PLENARY SPEAKER

Interactive Visual Exploration and Analysis and of Volumetric Data

Dr. Stefan Bruckner

Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Abstract

The evolution of computer technology has led to a rapid increase in the amount of data that arise in areas such as biology, medicine, climate science, and engineering. In many cases, these data - like the underlying phenomena - are volumetric in nature, i.e., they describe the distribution of one or several quantities over a region in space. Volume visualization is the field of research which investigates the transformation of such data sets into images for purposes such as understanding structure or identifying features. However, simply displaying a single data set is no longer sufficient. As potentially many thousands of data points, each consisting of a volumetric representation need to be investigated, intuitive and goal-oriented navigation and interaction techniques are needed. In particular, it is crucial to provide efficient and effective facilities to visually explore, query, and retrieve data items, as well as methods to categorize and abstract the space. In this talk, I will outline the challenges involved in building such tools, present approaches on how to overcome some of the obstacles, and provide a perspective on how future research in this field may profoundly impact scientific knowledge discovery.

Biography of the Plenary Speaker

Stefan Bruckner received his master's degree in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology (VUT), Austria in 2004 and his Ph.D. in 2008 from the same university. He was awarded the habilitation (venia docendi) in Practical Computer Science in 2012. Since 2008, he has been an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms at VUT. In 2009/2010, he spent one year as a visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His research interests include biomedical and illustrative visualization, volume rendering, and visual data exploration. In 2011, he was recipient of the Eurographics Young Researcher Award. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGGRAPH, and Eurographics.