Wednesday

SciVis, InfoVis - Bridging the Community Divide?!
Moderator: Helwig Hauser, VRVis Research Center

Daniel Weiskopf, Simon Fraser University
Kwan-Liu Ma, UC Davis
Jarke J. van Wijk, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
Robert Kosara, UNC Charlotte

Scientific Visualization (SciVis) and Information Visualization (InfoVis) are well-established and often used terms in the research field of visualization. But instead of intuitively illustrating two research fields - with disjunctive goals, challenges, and approaches - which they are not, this terminology of SciVis vs. InfoVis rather represents a manifested community divide: there are SciVis researchers and there are InfoVis researchers (and there are only a few who appear on both sides), there are SciVis conferences/journals and there are InfoVis conferences/journals, etc. In this panel, we boil up a discussion about the pros and cons of this community divide, we identify the good reasons for staying apart from each other (yes, there seem to be some of these. . . ) as well as the good reasons for getting together a bit more. We also delineate to what extent this divide is due to historic, social, and organizational reasons (as compared to significant and inherent differences between the fields of InfoVis and SciVis).

Thursday

Visualization Careers
Moderator: Bill Lorensen, GE Research

Chris Johnson, University of Utah
Tamara Munzner, University of British Columbia
Will Schroeder, Kitware
Terry Yoo, National Library of Medicine

Visualization is still a young and expanding discipline with plenty of exciting challenges and opportunities for innovation. The recent NSF/NIH sponsored report on Visualization Research Challenges reinforces the contributions of the field and how the field will progress in the future. Within the field there are opportunities in industry, academia and government to establish and develop a career in visualization. This panel presents five approaches to careers in visualization: Academic Center (Johnson), Industrial Research (Lorensen), Academic Research (Munzner), Entrepreneur (Schroeder), and Government Scientist (Yoo). Panelist will describe their history, motivation, and positive / negative aspects of their career choice.

Publishing your Visualization Research
Moderator: Penny Rheingans, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

David Ebert, Purdue University
David Laidlaw, Brown University
Tamara Munzner, University of British Columbia
Jarke van Wijk, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

Successful publishing in visualization begins with an original idea for how to solve a problem and ends with a contribution to the body of human knowledge. Along the way, the idea may be realized through an implementation, demonstrated to be relevant for a specific application, evaluated to measure its effectiveness, spun into a compelling technical story, and presented to an attentive audience. Alternatively, the idea or its story may be initially misunderstood and rejected, potentially sending its originator into either fits of despair or a scramble to regroup. This panel brings together researchers who have been active in publishing their own work, reviewing manuscripts, editing journals, chairing program committees, and mentoring students as they begin to publish.We will discuss success stories, setbacks, and strategies, hopefully with honesty and humor.

Friday

Is There Science in Visualization?
Moderator: T. J. Jankun-Kelly, Mississippi State University

Robert Kosara, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Gordon Kindlmann, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Chris North, Virginia Tech
Colin Ware, University of New Hampshire
E. Wes Bethel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The field of visualization is at a crossroads. Advances in computer graphics technology and computing power have enabled the development of visualization techniques that have had a positive impact on medicine, computational science, bioinformatics, and finance. However, this focus on transitional efforts has not sufficiently addressed the basic science needed to create universal, validated principles on which to ground future visualization efforts. The purpose of the panel is to (1) assess whether a science of visualization is necessary and (2) discuss what is needed for such a science. We seek to discover the tools we need in order to examine why and how visualizations work. The panelists present different approaches to visualization science, from foundational theories to issues of practicality. The goal of this panel is to spark discussion about the need for a science of visualization and the real world barriers to its acceptance and adoption.