Liz Marai

Abstract: The incredible array of measurement technologies available to the scientific community is changing fundamentally our understanding of physical and biological processes. However, scientific data acquisition marks only the first step. To turn numbers into insight, computer graphics and visualization help us model complex systems, make predictions about their behavior, and finally harness the immense power of the human visual perception system to make insights into complex processes possible. In this talk I will present several novel geometric representations, computational modeling, and visual analysis tools to facilitate the simulation and analysis of such complex scientific phenomena. These representations and tools were developed at the Pitt Interdisciplinary Visualization Research lab I direct, and have applications in domains as diverse as neuroimaging, astronomy, biology, and turbulent combustion.

Bio: Liz Marai is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint and adjunct appointments in the Pitt Department of Computational Biology and at the CMU Robotics Institute. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, and of multiple Best Paper awards and teaching awards. www.cs.pitt.edu/~marai