IEEE SciVis Contest Share

The Visualization 2004 Contest was a new event in 2004 created to foster comparison of novel and established techniques, provide benchmarks for the community, and create an exciting venue for discussion at the conference. The contest was open to everyone (excluding the contest organizers and judges)—individuals or teams from academia, industry, or elsewhere. Students and student teams were highly encouraged to participate. Existing tools and research prototypes could have been used, and different tools could be combined where desired. The entries were judged upon the completeness of the solution (with regards to the given tasks) and the effectiveness of the solution. Partial answers focusing on a particular dataset, aspect of a task, etc. were acceptable.

The theme for the IEEE Visualization 2005 Contest was Rendering Revolution. With recent advances in non-photorealistic visualization, global illumination models for visualization, and multi-modal depictions of data and visualization parameters, the field stands at the cusp of leveraging these novel methods for more effective visualization. To encourage this development, the 2005 IEEE Visualization Contest focused this year on these new techniques.

The theme for 2006 IEEE SciVis Contest was "See What's Shaking." The subject was the TeraShake 2.1 earthquake simulation dataset. The goal of that year's contest was to design a visualization that effectively addressed domain-science questions using real datasets.

The theme for the 2008 IEEE SciVis Contest was Multifield 3D Scalar Data. The subject was an ionization front instability simulation dataset submitted by Mike Norman and Daniel Whalen. Their aim was to comprehend the formation of galaxies, specifically focusing on the impact of "shadow instabilities," wherein radiation ionization fronts disperse around primordial gas.

The 2010 IEEE Visualization Contest targeted the field of multimodal visualization for neurosurgical planning. The primary challenge in planning such interventions to identify all related risk-structures, their spatial relation to the lesion that's target to resection, as well as a safe access path to that lesion. Multimodal visualization should support the surgeon in performing this task. The contest aims at demonstrating how novel visualization and interaction techniques from the fore-front of scientific research can help to solve real-world problems of high relevance.

The 2011 IEEE SciVis Contest focused on fluid dynamics. Participants were tasked with creating a visualization to explore the stability of a fluid dynamics simulation of a pump across various turbulence models. One big challenge is the large amount of the data. The contest aims at demonstrating how novel visualization and interaction techniques from the fore-front of scientific research can help to solve real-world problems of high relevance - today.

The 2012 SciVis Contest centers on computational material science, specifically atomic configurations. Contestants aim to create a visualization enabling exploration of phase transitions in a designated ferroelectric material as temperature decreases gradually. The ability to simulate phase transitions marked a significant recent breakthrough. Understanding the behaviour of materials undergoing transformation is pertinent not only to fundamental research but also to technological applications.

The IEEE 2013 SciVis Contest targeted the domain of developmental neuroscience. Participants were tasked with identifying spatial and temporal gene expression patterns in the developing mouse brain to further the understanding of genes relevant to brain development or developmental brain disorders. The Allen Institute for Brain Science provided the Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas dataset for use for the contest, but was not an official sponsor of the contest.

The 2014 IEEE SciVis Contest targeted data from atmospheric research that captures volcanic eruptions and their atmospheric aftermath. The goal was to create a comprehensive visualization of the provided data that enables domain experts to gain a deeper understanding of the volcanic eruption events and helps them better understand the consequences for atmosphere and climate. The data are provided by the Simulation Laboratory Climate Science at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and the Institute of Energy and Climate Research, both at Research Center Jülich, Germany within the JARA - High Performance Computing collaboration.

Cosmological simulations are a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe throughout Its 13.7 billion year progression from small fluctuations observed in the cosmic microwave background to today, when galaxies and clusters of galaxies surround us, interconnected by a vast cosmic web. Simulations of the formation of structure in the Universe typically simulate dark matter, a collisionless fluid, as a discretized set of particles that interact only gravitationally. Ensuring adequate mass resolution within a simulation requires a large number of particles -- typically on the scale of 1024^3, 2048^3, or even 10240^3 particles in the largest simulations. Developing visualizations for these particles, and perhaps more challengingly for the structures that they form through gravitational interaction and collapse, requires first identifying the structures, developing spatial or informatics representations of the components or the structures themselves, and then correlating these visualizations across time steps.

Ensemble simulation can be used to examine aleatoric uncertainty in simulation models that contain stochastic effects. For this purpose, a simulation experiment is performed many times to generate an ensemble of realizations of the model. The object of the 2016 Scientific Visualization Contest is the visualization of an ensemble of three-dimensional, transient fluid flows obtained through particle simulation with stochastic effects at multiple levels of resolution. In this ensemble, the behavior of so-called viscous fingers is of primary interest. The six-dimensional nature and size of the data is the main challenge for visualization. Effective browsing, summarization, and data reduction strategies are needed to obtain meaningful insight into the data.

The output generated by climate simulations is increasing in size, as well as complexity. Both aspects pose equal challenges for the visualization and interactive analysis of the data. The increase in complexity is due to maturing models that are able to better describe the intricacies of the climate system, while the gain in data size is a direct result of an increased spatial and temporal resolution used by modern climate models. The benefit of these high resolution models is not only that they are able to simulate the Earth's past, current and future climate with a higher accuracy, these models also allow us to gain more insight in the complexity of the weather and climate system itself. Until very recently, clouds and precipitation processes were only approximated within climate models and not fully resolved. Now, with maturing models and increasing computational capacities, we are not only able to really simulate clouds and precipitation processes in global models, but also small scale features from the formation of clouds, ice and rain. The data generated, however, is huge and requires special methods for the analysis and visualization of very large data sets. The visualization and analysis assignments for the 2017 IEEE SciVis Contest cover a large variety of different tasks with varying level of difficulty. Especially those associated with cloud detection and tracking, or the analysis and comparison of different resolutions, are very important to us, and maybe your solutions and answers will help us to gain more and faster insight into our data, and finally enable us to improve our research through better visualization.

The 2018 IEEE SciVis Contest is dedicated to the visualization and analysis of deep water asteroid impacts. Asteroids of various sizes, speeds, and compositions are zipping around the solar system with potential future Earth engagements. Most of the earth is covered in ocean and impacts would likely occur in deep ocean water. The IEEE SciVis Contest 2018 is dedicated to the visualization and analysis of simulations designed to study asteroid impacts in deep ocean water.

Recent additions to the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) [Ref 1] framework allow for more detailed cosmology simulations. With the addition of baryonic matter [Ref 2], and a mechanism for designating particles as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), new forms of visualization are now possible. These simulations are used to study the impact that feedback from AGN have on their surrounding matter distribution. AGNs are associated with violent bursts of energy that result from matter accretion onto supermassive black holes forming at the center of galaxies. Visualizing the temperature field of the baryon particles shows how this energy is imparted to the surrounding gas and affects subsequent structure formation. One can also examine entropy, which is a physical quantity acting as a thermodynamic record of heating and cooling processes during structure formation. Hence, the entropy contains a wealth of information regarding the various astrophysical processes that occurred during the formation of massive objects. Cosmological simulations that model feedback from AGN as well as other astrophysical phenomena including radiative cooling, star formation, and supernovae feedback are critical in understanding the structure formation history of the universe. The dataset is from a CRK-HACC cosmological simulation containing 2×643 dark matter plus baryon particles in a cubic box of side length 64 Mpc/h. Particles contain multiple fields, including position, velocity, temperature, etc. The simulation evolved from z = 200 (universe was 5 million years old) to z = 0 (today), thus multiple timesteps are available to visualize time evolution.

The 2020 IEEE SciVis Contest is dedicated to create novel approaches or state of the art visualizations to assist domain scientists to better understand the complex transport mechanisms of eddies in the Red Sea under uncertainty. Eddies are clockwise or counter-clockwise circular movements of water that play a major role in transporting energy and biogeochemical particles in the ocean. We use a high-resolution Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm), together with remote sensing satellite observations, to simulate and study the circulation dynamics and to investigate the eddy activities of the Red Sea. Given the narrow nature of the basin, many eddies can occupy more than half of the Red Sea width, providing rapid transport of organisms and nutrients along the coastline and between the African and Arabian Peninsula coasts. These marine ‘whirlpools’ are much more frequent than what had been previously thought, profoundly affecting the social and economic lives of people living in the surrounding countries. Advanced visualization techniques should enable for better detection capabilities and deeper knowledge of how regularly these eddies occur and how they behave. This will, in particular, help investigating oceanic dynamics across different scales and improve local ocean forecasts, as well as provide tools for the coastguard to undertake search-and-rescues, the authorities to plan for oil spills responses or concentrate discharges, and to formulate conservation plans.

The 2021 IEEE SciVis Contest is dedicated to creating novel approaches and state-of-the-art visualizations to assist domain scientists to better understand the convection processes in the Earth’s mantle. Contest participants will be invited to present at the special SciVis Contest session at IEEE Vis 2021 on October 23 - 28, 2021 1, and the winning team will be invited to submit a full journal article (with an expedited review process) to IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Journal. The contest is sponsored by IEEE Vis and Compute Canada.

The 2022 SciVis Contest is dedicated to understanding the evolution of wildfires, specifically the vorticity-driven lateral spread phenomena. The Contest will be co-located with IEEE Vis 2022, October 2022, in Oklahoma, USA. Wildfire behavior is a result of complex nonlinear interactions between a variety of physical processes and chemical reactions. Understanding the coupling between these components and the ways in which their interactions are influenced by their surrounding environment (e.g. winds, fuels, and topography) is a challenging undertaking. The IEEE SciVis 2022 Contest is focused on the visualization and analysis of simulations of wildfires.

In 2023, the conference and this contest will be held in Melbourne, Australia, and will focus on the visualization of neuronal network simulations of plasticity changes in the human brain.