An already impressive laboratory for data visualization at the is collaborating on a major software upgrade with the help of a $5-million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The (LAVA) consists of 1,200-square feet of space equipped with the world’s highest resolution hybrid reality visualization system called the , which stands for cyber-enabled Collaboration Analysis Navigation and Observation Environment, whose creator is Information and Computer Sciences Professor Jason Leigh. LAVA also is flanked by numerous ultra-high-resolution stereoscopic 3D and 2D, touch-enabled display walls.

• Related �鶹��ýNews story: Who built the world’s best hybrid 3D visualization system? UH students!, November 26, 2016

The software running these walls, SAGE2 (Scalable Amplified Group Environment), is getting a big boost from the large grant to UH, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Virginia Tech University to develop SAGE3, which will essentially add Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the mix.

SAGE2 was first designed for research scientists who had lots of data they had to make sense of. Through the years, technology costs dropped so rapidly that now almost anyone with a computer and three monitors can put together a SAGE wall.

Leigh and Assistant Professor Mahdi Belcaid are co-lead investigators for the new grant. Leigh said the grant for SAGE3 takes the technology to a whole new level by incorporating AI, turning the wall into a smart “co-pilot.”

“The applications for this technology are endless. It will be tremendously useful to enable evidence-based response during natural disasters, like the current COVID-19 pandemic,” Leigh said. “It will make it easier for scientists to use AI to analyze large amounts of data to make discoveries faster. It will help teachers use and teach AI concepts to future generations of students. It will also help film makers and video game designers brainstorm over new ideas more effectively by being able to analyze how films and video games in the past relate to each other and which ones had the greatest popularity and why.”

SAGE3 provides scientists with an intuitive framework that integrates state-of-the-art AI technologies with applications, workflows, smart visualizations and collaboration services to help them access, share, explore and analyze their data, come to conclusions, and make decisions with greater speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and confidence.

The National Science Foundation wrote: “SAGE3 augments every step of the scientific discovery enterprise—from quickly summarizing large data, to finding trends and similarities or anomalies among one or more linked datasets, to communicating findings to scientists, public policy and government officials, and the general public, to educating the next-generation workforce.”

Leigh said, ultimately, it is the scientists and future scientists who must harness the big data revolution to solve the nation’s grand challenge problems that will benefit society as a whole, including studying the diversity of life on Earth, understanding the Earth and its systems from satellite imagery of its poles, developing response scenarios for natural disasters such as landslides and pandemics that impact the citizens and economies of the world and more.

Hollywood film producer Chris Lee, founder of UH’s Academy for Creative Media System, has long been a supporter of SAGE2, helping Leigh construct SAGE2-based tiled display walls, or CyberCANOEs, throughout �鶹��ý.

• Related �鶹��ýNews story: World’s best hybrid visualization system up and running at UH ����ԴDz�, November 26, 2016

—By Kelli Trifonovitch

A cross-disciplinary course offered at the through the departments of , and , is giving students the chance to learn cutting-edge data visualization techniques while working collaboratively on a shared project.

“The students are utilizing data from the natural sciences to create interactive and immersive data visualization experiences to promote public awareness of environmental issues facing Hawaiian ecosystems,” said , chair of the UH Hilo art department.

The data visualization is done using . CANOE is the acronym for Cyber Enabled Collaboration Analysis Navigation and Observation Environment and is a display technology that enables users from varied disciplines to share and collaborate on projects.

The CyberCANOE technology is funded through the . UH Hilo technology sites are located in the computer science department, the , and . The technology also allows collaborative projects between UH campuses throughout the state.

Traditionally, majors at a university can be very segregated, but CyberCANOE technology offers Hilo and other UH students a change of pace. The cross-disciplinary course brings together students of different disciplines to learn skills they will need in the real world after graduation, such as proficiency in digital visualization data.

Creating a visual game backed by data

The focus of the current class is to create a digital game backed by data. This semester’s class is focusing on mongoose (Herpestes javanicus), an invasive species found on several islands in �鶹��ý. The game places the player as the mongoose itself. There is much to be researched as to how a mongoose moves, what it eats, and the environment in which it lives. Although the work can be divided in any way chosen by the students, this research is usually taken up by marine science students.

The next part is for the artists to digitally create the scenery of the game. This includes matching art styles to create one cohesive look as well as utilizing the data given to create realistic looking scenarios.

Lastly is bringing it all to life, usually taken up by computer science majors. They take the art produced and make it move in a realistic way, allowing the game to be played.

The hard work of science researchers can only go so far in making an impact without their work being shown to the general public. Through emerging visualization data and digital media, researchers have an opportunity to bring their work to life. Using visualization technology science majors can spread awareness—in the case of this class, awareness about environmental issues facing Hawaiian ecosystems.

