Visualization and Virtual Reality Research Group Meetings

Visualization and Virtual Reality Group School of Computing, University of Leeds
		VVR Group Events

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Previous Group events

Events within the next 7 days are highlighted in bold.

Time/Date	Location	Who	Event
Autumn, 2008
18/12/08 14.30	6.08	Dr. Corina Sas	Research Group Meeting Details to follow.
09/12/08 16.00	Viva Restaurant	VVR Christmas Lunch
05/12/08 14.30	9.21	Dr. Giancarlo Amati Division of Imaging Sciences, King's College London	Research Group Meeting Design of a registration system of Video Images and MRI in the assessment of knee arthritis by arthroscopy: the DIORAMA project. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) shows potential for use as a biomarker in assessment of inflammatory arthritis and may be used to evaluate new therapeutic agents. Intra-articular variation of MRI signal intensity has been observed, but the relevance to synovial membrane pathology is poorly defined. Accurate localisation of synovial biopsy sites with respect to MR position is required in order to investigate this. DIORAMA (3-Dimensional Integration of images using Optic Remote-sensing technology to evaluate Arthroscopic and MRI Assessments) aims to develop and use image guided surgery technology to validate current and emerging non-invasive imaging methods for the diagnosis and monitoring of early knee arthritis (Osteorthritis (OA) and Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA)). Specifically, we plan to integrate current and emerging MRI methods, with images obtained during arthroscopic assessments using optical remote sensing technology to generate an integrated three dimensional representation of the joint. This technology can be used for point to point comparisons between MR imaging and histology in inflammatory arthritis. Further applications may include measurement of defects in articular cartilage to validate MRI and arthroscopic assessments for osteoarthritis. This approach will combine the strengths of arthroscopy and MRI permitting cross-validation of two approaches.
27/11/08 14.30	6.08	Jungwook Seo	Research Group Meeting The ADVISE (Analysis of Data in a VISual Environment) Project This project is funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and has been run by three collaborators: NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group), VSN International and the University of Leeds(VVR Group). The aim of this project is to provide insight into the increasingly large and complex data sets that now occur routinely in many application areas, merging statistical and visualization algorithms/components from IRIS Explorer and Genstat applications. The architecture of this system is based on service-oriented, making use of recent developments in web service technology such as WS-Resource Framework (WSRF) and WS-Notification. It therefore provides scientists and engineers with a stateful web service for visual analytics, enabling them to maintain their own pipelines, which are alive on the Web. We have developed a three-layer architecture: a client layer which enables a variety of the user interfaces; a web service middleware layer, which provides a published interface to the visualization system; and finally, a visualization component layer which provides the core functionality of visualization techniques reusing algorithms and visual components. This separation of middleware from the visualization components is crucial: it allows us to exploit the strengths of web service technologies in providing standardized access to the system, and in maintaining state information throughout a session, but also gives us the freedom to build our visualization layer in an efficient and flexible way without the constraints of web service protocols. In this talk a visualization Web Service based on this architecture will be presented, and two demos, an Applet UI and an Air quality service are also going to be demonstrated at the end of the talk.
13/11/08 14.30	6.08	Rita Borgo, David Duke	Research Group Meeting IEEE VisWeek 2008 Conference - Trip Report Trip report about the IEEE VisWeek 2008 Conference. A general overview of the Conference will be provided plus some interesting details on the Topology and Tensor session.
30/10/08 14.30	6.08	Charles Flynn	Research Group Meeting GPUs GPUs have evolved from being dedicated hardware to accelerate graphical operations to being a highly paralell programmable processor. The past few years have seen a lot of research dedicated to performing general purpose computations on the GPU (GPGPU programming), which has resulted in the major hardware vendors releasing tools to allow programmers to release this potential. This talk will look at the history of GPUs: how they first came about, the early architectures, and how they evolved into the architectures seen today. We shall also look at the history of GPGPU computing, and how CUDA (NVIDIAs GPGPU programming toolkit) allows the programmer access to the GPU hardware.
