Events

Many of today's important scientific breakthroughs are made by large, interdisciplinary collaborations of scientists working in geographically distributed locations, collecting, producing, and analyzing vast and complex data sets. This deluge of scientific data has been called the "data tsunami." Large-scale science projects require software tools that support, not only insight into exponentially growing data, but collaborative science discovery.

This interdisciplinary research area has recently become known as eScience. The lecutre will discuss some of the new research directions opening up in eScience, and describe Sunfall, a collaborative visual analytics system developed for the Nearby Supernova Factory, an international astrophysics experiment and one of the largest data volume supernova searches in operation. Sunfall utilizes interactive visualization and analysis techniques to facilitate deeper scientific insight into complex, noisy, high-dimensional, high-volume, time-critical data. The system combines novel image processing algorithms, statistical analysis, and machine learning with highly interactive visual interfaces to enable collaborative, user-driven scientific exploration of supernova image and spectral data. The lecture will also discuss related results from computer science research, and conclude the talk with some lessons learned about developing software to support scientific collaborations, and potential future directions for eScience.

This event is free and open to the public.