Science is increasingly relying on computation. This trend has been steadily gaining momentum with
advancement of faster and affordable compute hardware and is further boosted by its wider availability
and accessibility to researchers. Computational simulations are becoming an important aspect of
research in virtually every discipline. This has led to a rapid growth of scientific data and is expected to
continue expanding. Among several significant challenges involved with scientific data a chief one is
making sense out of it. Unfortunately, there has not been a corresponding level of development to
analyze the deluge of data; moreover our ability to understand data is no better than earlier.
One of the untapped potential to understand the data is through scientific visualization. Our visual
system is highly developed and could be harnessed to gain insight by encoding data into visual form.
This is the key objective of scientific visualization, which aims to provide an intuitive way to investigate
and analyze data. Often a visual representation has the potential to make the results widely accessible
to a broad range of people. Based on his work, Amit will broadly discusses the role scientific
visualizations have played in several disciplines including astrophysics, biology, climate modeling,
computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, nanotech, structural engineering and seismology.
The presentation will briefly describe problems, bottlenecks on visualization front and will also feature
few animations.

Biography: Amit Chourasia leads the Visualization Services group at the San Diego Supercomputer
Center. His work has been focused on leading the research, development and application of software
tools for scientific visualization; for data typically generated by massively large computer simulations in
various fields of science and engineering. Key portion of his work is to find ways to represent data in a
visual form that is clear, succinct and accurate (a challenging yet very exciting endeavor). He believes
that with the help of visualization, domain scientists can gain significant insights about their data, pose
relevant questions of their research, share results in addition to visual validation of their data.
Amit's application and research interests are in area of animation, computer graphics, visualization and
visual perception. He received a Master's degree in Computers Graphics Technology from Purdue
University, West Lafayette and a Baccalaureate degree in Architecture (Honors) from Indian Institute of
Technology, Kharagpur.

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