Created: 25 September 2009

Chris Johnson, director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, will receive the prestigious Cyber Pioneer Award. Alan Hall, chair of the Utah Technology Council, will present the award at the 2009 Utah Cyber Symposium on September 25th. The award is designed to honor individuals who are pioneers in Utah’s high tech industry.

Created: 14 July 2009

In celebration of the 15th anniversary of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, a top 10 list of the most cited papers was compiled to illustrate the success of the journal. Second on the list was a paper by Marc Alexa, Johannes Behr, Daniel Cohen-Or, Shachar Fleishman, David Levin, and Claudio Silva entitled, "Computing and Rendering Point Set Surfaces". To date, it has been cited 574 times according to Google Scholar. This paper introduced a new technique for modeling surfaces out of point samples by means of a moving least squares (MLS) projection approach. It also contain a number of applications, including techniques for resampling and rendering point sets. This general approach became increasingly popular following the publication of this paper.

Created: 25 March 2009

Chris Johnson - "Computing and Visualizing the Future of Medicine" (video not available)
Ross Whitaker - "Scientific Computing and Visualization for Medical Image Analysis"

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Created: 06 July 2009

The VisTrails development team is happy to announce the release of two new versions of VisTrails. Version 1.3 contains lots of new features, improvements and a new version of the user's guide. Version 1.2.2 contains lots of bug fixes and it's basically a maintenance release of version 1.2.1. Both versions come with updated versions of VTK (5.4.2) and matplotlib. For a more detailed description see the release notes below. Both versions may be downloaded from the VisTrails wiki.

Created: 29 May 2009

The ImageVis3D team is proud to announce the release of ImageVis3D 1.0!

ImageVis3D is a desktop volume rendering application which was designed to visualize large data. Support is available for multiple rendering modes, such as 1D and 2D transfer functions, isosurface rendering, as well as specialized modes such as MIP and slice views. On modern systems, ImageVis3D's GPU-accelerated rendering delivers incredible performance, while compatibility options exist to allow ImageVis3D to perform adequately on older systems.

ImageVis3D 1.0 supports Intel Macs 10.4 and up (10.5.7 highly recommended), Windows, and Linux. Download now.

Created: 15 May 2009

Juliana Freire joins the SCI Institute from the School of Computing at the University of Utah where she is an Associate Professor. Before joining the University of Utah, she was member of the technical staff at the Database Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies) and an Assistant Professor at OGI/OHSU. An important theme in Professor Freire’s work is the development of data management technology to address new problems introduced by emerging applications, including the Web and scientific applications. Her recent research has focused on two main topics: Provenance management for computational tasks and Web mining. Professor Freire is an active member of the database community, having co-authored over 80 technical papers and holding 4 U.S. patents. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER and an IBM Faculty award. She has chaired or co-chaired several workshops and conferences, and she has participated as a program committee member in over 50 events. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, the University of Utah and the State of Utah.

Created: 11 May 2009

The ShapeWorks software is an open-source distribution of a new method for constructing compact statistical point-based models of ensembles of similar shapes that does not rely on any specific surface parameterization. The method requires very little preprocessing or parameter tuning, and is applicable to a wide range of shape analysis problems, including nonmanifold surfaces and objects of arbitrary topology. The proposed correspondence point optimization uses an entropy-based minimization that balances the simplicity of the model (compactness) with the accuracy of the surface representations. The ShapeWorks software includes tools for preprocessing data, computing point-based shape models, and visualizing the results. Download ShapeWorks.

Created: 01 May 2009

SCI Director Dr. Chris Johnson has been selected by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to be honored as a SIAM Fellow for his contributions to Scientific Computing and Visualization. The SIAM Fellow is a new honor designed to recognize a member's outstanding contributions to the fields served by SIAM. Dr. Johnson is among the initial class to be selected for this honor. Initial Fellows were selected from among those SIAM members for which certain previous recognition places them clearly among those intended to be recognized by the program. For more information see: SIAM Fellows Program.

Created: 13 April 2009

SCI graduate student Huy Vo has been awarded an NVIDIA Fellowship for 2009-2010. Huy is one of just ten students in the country to receive this honor. The NVIDIA Fellowship Program provides funding to Ph.D. students who are conducting research on topics which are expected to lead to major advances in the graphics and digital media industry, and are investigating innovative ways of leveraging the power of graphics hardware. Huy Vo's graduate adviser is SCI faculty member Dr. Cláudio T. Silva.

For more information about the award, please see the NVIDIA press release "NVIDIA Fellowship Results for 2009"

Created: 09 April 2009

A SCI research team, lead by Dr. Tolga Tasdizen and Dr. Ross Whitaker, in collaboration with Dr. Robert Marc and his team at the Moran Eye Center have recently completed a 3D neurocircuitry map of every cell in the retina of a rabbit's eye. This data is a huge milestone on the way to building a complete description of the neurocircuitry that allows mammals to see. By comparing healthy samples with those undergoing disease processes, neuroscientists hope to develop a detailed understanding of how many diseases cause blindness and hopefully find ways to stop or even reverse the deterioration. The Neural Circuit Reconstruction Toolset used to construct this unprecedented map from thousands of individual electron microscope images was developed here at the SCI Institute and is currently available for download for free. The massive 20GB dataset will also eventually be made available on the web. 

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