Center for Visual & Decision Informatics

An Industry/University Cooperative Research Center

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

http://nsf-cvdi.lousiana.edu

http://nsf-cvdi.lousiana.edu

HIGHLIGHTSCVDI will be a joint collaboration between the Uni-versity of Louisiana at Lafayette and Drexel University. The Center will have 26 participating faculty members from both universities, primarily from Computer Sci-ence, Information Science and Chemical Engineering. In the last 5 years, the participating faculty members have contributed 233 research publications, 12 li-censed products and a track record of bringing over $20M of research funding. CVDI will be a member of the National Science Foundation’s successful and proven Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) Program.

FACILITIESThe Center’s research will be supported by state-of-the art computing and visualization facilities. These include:

• The Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, a visualization facility with a six-sided immersive visualization and 3D visualization theatre support-ed by 4.1 TB memory SGI Altix 700 machine with 160 CPU cores

• A state-wide distributed High Performance Com-puting infrastructure supported by a 40GBPs opti-cal network, called the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative

• An experimental cloud computing cluster, virtual reality displays with tracking and haptic devices

• The College of Information Science at Drexel has a variety of specialized facilities, including a large server IBM e1350 Linux Cluster- containing 335 computing nodes, each with Dual Intel Xeon processors- for dedicated to research use

Director:Dr. Vijay Raghavan

337.482.6603raghavan@louisiana.edu

Co-Director:Dr. Xiaohua Tony Hu215.895.0551xh29@drexel.edu

Center for Visual & Decision Informatics

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

For additional information or discussion, please contact Vijay Raghavan or Tony Hu by phone or email. We also welcome you to visit

us at our offices, have us visit your premises or click

Visualization enables humans to intuitively under-stand, analyze and interpret information. With the growth in the magnitude and complexity of data available through digital media such as the internet and sensor instruments, decision makers in both in-dustry and government are constantly faced with challenges to interpret actionable information from complex and dynamic data.

The Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/Uni-versity Cooperative Research Center. The Center’s mission is to research and develop next generation visual and decision support tools and techniques to enable decision makers in government and industry to fundamentally improve the way their organization’sinformation is interpreted and analyzed. CVDI will bring together, analytic, visual and perceptual tech-niques by advancing the state-of-the-art in the five-year-old research field known as Visual Analytics. This research will be supported by advanced computing and visualization facilities to create Decision-Making Environments (DME) – a framework that will enable users to explore and customize information streams in a variety of modalities to gain better insight to that information. The research at CVDI will span multiple industry/government sectors, including:

CVDI will be the center of excellence in Visual Analyt-ics research. CVDI will be driven by academic experts in various disciplines, world-class visualization and supercomputing facilities and the needs of the indus-try. While the Center will focus on the basic research necessary to develop and advance future technolo-gies, it will also seek additional funding opportunities for applied research to translate research ideas into products that reflect the needs of its government and industry members. The Center’s goals are to:

Accelerate the creation and transfer of knowledge and technology to industry and commercial products

Discover, share and leverage synergies of concepts, technologies and resources needed for industry-relevant Visual and Decision Informatics research

Create a future workforce that benefits the local and national economy by edu-cating a diverse body of students on the interdisciplinary field of Visual and Deci-sion Informaticss

In summary, the CVDI’s value proposition is to offer a low cost, low risk venue for its members from indus-try and government agencies to validate their early stage innovations with the involvement of university faculty, post doctorate scholars and students.

OVERVIEW GOALS

As a member of the CVDI Industry Advisory Board, you will have access to the leading-edge developments in Visual and Decision Informatics and have an opportu-nity to provide direction to the Center’s research proj-ects that directly reflect the needs of your organization and of potential end-users of the resulting technolo-gies. You will also have access to the interdisciplinary knowledge base from academic researchers and en-gage with other industry advisory board members to explore potential opportunities. The following are the highlights of membership benefits:

• One-stop access to interdisciplinary univer-sity professors, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students from partnering universities

• A well-equipped venue to investigate a re-search topic that may otherwise be expensive to investigate with your existing staff

• Formal periodic project reviews along with continuous informal interaction and timely access to reports, papers and intellectual property generated by the Center, which will significantly reduce your risk to validate your innovative ideas

• Convenient access to world-class facilities, including cloud computing, supercomputing and immersive visualizations

• Recruitment opportunities to attract outstand-ing graduate students

• Opportunity to network and collaborate with other industry advisory board members to explore joint venues of research collaboration

• Leverage R&D investments and access ex-ternal technologies; The NSF will match one dollar for every three dollars jointly spent by government and industry

BENEFITS OF MEMBERSHIP

• Healthcare

• Bioinformatics

• Biomedicine

• Financial Services

• Homeland Security

• Emergency Management

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