Me in 2012: I wish I could go to SIGGRAPH someday, that would make me so happy.
Me in 2014: I can’t believe I’m actually attending SIGGRAPH!
Me in 2017: I can’t believe I’m actually teaching a course at SIGGRAPH!
Me in 2020: I can’t believe I’m actually a peer reviewer for SIGGRAPH!
2012 me would be so proud.
I am officially an instructor! The Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) “3D Data Visualization for Science Communication” is available now at: https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-visualization-science-communication
It is a 4-week introductory course on scientific visualization, which I developed with my colleague, AJ Christensen.
I started the organization Women@NCSA at the beginning of 2017, and I am proud of what it has grown into! We were just awarded affiliate status with the international organization Women in High Performance Computing. More details here:
NCSA’s Women in Tech Group Awarded Women in High Performance Computing Affiliate Status
AJ and I were interviewed by SideFX, the makers of Houdini, at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference a few months ago. Here is the cool video they made, where we talk about how the AVL uses Houdini!
My colleague AJ Christensen and I gave a webinar on using Houdini for scientific visualization. Check it out below.
My high school, Northside College Prep, wrote an article about me and titled it “An Inspiration to Women in Computer Science“. That’s very sweet. I’m blushing!
Northside was recently ranked as the #2 best public high school in America. Go Mustangs!
Here is a demo reel showing off some of AVL’s work. I worked on some, but not all, of the shots in this video (the AVL has been around for a long time)!
I’ll be teaching a course at SIGGRAPH called “Communicating Science Through Visualization in an Age of Alternative Facts“.
SIGGRAPH is kind of a big deal. Nervous and excited!
The course notes are available here.
There’s been some exciting stuff going on! I’ve been collaborating with Dr. Jill Naiman at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to create ytini, an open-source middleware between the scientific analysis and visualization Python package, yt, and the visual effects software, Houdini.
We made a website with code, tutorials, and downloads at ytini.com, that teaches anyone how to make cinematic scientific visualizations. I may be putting myself out of a job!
We published a paper about it, and we just started working on our second, after having a major breakthrough with the help of my intern, Haoming Lai: We can now render Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data.
This is a big deal, because AMR is a common data format for astrophysics and climate sciences. It consists of nested, multi-resolution grids, which let you have more detail where there are more interesting things going on in the data. On the other hand, Houdini only works with uniform, cartesian grids… You can see how we made this work by following the tutorial here. Also, stay tuned for the next paper!
I gave a TED talk last week! Here’s an article about it. I wonder if the video of the talk will get posted soon?
Leading a group discussion at the end of the event. I don’t remember what I was talking about at this moment, but it sure looks like I was making an important point!
Posing with the TEDxUIUC logo