Thursday, 9 December 2010, 10:15 at Torget, Lindstedtsvägen 5, floor 6
by Prof. Rüdiger Westermann, Technische Universität München, Computer Graphik & Visualisierung
Abstract:
Visualization harnesses the humans´ perceptual and cognitive abilities to foster a better and faster understanding of the information that is contained in complicated data sets. Interactive visualization techniques, in particular, provide new possibilities to guide the exploration process and, thus, to put experts and their capabilities into the center of this process. In many applications, however, new requirements arise from the advancements in algorithms and instruments, which result in a tremendously increasing size and complexity of the data that has to be visualized interactively.
In this talk I will discuss a number of recent developments in the area of interactive data visualization at the Chair for Computer Graphics and Visualization of TUM. I will present the results of these efforts in a variety of applications ranging from geographical information systems and biomedical computing to computational fluid dynamics and astrophysics. The focus will be on scalability issues with respect to both the ever increasing amount of data and the increasing complexity of this data. I will demonstrate the use of massively parallel graphics hardware to achieve scalability, and I will present novel approaches for data compression and hierarchical data representation. I will conclude my talk with a presentation of a real-time environment for computational steering, which demonstrates the potential of interactive data visualization in computational science and engineering.
