A picture is worth a thousand words. Visualization and graphics both encompass the art and science of producing images that capture the complexity, intricacy, and beauty of real-world datasets. With good visualization, an evolutionary biologist can easily make sense of the rich ancestral relationships in plant genomes. A geologist uses computer graphics to see the structure of caves that would be physically inaccessible to her. A programmer visualizing the execution of her code can quickly pinpoint a problem with a parallel program running on thousands of machines. Computer graphics research seeks to improve the fundamental techniques by which we can create and manipulate visual content. Visualization research creates novel algorithms and interaction techniques that make data accessible to experts, and to the broader public as well.
Both visualization and graphics are unique in that they combine core CS research with a variety of other fields such as perceptual psychology, art, design, and statistics. This research frequently offers opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations to solve exciting problems with real world applications. Our group, the HDC lab (https://hdc.cs.arizona.edu), includes world-class expertise in graph drawing, large data and systems visualization, topological data analysis, performance visualization, geometry processing, GPU techniques, physically-based animation, data structures for interactive data analysis at scale, and flow visualization.
