Graz University of Technology, Austria
Description of organization
The Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision (ICG) at Graz University of Technology headed by Prof. Dieter Schmalstieg is the only Austrian academic group with the charter to address both Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. The group for Computer Graphics and Interactive Systems by Prof. Schmalstieg focuses on the topics: visual analytics and information visualization for molecular biology, human-computer interaction, and virtual/augmented reality.
The institute currently has a research staff of about 80 full time researchers and an annual budget of >3M EUR through third party funding. It also has extensive experience in conducting EU funded research (in excess of 10 finished projects) both as partner and as coordinator. In 2011, ICG awarded 6 PhD degrees, and its researchers published >100 peer reviewed papers. A wide variety of courses in graphics, visualisation, HCI and vision are offered to students.
Previous experience
Since 2006 ICG runs the Caleydo project, funded through various sources, which has the agenda to do research on visualization for molecular biology, and to provide molecular biology practitioners with software they can use in their work. In the course of the Caleydo project, more than 15 papers have been published, including publications and awards at the top journals and conferences for the domain of visualization.
The Caleydo project has, since its inception, been a cooperative effort between the Institute of Pathology at the Medical University Graz and ICG. Recently, other partners, such as SimVis GesmbH, Harvard Medical School, or the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard collaborate in the Caleydo project.
Profile of staff members
Dieter Schmalstieg is full professor and head of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology (TUG), Austria. His current research interests are visualisation, human-computer interaction and augmented reality. He received Dipl.-Ing. (1993), Dr. techn. (1997) and Habilitation (2001) degrees from Vienna University of Technology. He is author and co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications, associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, member of the editorial advisory board of computers & graphics, member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, chair of the EUROGRAPHICS working group on Virtual Environments (1999-2010), advisor of the K-Plus Competence Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization in Vienna and member of the Austrian Academy of Science. In 2002, he received the START career award presented by the Austrian Science Fund. His main tasks in the project will be the project coordination (WP1) and leadership of the work package on evaluation (WP5).
Alexander Lex studied in Graz, Austria, at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA and received his bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from Graz University of Technology where he has been involved in the Caleydo project since 2008 as a research and teaching assistant. He is currently concluding a PhD in information visualisation. His research interests are visual analytics, information visualisation, HCI, especially when applied to molecular biology applications.
Webpage
Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology
Five recent publications relevant to the project
1) A. Lex, M. Streit, H.-J. Schulz, C. Partl, D. Schmalstieg, P. J. Park, and N. Gehlenborg, "StratomeX: Visual Analysis of Large-Scale Heterogeneous Genomics Data for Cancer Subtype Characterization," Conditionally accepted for: Computer Graphics Forum (EuroVis '12), vol. 31, no. 3, p. fff–lll, 2012.
2) A. Lex, H.-J. Schulz, M. Streit, C. Partl, and D. Schmalstieg, "VisBricks: Multiform Visualization of Large, Inhomogeneous Data," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (InfoVis '11), vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2291–2300, 2011.
3) A. Lex, M. Streit, C. Partl, K. Kashofer, and D. Schmalstieg, "Comparative Analysis of Multidimensional, Quantitative Data," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (InfoVis '10), vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 1027–1035, 2010.
4) C. Holzhüter, A. Lex, D. Schmalstieg, H.-J. Schulz, H. Schumann, and M. Streit, "Visualizing Uncertainty in Biological Expression Data," in Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA '12), 2012, vol. 8294, p. 82940O.
5) M. Streit, A. Lex, M. Kalkusch, K. Zatloukal, and D. Schmalstieg, "Caleydo: Connecting Pathways and Gene Expression," Bioinformatics, vol. 25, no. 20, pp. 2760–2761, 2009.