Welcome

This webpage provides the basic information of my CAREER NSF project and its outcome.


Motivation

Vector fields are a ubiquitous tool to describe the behaviors of various dynamical systems that dominate many important physical phenomena, especially fluids. Their analysis is indispensable for many applications ranging from medical data analysis such as blood circulation to tsunami simulations and many other problems in science and engineering. However, most existing analysis and visualization tecniques for vector fields are not scalable to the real-world data that continue increasing in size and detail. This situation is worsen given the finite resolution and dimensions of modern displays and the limited capacity of human visual perception channel, all of which prevent us from understanding this inherently complex data as a whole or in fine detail.

Objectives

This project aims to develop an effective summary represetation for vector fields. This summary will enable a number of applications for scientific discovery and education including the scalable and knowledge-assisted exploration of flow data, vector field comparison, and vector field synthesis gaming. To construct such a summary, the proposed research will first investigate the inherent relation among the physical properties of the vector fields and their geometric appearance, and then develop a novel, dimension independent intermediate representation that seamlessly integrates various flow information characterized from different perspectives and in various scales. From this intermediate representation, a hierarchical summary for vector fields will be defined. This research represents one step towards a unified framework of knowledge discovery and integrity from heterogeneous data sources.