Sujal Bista and Horace Ip Receive Honors at 2014 IEEE Visualization Conference

Two researchers affiliated with the Graphics and Visual Informatics Laboratory, one of 16 labs and centers in UMIACS, were honored at the annual IEEE Conference on Scientific Visualization (SciVis) recently held in Paris.

Sujal Bista, a research associate in UMIACS, was honored with a Best Paper Award for his research on visualization of diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) tensors for understanding the brain microstructure.

Cheuk Yiu “Horace” Ip, a former doctoral student in GVIL and now a researcher at AT&T Labs, received the Best Dissertation of the Year award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee.

“The competition for both awards was fierce, and I am thrilled to see Maryland computer science graduates competing for, and winning, these highly prestigious awards,” says Amitabh Varshney, the director of UMIACS who served as adviser to both Bista and Ip.

Bista’s paper was chosen from 136 submissions, of which 34 were accepted for presentation at the conference. It explores the use of spherical harmonics illumination in visually exploring and analyzing dense spatio-angular fields in the human brain.

Bista believes the effectiveness of this approach over current state-of-the-art techniques (mean diffusion, fractional anisotropy, and principal diffusion direction color maps) can help medical experts better identify changes in the brain microstructure due to causes like severe to mild traumatic brain injuries, frontal lobe damage and tumors.

Co-authors on the winning paper were Rao Gullapalli and Jiachen Zhuo—both radiology experts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore—and Varshney.

Ip’s winning dissertation paper builds upon recent advances in machine learning, visualization, and user interactions to facilitate exploration of large-scale scientific datasets.

It details how to extract, visualize and explore informative regions on very large 2-D landscape images, 3-D volumetric datasets, high-dimensional in order to discover patterns, relationships and anomalies that can lead to new scientific, engineering and medical advances.

The IEEE SciVis conference is considered the most prestigious conference in the field of computer visualization, covering scientific visualization, information visualization and visual analytics. This year’s event attracted more than 1,100 participants from around the world.