Webinar: Recent advances in scientific data management and visualization research at The Ohio State University

NSF CI Compass hosted webinar "Recent advances in scientific data management and visualization research at The Ohio State University" on August 12, 2024. The webinar featured Suren Byna, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at The Ohio State University (OSU), and Hanqi Guo, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at OSU.

Abstract:

Scientific data management and visualization are critical components of handling massive amounts of data and extracting useful insights in that data. In this talk, Suren Byna will talk about the data management research that goes on in his Innovative Data Technologies (IDT) lab and Hanqi Guo about feature-preserving compression along with the activities in his lab.

Among the data management research activities, Suren will talk about Proactive Data Containers (PDC) - an object-focused software-defined data management system. exascale I/O performance optimizations, and AIDRIN - a framework for assessing data readiness for AI.

On visualization activities, Hanqi Guo will highlight recent research on feature-preserving compression for visualization and analysis. While lossy compression is widely used in scientific data management for reduced storage, the impact on visualization fidelity and downstream analysis tasks is often overlooked. To this end, we will demonstrate methodologies to preserve topological, geometrical, and spectral features, such as cyclone trajectories in climate data, dark matter halos in cosmological simulations, and blob filaments in fusion energy simulations; distortions on these features of interest can severely impact visualization, AI, and decision-making for science applications.

Bios:

Suren Byna is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at The Ohio State University (OSU). He was a Senior Computer Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he is now a Visiting Faculty Scientist. He leads the Innovative Data Technologies Lab at OSU. His research interests span across many topics in scientific data management and analysis. Some of these include parallel I/O, file and data management systems, I/O libraries, file formats, and metadata management. He also leads projects in the areas of data quality, cybersecurity and trustworthiness of data, and AI readiness of data.

Hanqi Guo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at The Ohio State University. He also holds a joint appointment with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. He specializes in visualization, analysis, and machine learning for scientific data. He is an awardee of the DOE Early Career Research Program in 2022. He has received multiple Best Paper awards in IEEE VIS, IEEE IPDPS, and IEEE PacificVis, premier conferences in the visualization and HPC research communities.