Proceedings of the 1st conference on Visualization '90

Welcome to Visualization '90, the first annual IEEE Conference on Visualization, held October 23-26, 1990, in San Francisco, California. This conference was inspired and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Graphics. Visualization '90 is in cooperation with ACM/SIGGRAPH. Visualization has emerged in the late eighties as a key field of computer science and its numerous visualization applications. It encompasses and unifies the fields of computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, signal processing, computer-aided design, and human-machine interaction. Visualization is a method of extracting meaningful information from complex or voluminous datasets through the use of interactive graphics and imaging. It provides processes for steering the dataset and seeing the unseen, thereby enriching existing scientific methods. This conference is concerned with all aspects of visualization, with a focus on interdisciplinary techniques. It explores how visualization is being used to extract knowledge from data acquired in a variety of applications. The conference allows a dialogue to occur between the developers of visualization methods and visualization users across the spectrum of science, engineering, medicine, and business. These proceedings publish the 45 full papers presented during the three days of the technical papers program at the conference. We feel that this program represents the state of the art in visualization research and applications. The preeminence of the technical papers program stems from the large number of very high quality papers submitted. The full papers, and the accompanying video-tapes (if available), submitted to the papers chair were refereed by at least three reviewers, at least two of them members of the program committee. Every effort was made to guarantee that the paper and the expertise of the reviewer were well matched. Although this caused a higher load for some reviewers, it resulted in an improved refereeing procedure. The reviewers provided a well-documented and thoughtful summary of their opinions. Following the collection and compilation of these summaries, the papers were ranked. Based on this ranking, and in some cases on additional reviews made by the program committee, and following lengthy conference calls, the program committee was convinced that the best possible selection had been made. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, and with the permission of the authors, the program committee is forwarding to the editor of the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications a small set of outstanding papers. A special issue of these selected papers will appear in early 1991. The Visualization '90 proceedings also include a section of papers from the case studies program of the conference. These papers deal with interdisciplinary issues of visualization, and demonstrate how to go from the theory to the practice, and from the R&D to the application. The nine case studies were selected from proposals that were submitted to the case study chair, Paul Hazan, who was assisted by co-chairs Donna Cox and Laurin Herr. This unique case studies program is an integral and vital part of the Visualization '90 conference. The high quality of this program is due to the quality of the submitted case studies and the dedication of the case studies committee. The third section of these proceedings is the panels program, which includes summaries and position papers by the panel chairs and panelists. The six panels deal with a diverse set of current issues in visualization, such as techniques, tools, human perception and interaction, and graphics-imaging unification. A great deal of work by the panels co-chairs Georges Grinstein and Dan Bergeron and the slates of panelists made this program possible. The keynote speaker at the opening session of the conference is Gordon Bell, chief scientist of Stardent. His speech deals with the question: "What is This Thing Visualization?". This session is followed by a keynote panel Towards Visualization 2000, chaired by Larry Rosenblum, with Jim Clark, Steve Colluy, David Naegle, Pari Sadasivan, and John Poduska as the keynote panelists. The last part of these proceedings is the color section, in which the color plates for the papers are collated. A black and white version of each of these plates appears within the paper itself, so that the paper is self-contained. These proceedings are complemented by a videotape. It includes all the accepted videotape submissions. The video segments supplement the hard copy papers in the Visualization '90 proceedings. Thanks are due to the video co-chairs, Jeff Posdamer and Marian Posdamer, who lent their expertise and time to produce this indispensable appendix of the Visualization '90 proceedings.