IDAV Researchers chaired two tutorials at IEEE VisWeek 2009, held in Atlantic City NJ, from October 11-16, 2009. Christoph Garth chaired a well-attended tutorial on flow visualization and Hank Childs and Sean Ahern (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) hosted a VisIt tutorial. An excellent review of the VisIt tutorial was written up in vizworld.com.

Ken Joy and Serban Porumbescu are offering an IPhone Application Development Course through the Computer Science Department at UC Davis. This course, numbered ECS 189H, leads the students through the App Development Process, culminating with projects that can be submitted to the ITunes App Store. The course is available on ITunesU.

Hank Childs has been appointed chief software architect for a new Visualization and Data Analysis Center at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The National Science Foundation, through the eXtremeDigital program, has awarded a $7 million grant to TACC that will provide a comprehensive visualization and data analysis to the open science community. Childs, a chief architect of VisIt package, a large scale visualization package will be working to expand visualization and data analysis tools for the Teragrid community.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Michael Neff $245,000 for a three year study entitled "Increasing Creative Exploration with Computer Tools that Support Spontaneity and Embodiment". The study will examine whether graphics applications that focus on providing 3D gestural interfaces and allow spontaneous exploration can increase users creativity.

The video "Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Recycling Nuclear Reactor" was featured by Wired Science as one of the best science visualization videos of 2009. This video shows turbulent flow of coolant into a moc-up of an advanced recycling nuclear reactor. The video was generated by Hank Childs of VACET/IDAV, Paul Fischer, Aleks Obabko, Dave Pointer and Andrew Siegel.

Led by Hank Childs, a team of researchers from the Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET) recently ran a series of experiments demonstrating that VisIt, a parallel visualization and analysis tool could be used on massive datasets ranging from 500 billion to four trillion zones running on four of the world's 12 most powerful supercomputers. This effort demonstrated that VisIt's parallelism approach can take advantage of the growing number of cores powering these advanced supercomputers. VACET is a collaborative effort between UC Davis, the University of Utah, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Ken Joy and Christoph Garth $450,000 for a three year study of "Lagrangian Visualization Methods for Very Large Time-Dependent Vector Fields." This research promises to develop new methods that address the expensive computation of integral curves in Lagrangian methods, making new techniques available resulting from improved interactivity of these methods. It will allow these methods to be applied to large-scale problems and data sets, which they currently cannot address.

Professor Michael Neff has received the NSF CAREER award for his project titled "Generative Models for Character Animation and Gesture in the New Age of Art and Electronic Interaction." This research will develop new models of human movement to be used in character animation applications such as movies, games, and online worlds.

Hank Childs, architect of VisIt -- one of the most popular frameworks for data analysis and visualization, has joined IDAV as a Professional Researcher. Childs, who holds a half-time appointment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory comes to Davis after nearly a decade at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was a member of the original VisIt development team. Hank, a member of our DoE VACET project, will concentrate on large-scale visualization projects while working at IDAV.

Ken Joy and John Owens has been awarded an $800K grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration to study "Real-Time Three-Dimensional Exploration of Wide-Area High-Resolution." This three-year study will focus on development of new algorithms for visualizing moving elements in an "urban" environment, based upon large-scale aerial video images.

Graduate Student Attila Gyulassy, with Valerio Pascucci and Bernd Hamann have developed a new algorithm that detects features and patterns in complex scientifici data sets. This effort has been reported by a number of science news agencies, and can be accessed through the cite referenced below

A video entitled "Accurate and Efficient Integral Surfaces for Flow Visualization" won an "OASCR" at the 2008 SciDAC "Electronic Visualization and Poster Night". Six awards, sponsored by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research of the Department of Energy were given from an entry list that included 56 submissions.

Shubho Sengupta has been chosen as the outstanding graduate student for 2008 in the Computer Science Graduate Program. Shubho, working with Professor John Owens, specializes in Graphics Hardware.