Dr. Kwan-Liu Ma
Director, Institute for Ultrascale Visualization
Professor, Computer Science Department
University of California, Davis

Depicting beyond Terascale

Advanced computing and imaging technologies enable scientists to study natural phenomena at unprecedented precision, resulting in an explosive growth of data.   The size of the collected information about the Internet and mobile device users is expected to be even greater, a daunting challenge we must address in order to make sense and maximize utilization of all the available information.  Visualization transforms large quantities of, possibly multiple-dimensional,  data into graphical representations that exploit the high-bandwidth channel of the human visual system, leveraging the brain's remarkable ability to detect patterns and draw inferences. It has thus become an indispensable tool in many areas of study involving large data.  As we are moving from terascale to petascale computing and data analysis, are existing visualization solutions still usable?  I will go over a few of the new visual-based strategies we have recently developed offering promise for addressing the upcoming petascale challenges.

Dr. Kwan-Liu Ma is a professor of computer science at the University of California-Davis. He leads the VIDI (Visualization and Interface Design Innovation) research group at UC Davis and also the DOE SciDAC Institute for Ultra-Scale Visualization. His research spans the fields of visualization, high-performance computing, and user interface design. Professor Ma received his PhD in computer science from the University of Utah in 1993. During 1993-1999, he was with ICASE/NASA LaRC as a research scientist. In 1999, he joined UC Davis. In the following year, Professor Ma received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his work in parallel visualization. In 2001, he received the Schlumberger Foundation Technical Award for his work in large data visualization. In 2007, he received the College of Engineering's Outstanding Mid-Career Research Faculty Award.   Professor Ma actively serves the research community. In 2008,  he serves as a paper chair for  the IEEE Visualization Conference,  IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, and Workshop on Visualization and Cyber Security.  He also serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics.