Department of Scientific Computing
Florida State University

"Scientific Visualization"

Abstract:

Visualization is critical in many scientific disciplines. With advancements in computer graphics the number of visualization tools has grown substantially. Often it can be intimidating to know which is the right graphics library to use for your project. This talk will provide an overview of the scientific visualization landscape, mostly with respect to the Python programming language. I will cover javascript libraries, such as D3, which is designed for web based interactive graphics as well as OpenGL frameworks which utilize modern GPU architectures. The emergence of recent work on declarative data visualization will be highlighted, as well as my work on the Altair project. Altair is a package designed for exploratory visualization in Python that features a declarative API which incorporates best practices drawn from recent research in effective data visualization. I hope to emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of the many scientific visualization tools available and maybe introduce you to something new.