MAY 14, 2018 — A meeting of the Visualization Alliance was held at the third annual CENTRA Meeting, chaired by Professor Shinji Shimojo from Osaka University and NICT, Japan, on May 14-16, 2018.
CENTRA (Collaborations to Enable Transnational Cyberinfrastructure Applications) is an international partnership and evolving framework for collaborations amongst research centers, institutes and laboratories across the world <http://www.globalcentra.org>.
The Visualization Alliance, a CENTRA Working Group, is organized by Jason Leigh, Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Jason Haga, Senior Research Scientist in the Information Technology Research Institute at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Leigh was unable to attend this year, so Haga led group breakouts and discussions. Maxine Brown, Director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the CENTRA Advisory Board, participated.
The focus of the Visualization Alliance is on visualization and virtual-reality tools and techniques applied to real world problem solving. More specifically, there was much interest in SAGE2 among other CENTRA Working Groups, and many people were either SAGE2 users or wanted to be. For example, as a Visualization Alliance outcome of last year’s CENTRA meeting, Haga worked with Leigh and his PhD student Dylan Kobayashi on the application River Disaster Information Management https://youtu.be/jglsZNQ8T-g, and other projects with AIST and Taiwan are taking place. However, in addition to using SAGE2 to advance domain science problems, there was much discussion about CENTRA partners contributing to SAGE2 middleware and CENTRA partners connecting their SAGE2 walls to create a persistent visualization collaboration infrastructure.