15/10/08 14.30	6.08	Yi Song	Research Group Meeting Segmentation of Anatomic Structures from Volume Datasets Using a Level Set Approach There is an increasing demand for the development of virtual environments (VE) for training in vascular interventional radiological procedures, as an alternative to traditional apprenticeship training using physical and animal models. This requires fast and precise segmentation of varied abdominal structures from a broad variety of volume datasets. Then surface models can be extracted from the segmentation results to create virtual humans. The most used volume datasets are CT and MR images, where boundaries of the anatomic structures often have low and sometimes varying contrasts. The level set segmentation method offers robustness to both image noise and small boundary gaps. It recovers object boundaries from the input data by solving an initial-value partial differential equation (PDE) with user-defined feature-extracting terms. However, it is not sufficient to use level set segmentation alone. Efficient initialization techniques are necessary in order to produce successful segmentations. We propose an efficient semi-automatic segmentation system which combines image processing techniques and mathematical morphology operations to obtain an initial segmentation close to the target structure shape. This initial segmentation is then embedded into a level set function to obtain a refined segmentation result. Minimal intervention is required in comparison to other level set based approaches. The approach also dramatically decreases processing time and reduces the risks of leaking at weak boundaries, without compromising the accuracy of the segmentation.
09/10/08 14.30	6.08	Asif Jamil	Research Group Meeting CgViz The primary purpose of CgViz is to provide clinicians a tool to study medical datasets for training or pre-surgical preparation. The tool is designed to support the fusion of datasets from different imaging modalities and support the static and dynamic data simultaneously.
25/09/YY 14.30	6.08	Trevor Dodds	Research Group Meeting Trip Report I will report on my visit to the following Institutions: SIGGRAPH 2008, Stanford (Jeremy Bailenson), University of Southern California (Mark Bolas), and IBM Watson Research lab (Li-Te Cheng).
Summer, 2008
02/07/08 14.30	9.21 (Staff Coffee Room, Level 9, EC Stoner)	Dr. Henrik Nilsson School of Computer Science, Nottingham University	Research Group Meeting A Functional Approach to Programming and Modelling of Reactive, Hybrid Systems Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a functional approach to implementing reactive systems. Prominent features of the approach include an emphasis on hybrid systems, i.e. systems having both continuous-time and discrete-time aspects, and system descriptions in terms of functions on first-class reactive entities. The result is a very flexible approach to reactive programming that supports structurally dynamic systems. The aim of this talk is to give an introduction to FRP and one of its concrete implementations, Yampa, along with some application examples. Additionally, the talk will consider FRP from the point of view of modelling of physical systems, and how FRP-like ideas can serve as a useful starting point for so called non-causal modelling where systems are modelled in terms of sets of undirected Differential Algebraic Equations (DAE) and transitions between them, an approach which we have termed Functional Hybrid Modelling (FHM).
12/06/08 14.30	6.08	Trevor Dodds et al.	Research Group Meeting Conference Reports. "I will be reporting back from Eurographics Virtual Environments, and will give the highlights of developments presented in Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, the poster session and demos."
05/06/08 14.30	6.08	Rodolfo Allendes Osorio, Chris Rooney	Research Group Meeting 1. Contouring with Uncertainty In preparation for my presentation at the UK chapter of Eurographics and the New Route PhD Conference, I'll be presenting an overview of the methods I've implemented to do contouring when there is uncertainty in the original data, represented as a probability density function. 2. A New Method for Interacting with Multi-Window Applications on Large, High Resolution Displays Physically large display walls can now be constructed using off-the-shelf computer hardware. The high resolution of these displays (e.g., 50 million pixels) means that a large quantity of data can be presented to users, so the displays are well suited to visualization applications. However, current methods of interacting with display walls are somewhat time consuming. We have analyzed how users solve real visualization problems using three desktop applications (XmdvTool, Iris Explorer and Arc View), and used a new taxonomy to classify users' actions and illustrate the deficiencies of current display wall interaction methods. Following this we designed a novel method for interacting with display walls, which aims to let users interact as quickly as when a visualization application is used on a desktop system. Informal feedback gathered from our working prototype shows that interaction is both fast and fluid.
22/05/08 14.30	6.08	Dr. Jonathan C. Roberts School of Computer Science, Bangor University	Research Group Meeting Web Searching is challenging - is visualization the answer? Web searching is done by all of us everyday! But there are many problems: Users only usually observe 10 results, but hundreds and thousands are available; it is difficult to remember what pages users have visited and whether they have seen this page before; users change their minds and wander off to something else (wilfing); and change their goals as they explore. Can visualization help? In this talk I will consider some of the challenges, discuss different web-search visualizations and present some of our visualization solutions.
15/05/08 14.30	6.01	Roy Ruddle	Research Group Meeting Navigation, body-based information and various forms of physical locomotion I will be talking about the research I'll be doing in my sabbatical.
