NIH/NSF Workshops on Visualization Research Challenges

About the workshops:

It has been 17 years since the original NSF report by McCormick, DeFanti, and Brown, " Visualization in Scientific Computing ," was published in the ACM Computer Graphics quarterly. In the intervening years, many of the grand challenges from those days have been addressed, and some of them have been answered. New frontiers likewise have grown up to take their place. Conferences have been formed and thrive, seminal algorithms have appeared and matured, and software and networking systems have exploded beyond the imaginations of the attendees of the original panel. Great changes have taken place, and hardware for visualization has become nearly ubiquitous. We are at a crossroads, and some new vision is required.

It is time to revisit this topic, take stock of the field, and consider the creation of a new report. The workshop is expected to explore the area of visualization, not only in the traditional aspects/applications of scientific and medical visualization, but also in the emerging and developing areas of information visualization, large dataset management, new mathematical foundations, and non-traditional research avenues in perception, artistic representation, interaction, uncertainty, simulation, and other topics that are "out of the mainstream."

Workshop Organization:

We have held two meetings to draft an updated report outlining the immediate and long-range challenges for the discipline of visualization and its many related research areas, topics, and applications.

The workshops were sponsored by a range of divisions, offices, institutes and directorates at the NIH and NSF. They have also had the generous support of non-profit and corporate contributors. The overall organization for the workshops are governed by the chairs who form the executive committee for the project, and the government liason, Terry Yoo (OHPCC/LHNCBC/NLM/NIH/DHHS).

Executive Committee