Amitabh Varshney
Salient Visualization 

Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Recent advances in data acquisition and scientific simulations result in visualization datasets that can easily overwhelm human comprehension. To deal with the resulting glut of visual clutter one turns to the human visual system for inspiration. The human visual system deals with the natural complexity of the world around us by focusing retinal hardware and attention on what is most important.

Indeed, the principles of visual saliency have long been used in art, illustration, and photography to convey varying levels of importance of the constituent elements. In this talk I shall overview examples of how principles of visual saliency have been used over time leading up to the present in visual communication and scientific discovery.

Amitabh Varshney is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Varshney's research has addressed challenges in interactive 3D visualization for large datasets by reconciling realism with interactivity through multiresolution techniques and high- performance computing. He has served as the papers co-chair for IEEE Visualization 2000 and 2001, program co-chair for IEEE Visualization 2005, and conference co-chair for IEEE Visualization 2006 and 2007. He has served on program committees of several conferences. During
1999-2003 he served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Varshney received the NSF CAREER award in 1995 and the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2004. Further details are at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~varshney

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Tony Gualtieri