Archive for the ‘GLEAM’ Category

Yesterday WIRED posted an article featuring the GLEAMviz data visualizations I worked on at ISI Foundation, describing them as ‘mesmerizing’.

Unfortunately the concerned graphics are incorrectly attributed. They are in fact the result of a collaborative effort by developers and scientists at both the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy and the Mobs Lab at Northeastern University, USA, with the support of both European and American research funding agencies.

To end on a positive note:Bill Gates seems to like our work, given his tweet and facebook post.

The Epidemic Planet visualisation/installation is currently on show in Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, an exhibition on scientific data visualisation. The show explores “how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time”. It runs from 20 February till 26 May 2014 at The British Library in London.

For the new version shown in this exhibition, the GLEAMviz-team provided new scenarios with outbreaks in London and the Isles of Scilly, while I redesigned the interface and the cartographic renderings. Screenshots of the results are shown below.

This control panel is provided on a touch-screen. It allows the visitors to select and compare different epidemic scenarios.

 

This cartographic animation shows the evolution of the simulated scenarios.

Some appearances in the press:

• BBC Future – 19 February, 2014
  
• The Independent – 19 February, 2014
• Design Week – 19 February, 2014
• New Scientist – 21 February, 2014
• WIRED.it – 22 February, 2014
• Gizmodo – 26 February, 2014
• The Guardian – Data Blog – 27 February, 2014

Quotes:

• Finally checked out Beautiful Science #dataviz exhibit at @britishlibrary. short & sweet. especially liked epidemic simulator by @gleamviz. Andre Tartar, Economic Data Editor at Bloomberg News and New York Magazine, 30 March 2014.

An updated version of our Epidemic Planet exhibit is currently shown in the Epidèmia show in CosmoCaixa, the awesome science museum in Barcelona.

 

Data Driven Dynamical Networks

From September 26 till October 1, we organized the Data Driven Dynamical Network workshop in Les Houches, France. We brought together a group of people from a variety of scientific backgrounds to share insights in the collection, analysis, application and visualization of data driven dynamical networks.

Connecting the Dots

On 22 October, I gave a talk about Visualizing SocioPatterns at Connecting the Dots, a Network Visualization Symposium at Harvard University, organized by Samuel Arbesman, Michael Barnett, and Jukka-Pekka Onnela from the Harvard Medical School.

GLEaMviz Simulator v2.6

We recently released a new version -v2.6- of the GLEaMviz Simulator application in which we provide an improved visualization of the epidemic spreading. The following movie provides some examples of how this new visualization shows the number of new cases at the cell-level, instead of the less precise basin-level incidence representation used in the previous versions.

The user can now also select from a number of backdrop maps onto which the visualization is projected, details of which are shown in the following figure. The left option is based on the NASA Blue Marble map, while the other two provide a more neutral base onto which the cell-level cases can be inspected with greater visual accuracy.

Epidemic Planet

A new version of the Epidemic Planet exhibit, now with the new visualization of GLEaMviz Simulator v2.6, was shown in the Exhibition hall of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC10), that was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from November 13th to 19th. The exhibit was hosted at the booth of the Indiana University, partner of the GLEaMviz project.

The Epidemic Planet is currently also shown in CosmoCaixa Mòbil – Tecnorevolución, a traveling exhibition by the Cosmo Caixa science museum that will set up show in a number of cities in Spain.

We recently released a publicly accessible version of the GLEaMviz Simulator. This client-server system allows its user to design, execute and visualize simulations of world-wide epidemic outbreaks. I have updated my related project page, providing a overview of this novel system’s functionality. You can, of course, also try it out yourself.

I am currently working on the next version of the Epidemic Planet installation, which will be exhibited at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in collaboration with the British Society for Immunology. In this new version, visitors will observe the evolution of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic since its early origin in Mexico, and will discover how the air traffic and commuting flows determined the spreading patterns of the flu worldwide, and how different intervention scenarios could have influenced this spreading. For more information see this post on gleamviz.org.

This is another interview with yours truly recorded during the hectic opening of the Infectious exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin. This interview is about the Epidemic Planet visualization application I developed in the context of the GLEaMviz project.

Another project I have been involved in at ISI is the GLEaMviz project, in which I’m primarily dealing with visualization and dissemination. I have for instance developed the Epidemic Planet visualization currently on display at the Infectious exhibition in the Trinity College Science Gallery in Dublin. You can read a bit more about this exhibit on this blog post. This visualization is a multi-window Adobe Air app. The movies are pre-rended in another Adobe Air app, which is the actual GLEaMviz app.

The GLEaMviz app provides a multi-scale temporal visualization of the data produced by the GLEaM modeling system. The app provides an interactive interfacing mode and can also export frames, one for each timestep, which can then be compiled in a movie. I plan to provide more info, screenshots, and movies, but I’m currently very busy with the Mexican Flu spread projections reporting on gleamviz.org.