More Like this

1. Bringing Montage To Cutting Edge Science Environments.

   Berriman, G. Bruce ; Good, John C. ( February 2020 , NSF Cyberinfrastructure For Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) Principal Investigator Meeting)

   e describe the use of Montage to create all-sky astronomy maps compliant with the Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) sky-tesselation scheme. These maps support panning and zooming across the sky to progressively smaller scales, and are used widely for visualization in astronomy. They are, however, difficult to create at infrared wavelengths because of high background emission. Montage is an ideal tool for creating infrared maps for two reasons: it uses background modeling to rectify the time variable image backgrounds to a common level; and it uses an adaptive image stretch algorithm to convert the image data to display values for visualization. The creation of the maps involves the use of existing Montage tools in tandem with four new tools to support HiPS. We wil present images of infrared sky surveys in the HiPS scheme.
2. Visualizing Life in the Deep: A Creative Pipeline for Data-Driven Animations to Facilitate Marine Mammal Research, Outreach, and Conservation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VISAP52981.2021.00007  

   Kendall-Bar, Jessica ; Kendall-Bar, Nicolas ; Forbes, Angus G. ; McDonald, Gitte ; Ponganis, Paul J. ; Williams, Cassondra ; Horning, Markus ; Hindle, Allyson ; Klinck, Holger ; Beltran, Roxanne S. ; et al ( October 2021 , 2021 IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP))

   In this paper, we introduce a creative pipeline to incorporate physiological and behavioral data from contemporary marine mammal research into data-driven animations, leveraging functionality from industry tools and custom scripts to promote scientific insights, public awareness, and conservation outcomes. Our framework can flexibly transform data describing animals’ orientation, position, heart rate, and swimming stroke rate to control the position, rotation, and behavior of 3D models, to render animations, and to drive data sonification. Additionally, we explore the challenges of unifying disparate datasets gathered by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, and outline our design process for creating meaningful data visualization tools and animations. As part of our pipeline, we clean and process raw acceleration and electrophysiological signals to expedite complex multi-stream data analysis and the identification of critical foraging and escape behaviors. We provide details about four animation projects illustrating marine mammal datasets. These animations, commissioned by scientists to achieve outreach and conservation outcomes, have successfully increased the reach and engagement of the scientific projects they describe. These impactful visualizations help scientists identify behavioral responses to disturbance, increase public awareness of human-caused disturbance, and help build momentum for targeted conservation efforts backed by scientific evidence.
3. Interactive hydrological modelling and simulation on client-side web systems: an educational case study

   https://doi.org/10.2166/hydro.2022.061  

   Ewing, Gregory ; Mantilla, Ricardo ; Krajewski, Witold ; Demir, Ibrahim ( November 2022 , Journal of Hydroinformatics)

   Computational hydrological models and simulations are fundamental pieces of the workflow of contemporary hydroscience research, education, and professional engineering activities. In support of hydrological modelling efforts, web-enabled tools for data processing, storage, computation, and visualization have proliferated. Most of these efforts rely on server resources for computation and data tasks and client-side resources for visualization. However, continued advancements of in-browser, client-side compute performance present an opportunity to further leverage client-side resources. Towards this end, we present an operational rainfall-runoff model and simulation engine running entirely on the client side using the JavaScript programming language. To demonstrate potential uses, we also present an easy-to-use in-browser interface designed for hydroscience education. Although the use case presented here is self-contained, the core technologies can extend to leverage multi-core processing on single machines and parallelization capabilities of multiple clients or JavaScript-enabled servers. These possibilities suggest that client-side hydrological simulation can play a central role in a dynamic, interconnected ecosystem of web-ready hydrological tools.
4. Connecting Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches in Environmental Observing

   https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab018  

   Eicken, Hajo ; Danielsen, Finn ; Sam, Josephine-Mary ; Fidel, Maryann ; Johnson, Noor ; Poulsen, Michael K ; Lee, Olivia A ; Spellman, Katie V ; Iversen, Lisbeth ; Pulsifer, Peter ; et al ( April 2021 , BioScience)

   Abstract Effective responses to rapid environmental change rely on observations to inform planning and decision-making. Reviewing literature from 124 programs across the globe and analyzing survey data for 30 Arctic community-based monitoring programs, we compare top-down, large-scale program driven approaches with bottom-up approaches initiated and steered at the community level. Connecting these two approaches and linking to Indigenous and local knowledge yields benefits including improved information products and enhanced observing program efficiency and sustainability. We identify core principles central to such improved links: matching observing program aims, scales, and ability to act on information; matching observing program and community priorities; fostering compatibility in observing methodology and data management; respect of Indigenous intellectual property rights and the implementation of free, prior, and informed consent; creating sufficient organizational support structures; and ensuring sustained community members’ commitment. Interventions to overcome challenges in adhering to these principles are discussed.
5. Unified Voice and Group Agency: Developing Teams to Transform Engineering Education

   Margherio, C. ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   This research paper investigates how individual change agents come together to form effective teams. Improving equity within academic engineering requires changes that are often too complex and too high-risk for a faculty member to pursue on their own. Teams offer the advantage of combining a diverse skill set of many individuals, as well as bringing together insider knowledge and external specialist expertise. However, in order for teams of academic change agents to function effectively, they must overcome the challenges of internal politics, power differentials, and group conflict. This analysis of team formation emerges from our participatory action research with recipients of the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grants. Through an NSF-funded collaboration between the University of Washington and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technoliogy, we work with the RED teams to research the process of change as they work to improve equity and inclusion within their institutions. Utilizing longitudinal qualitative data from focus group discussions with 16 teams at the beginning and midpoints of their projects, we examine the development of teams to transform engineering education. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from social movement theory, we highlight the importance of creating a unified team voice and developing a sense of group agency. Teamsmore »have a better chance of achieving their goals if members are able to create a unified voice—that is, a shared sense of purpose and vision for their team. We find that the development of a team’s unified voice begins with proposal writing. When members of RED teams did not collaboratively write the grant proposal, they found it necessary to devote more time to develop a sense of shared vision for their project. For many RED teams, the development of a unified voice was further strengthened through external messaging, as they articulated a “we” in opposition to a “they” who have different values or interests. Group agency develops as a result of team members perceiving their goals as attainable and their efforts, as both individuals and a group, as worthwhile. That is, group agency is dependent on both the credibility of the team as well as trust among team members. For some of the RED teams, the NSF requirement to include social scientists and education researchers on their teams gave the engineering team members new, increased exposure to these fields. RED teams found that creating mutual respect was foundational for working across disciplinary differences and developing group agency.« less