WORLDCOMP'09 Tutorial: Dr. Brian J. d'Auriol

The proliferation of low and moderate cost visualization enabled systems and applications have brought the potential of high quality visualizations to end user communities. There is a wide-spread and increasing popularity and adoption of visualization as an effective means to present information and data. However, in many cases, visualizations are constrained by the particular system and users may have only limited background in visualization. In its simplest application, a graph or other picture is sufficient to get the point across. In these cases, the visualization designer may rely on intuition and experience to construct the visual. However, in most cases, a deeper knowledge of the end user’s requirements combined with more effective visual displays facilitates the end user’s understanding of the information or data. In mission or time critical applications, the presented information should be understood in as short an amount of time as possible. This tutorial covers information and data modeling, visualization modeling, visualization techniques ranging from simple visual presentations to more advanced presentations, and various visualization related aspects such as the use of color, shapes, interactions and metrics. Topics and examples range from simple applications suitable for practical applications to research level concepts. A ‘hands-on’ paper-based and question-answer style engages the tutorial participants.

• survey various visualization applications and systems,
• enable the participants to understand more about the visualization processes, techniques and related aspects that can be used to provide effective visualizations,
• pose research level questions that may motivate research activities,

This tutorial is intended for faculty, engineers, scientists, department managers and policy makers, and students who wish to learn about how to more effectively present information and data visually.

Brian J. d'Auriol received the BSc(CS) and Ph.D. degrees from the University of New Brunswick in 1988 and 1995, respectively. He is now research and teaching faculty in the Department of Computer Engineering at Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea. Previously, he had been a researcher at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, USA and assistant professor at several American and Canadian universities, including, The University of Texas at El Paso, The University of Akron, Wright State University and The University of Manitoba. He has organized and chaired the International Conference on Communications in Computing (CIC) 2000-2008 and the 11th Annual International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems (HPCS'97) in 1997. He has published over 65 papers in international journals and conferences and has given several invited presentations. His research includes information and data visualization with specialization in visualization modeling, program visualization of high performance computing codes, genome sequence visualization in bioinformatics, and health care related visualizations; and, optical-communication parallel computing models with specialization in optical bus models, communication and computation modeling in parallel and distributed systems, and recently, ubiquitous sensor networks. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE (Computer Society).