“I’ve seen amazing things out of these students with their capabilities,” said Morrissey. “I think we’re going to see some really amazing stuff at the end of the semester.”

For the full story, go to.

—A UH Hilo Stories article written by Mikayla Toninato, a junior completing a semester at UH Hilo through the National Student Exchange program

The largest Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) wallpaper display in the state was installed at the ʻUluʻulu public space area by the . Installed in collaboration with Jason Leigh, the director of (Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications) at UH ����ԴDz�, this video screen will offer new opportunities for teaching and screening of student work.

A 1,040-square-foot area within in the UH West Oʻahu Library will be transformed into a theater with seating for about 40 people by the end of 2017. Ceiling tiles, walls, and windows will be blacked out and a sliding, retractable acoustical wall will be installed to separate the theater from the rest of the area.

The centerpiece of the theater has already been installed—15 high-resolution LG Electronics screens have been joined together into a 135-square-foot screen where multiple video and other images can be viewed at the same time. The 55-inch, 4mm thick OLED screens feature the latest LG Electronics technology that has better color expression and refresh times than older displays.

“Because of the thinness of the technology it is the first time displays are becoming like wallpaper. This will usher in a future where all walls can be covered with information and art effortlessly and seamlessly,” Leigh said. “When used as a collaboration tool it could bridge distance creating the illusion that a remote location is literally right next door.”

Academy for Creative Media System Founding Director added, “ACM System is dedicated to fostering connectivity between UH campuses and programs and UH West Oʻahu’s second, best-in-class CyberCANOE is an exciting collaboration between Dr. Leigh’s innovative LAVA Lab at UH ����ԴDz�’s Information and Computer Sciences department and UH West Oʻahu’s ACM and ʻUluʻulu.”

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—By Greg Wiles

In honor of the 40th Anniversary of Star Wars, engineering graduate student Noel Kawano and computer science student Ryan Theriot created a 3D immersive visualization project—Star Wars Squadron and Tatooine.

Users can battle with lightsabers or dogfight through a universe filled with starfighters, TIE fighters and an armada of star destroyers.

The (research and fun) possibilities are endless now that UH ����ԴDz� is home to the best hybrid visualization system in the world that combines immersive virtual reality with ultra-high-resolution display walls. The , which stands for cyber-enabled Collaboration Analysis Navigation and Observation Environment.

“We wanted to take advantage of the [Destiny-class CyberCANOE’s] capabilities and make something really cool,” Kawano said.

CyberCANOE users can go under the sea, explore outer space and probe microscopic elements of the human body without leaving campus.

Computer and Information Sciences Professor is the system’s creator. His students were deeply involved in the design and construction of the CyberCANOE with investment and partnership from the and the .

With 256 megapixels, the cylindrical CyberCANOE is the ultimate tool for scientists and researchers to visualize big data at resolutions that are 100-times better than commercial 3D displays. The diameter is 16 feet, and the walls are eight-feet high.

The Destiny-class cost about $250,000 to build and is actually the seventh and best CyberCANOE Leigh has built in �鶹��ý over the past couple of years. His Laboratory for Advanced Visualization Applications (LAVA), where the Destiny-class CyberCANOE is housed, is planning to hold an open house in August 2017.

You could say the world’s best hybrid 3D visualization system is the apple of Noel Kawano’s eye. It should be. The masters in engineering student and a handful of others at the designed and built the immersive virtual reality environment with ultra-high-resolution display walls.

“I know every little bolt, every little nut and screw. There’s like thousands of pieces,” said Kawano, “I know every little detail of it.”

It’s called the , or CyberCANOE, under creator and Professor Jason Leigh.

“[The students] did everything from the design of the structure to coming up with the specs for the computer to developing the software that had to be used to drive the system. Even designed custom 3D printed parts so that we could align all of the displays together,” Leigh said.

The research tool enables visualization of big data and the immersive 3D environment with 256-million-pixel resolution needs the computing power equivalent to 32 of the latest 4K TV sets. The $250,000-project was funded by the and the . Information and computer science masters student Jack Lam eventually realized the CyberCANOE would need eight computers, much more power than he was used to.

Lam said, “Being able to work on this set up is a dream.”

Undergraduate computer science major Ryan Theriot designed the all-important software for researchers and scientists to put their projects into the Destiny-class CyberCANOE.

“It teaches you a very good toolset in being able to work as a team in a very real world setting, instead of just in a classroom,” he said.

Interested in developing software for the Destiny-class CyberCANOE?

After you’ve helped to build the best hybrid data visualization environment in the world, what’s next? For some students it’s pitching the intellectual property to investors for possible commercialization.