08/05/08 14.30	9.21 (Staff Coffee Room)	Dr. Ralph Schroeder James Martin Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford	Research Group Meeting Being There Together: The Future of Social Interaction in Virtual Environments This presentation will provide an overview of different types of shared virtual environments and how people interact in them. This includes immersive (Cave-type) and PC-based environments, small and large groups, and collaborative instrumental tasks as well as socializing. Various aspects of interaction - navigation, communication, avatar appearance, and comparisons with real world interaction - will be highlighted and results from a number of studies of these topics summarized. The argument is made that we can anticipate what the future of "being there together" will look like, both technically and socially. The implication is that we can use this forecasting to improve the social and technological shaping of shared virtual environments.
Spring, 2008
24/04/08 14.30	6.08	Trevor Dodds, Chris Rooney	Research Group Meeting Conference Reports Trevor Dodds and Chris Rooney will be reporting on two major visualization conferences they attended recently: IEEE Virtual Reality 2008 Conference and CHI 2008 .
22/04/08 14.00	Active Learning Lab	Paul Watson School of Computing Science, Newcastle University	School Seminar Cloud Computing for e-Science with CARMEN The CARMEN (www.carmen.org.uk) e-science project is designing a system to allow Neuroscientists to share, integrate and analyse data. Globally, over 100,000 neuroscientists are working on the problem of understanding how the brain works. This is a major challenge that could revolutionise biology, medicine and computer science. Solving it requires investigating how the brain encodes, transmits and processes information. In this talk we will describe the CARMEN system. This is a generic e-science platform "in the cloud" which enables data sharing, integration and analysis supported by metadata. An expandable range of services are provided to extract value from the data. CARMEN is accessed over the Web by neuroinformaticians who are populating it with content in the form of both data and services. We will describe the design of CARMEN and show how it is being used to support neuroscience.
02/04/08 to 03/04/08	School of Computing, University of Leeds	Roy Ruddle (contact)	Workshop International Workshop on Giga-pixel Displays and Visual Analytics The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in visualization and human-computer interaction, to determine how giga-pixel displays can best be exploited in visual analytics. The workshop includes: - Keynote talks from researchers who are well known for their work in innovative visualization methods (Prof Daniel Keim, University of Konstanz) and display wall interaction (Dr Chris North, Virginia Tech) -Case studies, which attendees will work on in groups to develop solutions for real applications. -Posters to publicise attendees' research in displays walls and visual analytics. -Application demonstrations on Leeds' 50-million pixel display wall. Attendance is limited to 50 people. Researchers at any level, and from both academia and industry, are welcome. More information at: Notes/Links GIANT
06/03/08 14.30	6.08	Group Session	Research Group Meeting IEEE Visualization 2008 Desing Contest During this week VVR Session we will discuss an important challenge. Every year the IEEE Visualization Committee proposes a visualization design contest as part of the Conference Venue. Aim of the contest is to foster the design of solution effective at answering domain-science questions on real data sets. Every year a different problem is proposed, the theme for the IEEE Visualization 2008 Contest is /Multifield 3D Scalar Data/. The subject is an ionization front instability simulation data set submitted by Mike Norman and Daniel Whalen. The objective is the understanding the formation of galaxies, in particular the effect of "shadow instabilities", where radiation ionization fronts scatter around primordial gas. A set of six domain questions have been drawn up by the scientists, the effectiveness and completeness of the designed solution at answering these questions will be the judging criteria. We propose you to have a look at the contest (data+domain questions), choose one of the domain questions (or just part of it if the question is too wide) and try to design what in your opinion would be an "effective solution" for that particular question. On Thursday we will divide into groups, compare the designs within each group and have a final discussion about the proposed designs.

Previous Group events

About Research Group Meetings

The Visualization and Virtual Reality (VVR) research group meetings are an opportunity for all group members - and anyone else who may be interested - to get together to talk about VVR research and listen to a talk or presentation. The members take it in turn to present, and we aim to get external speakers in at least once or twice a term.

The research group meetings are usually held every Thursday from 3.30pm, in E.C. Stoner room 6.08 (IN Conference Suite). Room 6.08 is on Level 6, at the west end of the building, and can be found just through a large grey door that is signed as leading to 6.08. Directions to the school.

Each meeting starts with a short update on the last week's activity, and is followed by a talk, paper walkthrough, or discussion on some aspect of visualization or virtual reality, by the main speaker.

Any interesting links, papers books, and so on, that come up in any given week's discussions will be put in the Notes/Links section - and so these may not be related to the title and abstract of any given week.

Every few months, the group meetings are archived to prevent this page becoming too large, and you may also be interested in subscribing to the RSS feed that lists all the forthcoming events.

VVR Group Events