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SOURCE: Communications Specialist
The project seeks to provide researchers with a suite of visualization tools for deeper understanding of complex, large-scale data.
Clifton Park, NY (PRWEB) November 27, 2012
Kitware, a leading R&D solutions provider, today announces the award of $4,049,998 in DARPA XDATA funding to develop The Visualization Design Environment (VDE), an open-source library of tools that will enable rapid development of large-scale data visualization interfaces by novice programmers.
VDE will be developed through a collaboration between world-class visual interface and design experts from Kitware, KnowledgeVis, Stanford University, Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Utah. The project will address how to ingest, transform, and visualize large quantities of data from a variety of sources, including formatted data records as well as free-form text documents.
VDE will be modeled after Kitware’s established Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and Stanford’s successful Data-Driven Documents library (D3.js). The team will produce a suite of novel visualization techniques to address specific end-user requirements in military and other applications. Using the aggregation, querying, and visualization tools provided in VDE, analysts will be able to move smoothly between very high-level summaries and individual documents. VDE will integrate with the larger XDATA effort to produce an extensive open-source platform for analysis and visualization of big data.
The ultimate goal of this effort is to support rapid development of visual interfaces. Existing tools support numerous visualization types but are typically programming-intensive and involve knowledge of many systems to create a complete application, making them challenging for novice programmers. This project will investigate interactive graphics techniques that reduce the programming burden on the user and even automatically suggest effective parameters for visual representations. The result will be a state-of-the-art, open-source library and community focused on the rapid composition and refinement of scalable, situation-specific user interfaces.
“We are thrilled to be providing DARPA researchers with new and improved data visualization tools for data analysis and understanding,” said Jeffrey Baumes, Technical Leader at Kitware and Principal Investigator on this project. “Having an accessible, easy-to-use library of visualization tools will enable them to work through data more quickly and thoroughly than ever before.”
For more information on the Visualization Design Environment or Kitware’s other scientific computing initiatives, please contact kitware(at)kitware(dot)com.
The Visualization Design Environment is sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) under contract number FA8750-12-C-0300.
About Kitware
Kitware is an open-source solutions provider for research facilities, government institutions, and corporations worldwide. Founded in 1998, Kitware specializes in research and development in the areas of visualization, medical imaging, computer vision, quality software process, data management, and informatics. Kitware is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY, with offices in Carrboro, NC, Santa Fe, NM, and Lyon, France. More information can be found at http://www.kitware.com.
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