Christopher R. Johnson Director, Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute (SCI)
In this video from the PASC16 conference, Chris Johnson from the University of Utah presents: Big Data Visual Analysis.
“We live in an era in which the creation of new data is growing exponentially such that every two days we create as much new data as we did from the beginning of mankind until the year 2003. One of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century is to effectively understand and make use of the vast amount of information being produced. Visual data analysis will be among our most important tools to understand such large and often complex data. In this talk, I will present state-of-the-art visualization techniques, applied to important Big Data problems in science, engineering, and medicine.”
One of the highlights of the talk is the Gigapixel David project:
“The first gigapixel, multi-view rendering of The Digital Michelangelo Project’s David can now be downloaded and viewed on your iPhone. The ViSUS Gigapixel David app allows you to explore the digital laser-scan of the statue David in extreme detail. With a simple pinch or spread of the fingers, users may zoom in and out to explore such details as the drill marks and scratches left by the artist Michelangelo.
The David model consists of 933 million triangles from a laser-scan of the original statue created by Professor Marc Levoy and members of The Digital Michelangelo Project at Stanford University. The original data is made of 8 million polygons, each about 2.0 mm in size, smaller than the thickness of 2 dimes.”
Download the ViSUS Gigapixel David app at the iTunes app store.
Chris Johnson is the founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah where he is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Physics and Bioengineering. His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization. Professor Johnson founded the SCI research group in 1992, which has since grown to become the SCI Institute, employing over 200 faculty, staff and students. Professor Johnson serves on several international journal editorial boards, as well as on advisory boards to national research centers. Professor Johnson has received a number of awards, including the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) award from President Clinton in 1995 and the Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology from Governor Michael Leavitt in 1999. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and received the Utah Cyber Pioneer Award. In 2010 he received the Rosenblatt Award from the University of Utah and the IEEE Visualization Career Award. In 2012 he received the IEEE IPDPS Charles Babbage Award, and in 2013 the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. In 2014, Professor Johnson was elected an IEEE Fellow.
