep learning.



Interactive Analysis for Large Volume Data from Fluorescence Microscopy at Cellular Precision
Y. Wan, H.A. Holman, C. Hansen. In Computers & Graphics, Vol. 98, Pergamon, pp. 138-149. 2021.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2021.05.006

The main objective for understanding fluorescence microscopy data is to investigate and evaluate the fluorescent signal intensity distributions as well as their spatial relationships across multiple channels. The quantitative analysis of 3D fluorescence microscopy data needs interactive tools for researchers to select and focus on relevant biological structures. We developed an interactive tool based on volume visualization techniques and GPU computing for streamlining rapid data analysis. Our main contribution is the implementation of common data quantification functions on streamed volumes, providing interactive analyses on large data without lengthy preprocessing. Data segmentation and quantification are coupled with brushing and executed at an interactive speed. A large volume is partitioned into data bricks, and only user-selected structures are analyzed to constrain the computational load. We designed a framework to assemble a sequence of GPU programs to handle brick borders and stitch analysis results. Our tool was developed in collaboration with domain experts and has been used to identify cell types. We demonstrate a workflow to analyze cells in vestibular epithelia of transgenic mice.



Spatio-Temporal Visualization of Interdependent Battery Bus Transit and Power Distribution Systems
A. Bagherinezhad, M. Young, Bei Wang, M. Parvania. In IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference(ISGT), IEEE, 2021.

The high penetration of transportation electrification and its associated charging requirements magnify the interdependency of the transportation and power distribution systems. The emergent interdependency requires that system operators fully understand the status of both systems. To this end,a visualization tool is presented to illustrate the inter dependency of battery bus transit and power distribution systems and the associated components. The tool aims at monitoring components from both systems, such as the locations of electric buses, the state of charge of batteries, the price of electricity, voltage, current,and active/reactive power flow. The results showcase the success of the visualization tool in monitoring the bus transit and power distribution components to determine a reliable cost-effective scheme for spatio-temporal charging of electric buses.



TopoAct: Visually Exploring the Shape of Activations in Deep Learning
A. Rathore, N. Chalapathi, S. Palande, Bei Wang. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 382-397. 2021.

Deep neural networks such as GoogLeNet, ResNet, and BERT have achieved impressive performance in tasks such as image and text classification. To understand how such performance is achieved, we probe a trained deep neural network by studying neuron activations, i.e., combinations of neuron firings, at various layers of the network in response to a particular input. With a large number of inputs, we aim to obtain a global view of what neurons detect by studying their activations. In particular, we develop visualizations that show the shape of the activation space, the organizational principle behind neuron activations, and the relationships of these activations within a layer. Applying tools from topological data analysis, we present TopoAct, a visual exploration system to study topological summaries of activation vectors. We present exploration scenarios using TopoAct that provide valuable insights into learned representations of neural networks. We expect TopoAct to give a topological perspective that enriches the current toolbox of neural network analysis, and to provide a basis for network architecture diagnosis and data anomaly detection.