09: 15 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Tue. April 21, 2009

11: 00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Thu. April 23, 2009

Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands

Macao University of Science and Technology, Macao

Abstract
Visualization aims at providing insight to its users. Now and then I am a user myself, and use visualization trying to solve a puzzle and to satisfy my curiosity. Simple questions turn out to be challenging problems, leading to a personal quest for their solution and resulting in intriguing images and animations. In my presentation I will present three such puzzles, all in the area of mathematical visualization. The first puzzle concerns knot theory. Take a string, and glue the ends together. It is easy to imagine a orientable surface that has this string as its boundary: a disk, bounded by a ring. Now, make a knot in the string, and glue the ends together again. Amazingly, in any case orientable surface exist that have this knotted string as their boundary. But what do these so-called Seifert surfaces look like The second puzzle is a classic one: How to map the globe without distortion. When a sphere is mapped to a plane, areas or angles can be depicted properly, but not both simultaneously. But what if we glue together a large large number of small, almost distortion free maps, which taken together cover the globe?

Finally, I will show recent work on tesselation of closed surfaces. Take a highly elastic fabric; cut out a number of identical pieces with the shape of regular polygons; sew these together, such that each side of a piece matches another side and that at each corner the same number of pieces meet; stuff tightly with polyester fiber. What could such an object look like? Starting with six squares, we get a cube, blown up to a sphere. But what do we get when we take 6, 12, or 24 octagons, where at each corner three pieces meet; or 16, 60 or 168 squares, where six of these meet?

Abstract
The Chang’e orbiter has successfully operated for more than 1 year. The exploration data sent back by Chang’e has been distributed to registered research institutes and universities after the pre-processing in National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC). This talk will introduce the processing and visualization of Chang’e-1 Lunar Exploration Data in Macau University of Science and Technology collaboratively with NAOC, CSSAR and Tsinghua University in the past few months.

In this talk, the scientific objectives and its related data of Chang’e-1 will be firstly introduced. In order to study the topology of Lunar surface, the enhancement and automatic seamless stitching of the images from CCD camera will be shown and the data processing and its visualization of the laser altimeter will be discussed, then, followed by the comparison with the results of other countries. For the purpose to analyze the abundance of different elements and its distribution on lunar surface, the analysis of γray spectrum and the distribution of Thorium will be presented. To probe the space environment in the vicinity of the moon, the preliminary results for visualization of measurement data of sonar wind will also be shown. At last, future works will be discussed.

Bio
Jarke J. van Wijk received a MSc degree in industrial design engineering in 1982 and a PhD degree in computer science in 1986, both from Delft University of Technology. He worked at a software company and at the Netherlands Energy Research Foundation ECN before he joined the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in 1998, where he became a full professor of visualization in 2001. His main research interests are information visualization, visual analytics, mathematical visualization, and flow visualizion, focusing on the development of new visual representations. He has co-authored more than 100 papers in the areas of visualization and computer graphics.
He has been paper cochair for IEEE Visualization (2003, 2004), IEEE InfoVis (2006, 2007), is currently paper cochair for IEEE VAST 2009, and he was general chair of IEEE InfoVis in 2008. He received the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2007 for his work on flow visualization, and best paper awards at IEEE InfoVis 2003 and IEEE Visualization 2005.

Bio
TANG, Zesheng was graduated from the Department of Electricity in Tsinghua University, Beijing. After graduation, he was the lecturer, Associate professor, Professor in Department of Electricity, Department of Automation, Department of Computer Science and Technology in Tsinghua University. From 1991, he has been the supervisor of Ph. D students. From 1985 to 1986, he visited University of Michigan and XEROX PARC in USA to do research in Computer Graphics. He used to be the head of Department of Computer Science, the director of Institute of Computer Technology and the board member of academic committee in Tsinghua University. In April, 2004, he was elected as the Director of China Computer Federation. From 1997, he has been the senior member of IEEE.
In September, 2000, he was appointed as the Dean of Faculty of Information Technology, in Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST). From August, 2002 to June 2008, he was the Vice Rector of MUST. Now, he is a full professor and the academic consultant of this university.
Prof. Tang is the pioneer in the research of Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization and Computer Aided Design in China. His research achievements have not only innovation results but also potential for application. He has published 4 books and more than 100 papers in academic journals and conferences.
Prof. Tang has completed 11 research projects and has won the National Scientific Progress Award (level 3) and other Scientific Progress Awards In June, 2006, he was offered the “Contribution Award for China Computer Graphics” by Chinagraph conference. In January, 2008, he received the Honorary Award offered by the Government of Macau SAR for his contribution to the development, reputation and society progress for Macau SAR.