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   COLLOQUIUM OF THE LABORATORY FOR COMPUTER DESIGN OF MATERIALS
                   School of Computational Sciences
                           (CSI 898-Sec 001)
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       Continuing Developments in Visualization Software at GMU
                      Featuring CCmaps and Glisten

                             Daniel B. Carr
     School of Information Technology, George Mason University

This talk revisits and updates previous talks on graphics software called
CCmaps and Glisten.  

CCmaps uses real time partitioning sliders, color encoding and partitioned
maps to represent three variables for regions.   Example regions have included
regular grids cells, states, counties, and school districts. CCmaps is
applicable to host of applications such as the ecological studies of
alcoholism and studies of standardized reading scores across schools
districts.  The software is ready for discovery by sociologists and educators
across the nation.  Several recent extensions are worth noting. These include
a fast grid search to find good slider settings among billions of
possibilities and live state space snapshots whose selection also return to
previous states with all the interactive options enabled. CCmaps is being
refined for distribution by National Cancer Institute.  

Glisten was developed as a 3-D generalization of a geographic information
system.  The underlying coordinates can be changed somewhat like changing a
map projection.  The basic entities displayed are glyphs.  Run time widgets
serve the roles of assigning variables to glyph features, modifying the
transfer function between variables and glyph features, and managing the
widgets. The talk focused some attention on the widgets. The applications are
also interesting.  The early applications focused tasks such as representing
statistics indexed by amino acid sequences.  Recently the software has also
served to show statistics in the context of protein structure.  Common protein
viewers lack such capability.   While Glisten is still lacking server planned
capabilities enough has been implemented to enable innovative applications.

 Software and applications contributions have come from many sources.  GMU
student contributors include:  Yuguang Zhang, Yaru Li, Chunling Zhang, Yanling
Liu, Andrew Carr, Pragyansmita Nayak, and Yasmin Said  
                         
                        Monday , September 17, 2004
                                  4:30 pm
               Room 206, Science & Tech. I, Fairfax Campus

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM.
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Find the schedule at http://www.scs.gmu.edu/lcdm/seminar/schedule.html
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