We are entering a data-rich era. Advanced computing, imaging, and sensing technologies enable scientists to study natural and physical phenomena at unprecedented precision, resulting in an explosive growth of data. The size of the collected information about the Web and mobile device users is expected to be even greater. To make sense and maximize utilization of such vast amounts of data for decision making and knowledge discovery, we need a new set of tools beyond conventional data mining and statistical analysis. One such a tool is visualization, which transforms large quantities of, often multi-dimensional, data into vivid pictures that exploit the high-bandwidth channel of the human visual system, leveraging the brain's remarkable ability to detect patterns and draw inferences. Visualization has been shown very effective in understanding large, complex data, and thus become an indispensable tool for many areas of research and practice. I will present several new concepts that my research group at UC Davis has introduced to further advance the visualization technology as a powerful discovery and communication tool.

Kwan-Liu Ma, an IEEE Fellow, is a professor of computer science and the chair of the Graduate Group in Computer Science (GGCS) at the University of California, Davis. He leads the VIDi research group and directs the DOE SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization. Professor Ma received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Utah in 1993. He then spent six years at the NASA Langley Research Center before joining UC Davis. He was a recipient of the prestigious PECASE award in 2000. Professor Ma's research interests include visualization, high-performance computing, and user interface design. He has been actively serving the research community. He was a papers chair of the IEEE Visualization Conference in 2008 and 2009, and an associate editor of IEEE TVCG during 2007-2011. He founded the IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium and IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization. Professor Ma presently serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, the Journal of Computational Science and Discoveries, and the Journal of Visualization.