Distinguished Lecture Series 2008-2009: Cecilia Aragon

Facilitating Scientific Insight with Sunfall
Cecilia Aragon, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Abstract

Many of today's important scientific breakthroughs are made by large, interdisciplinary collaborations of scientists working in geographically distributed locations, producing and collecting vast and complex datasets. These large-scale science projects require software tools that support, not only insight into complex data, but collaborative science discovery. In this talk, I discuss some of the issues to consider when developing such software tools, and describe Sunfall, a collaborative visual analytics system developed for the Nearby Supernova Factory, an international astrophysics experiment and the largest data volume supernova search currently in operation. Sunfall utilizes novel interactive visualization and analysis techniques to facilitate deeper scientific insight into complex, noisy, high-dimensional, high-volume, time-critical data. The system combines novel image processing algorithms, statistical analysis, and machine learning with highly interactive visual interfaces to enable collaborative, user-driven scientific exploration of supernova image and spectral data. Sunfall is currently in operation at the Nearby Supernova Factory; it is the first visual analytics system in production use at a major astrophysics project. I will also discuss related results from computer science research, and conclude the talk with some lessons learned about developing software to support scientific collaborations.

Biography:

Cecilia Aragon has been a Staff Scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2005, after earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004. Her current research focuses on computer-supported cooperative work for scientific collaborations. She studies the development of novel visual interfaces for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets, and has published in the areas of visualization, human-computer interaction, visual analytics, and image processing. A winner of the NASA Space Act Award and the Lawler Award, she received "Best Paper" awards for her research at conferences in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008. She was named one of the 2009 Top 25 Women of the Year by Hispanic Business Magazine. Aragon has an interdisciplinary background, including over 15 years of software development experience in industry and NASA, and a three-year stint as the founder and CEO of a small company. She earned her B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, and her early research was in theoretical computer science. She is also active in program service and the support of diversity in computing; she is the current chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Entrepreneur and Pioneer Awards committee, a founding member of Latinas in Computing, and a board member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research.