The Art of Scientific Visualization

Donna Cox will provide a visual feast of unique scientific visualizations, arts-technology projects, IMAX movies, and museum shows from her collaborative work with interdisciplinary “Renaissance Teams” at the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) and Illinois eDream Institute (Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Cox and her collaborators have thrilled millions of viewers with cinematic presentations of science. Her overview will include visualizations for large-scale public productions, digital full domes, museum exhibits, IMAX films, feature films, performing arts centers, and high-resolution television shows including work with the California Academy of Science, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Fox Searchlight and IMAX Corporation. Cox’s presentation will include excerpts from the 'making of' the Hubble3D IMAX movie narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. She and her collaborators used Hubble observational and cosmological data to create nearly one-fourth of the IMAX film that won the Giant Screen Awards for Best Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Life-long Learning. The AVL also works in a variety of scientific research projects, including interactive software for the U.S. Department of Transportation and Digital Cultural Heritage with the Cyprus Institute. Among the software and digital technologies, AVL’s Virtual Director™ holds a patent for virtual camera choreography and gestural interface design. AVL and eDream provide visualization software products for a variety of disciplines including the interactive performing arts.

At its broadest level, visualization makes the “invisible visible.” Cox and AVL make visible large-scale data and enable new understandings of natural phenomena to increase scientific literacies. They employ cinematic techniques to present these visualizations in public venues. She and the AVL team collaborate with professionals from a variety of disciplines to create and present visaphors, a term she coined to describe digital data-driven visual metaphors. She will focus on visaphors of computational data and the role that they play in an evolving new visual language. In current practice, researchers develop gather data and develop numerical models of scientific hypotheses. Computational and data-enabled sciences are paradigm shifts in the conduct of science where new knowledge is generated from investigators’ virtual laboratories. Scientists develop heuristic models of phenomena based on empirically derived data; then, together with visualization artists, they work to debug and reveal these studies generating massive blocks of numerical information. This emerging method of inquiry depends upon data visualization to provide insight. Cox will enlighten the audience with a range of dynamic animated visuals including supernova explosions, hurricane evolution, and Chicago traffic.

About Donna Cox

Donna J. Cox, MFA, PhD, is the University of Illinois’s first Michael Aiken Chair, Director of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Director of the Illinois Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute (eDream), and Professor in the School of Art and Design at the College of Fine and Applied Arts. She is a recognized pioneer in scientific visualization for public outreach and education and originator of the collaborative model of Renaissance Teams and the concept of visaphors (digital metaphors of computational science).

See website: http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/who-we-are/team/donna-cox-director