“Our pitch is that we’ve taken tried, true systems…and we’ve made it 10-times better and we’ve done it here in �鶹��ý, all built by students,” Kawano said, “We definitely have the wow factor.”

And they want the University of �鶹��ý’s world-class researchers to use the Destiny-class and the next generation of CyberCANOEs to explore scientific worlds from inside the earth to deep space and beyond.

—By Kelli Trifonovitch

You can now go under the sea, explore outer space and probe microscopic elements of the human body without leaving campus. The 3D, immersive possibilities are endless now that the is home to the best hybrid visualization system in the world that combines immersive virtual reality with ultra-high-resolution display walls.

It’s called the , which stands for cyber-enabled Collaboration Analysis Navigation and Observation Environment. Professor Jason Leigh is the system’s creator. He says he built what was the best system in the world in 2012 and was motivated to build something better when he moved to �鶹��ý.

“UH has a lot of amazing scientists which have a lot of data available,” Leigh said. “Because we have so much resolution on Destiny and we have so much computing power to drive that, we have a real cool opportunity, a unique opportunity, to visualize data with the best lens possible, to look at this information in much deeper ways than we could have before.”

With 256 megapixels, this CyberCANOE is the ultimate tool for scientists and researchers to visualize big data at resolutions that are 100-times better than commercial 3D displays.

Interested in developing software for the Destiny-class CyberCANOE?

The Destiny-class cost about $250,000 to build and is actually the seventh and best CyberCANOE Leigh has built in �鶹��ý over the past couple of years. He’s involved students from day one with investment and partnership from the National Science Foundation and the .

UH Academy for Creative Media System Director Chris Lee said, “We just found ourselves really sympatico about how we saw technology changing both the students and the university and ultimately �鶹��ý’s economy in the future.”

Up next, even better CyberCANOEs for UH’s Experimental Program to Support Competitive Research, or EPSCoR’s, fresh water sustainability research and for the .

Leigh said, “Just as we continue to build higher resolution instruments for looking at the stars, for looking at the earth, this is the same kind of thing.”

You could say Leigh and his students are boldly going where no one has gone before and they are encouraging the research community to join them for a ride in the latest, greatest CyberCANOE.

—By Kelli Trifonovitch

The “CreaTable” is a one of a kind interactive table top display designed and built by Noel Kawano, an electrical engineering student at the . The CreaTable resides in the or LAVA belonging to Professor Jason Leigh.

Leigh and two co-investigators just got a grant from the National Science Foundation to build the best data visualization and virtual reality system in the nation. He designed the current top system called the CAVE2 when he was at the the .

• Related: December 14, 2015

The University of �鶹��ý’s new system will be called the Cyber-enabled Collabration Analysis Navigation and Observation Environment or CyberCANOE. That’s where the CreaTable and Kawano come in.

Over the summer, Leigh asked him to build a coffee table for the LAVA lab, but not just any coffee table. Something that would be suitably interactive and would inspire creativity in the lab’s students.

Kawano rose to the occasion, designing the CreaTable using autocad and building it out of extruded aluminum pieces in three days.

“It was kind of like a learning experience for me and I also built something really cool for the lab and Jason’s students,” said Kawano.

While the CreaTable is definitely cool, like an enormous iPhone with a huge touch screen that angles on gas shocks, it’s serving an even greater purpose.

“The fundamental knowledge that he learned to build this table is exactly what we need to build the new CyberCANOE,” said Leigh.

Kawano will be going from this summer project to helping to design and build the best data visualization and virtual reality system in the nation. Fitting, really, when you understand the vision for the CyberCANOE.

“If you think of the really hard problems in the world today, it’s not about just the chemistry problem or the physics problem or the biology or the education problem, it’s really all these things interconnected,” said Leigh. “And so the CyberCANOE sort of provides that platform for these other disciplines to think differently, work together in different ways that they never thought of before.”

—By Kelli Trifonovitch

More on the CyberCANOE

The will be home to the best data visualization system in the United States, thanks to a major research infrastructure grant from the (NSF).

The NSF provided $600,000 and the added $257,000 for a total of $857,000 to develop a large CyberCANOE, which stands for Cyber-enabled Collaboration Analysis Navigation and Observation Environment. The CyberCANOE is a visualization and collaboration infrastructure that allows students and researchers to work together more effectively using large amounts of data and information. It was designed by Professor Jason Leigh, who is also the founder and director of the (LAVA) at UH Mānoa.

UH’s CyberCANOE represents the culmination of over two decades of experience and expertise for Leigh, the grant’s principal investigator, who developed immersive virtual reality environments while at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the .

Exceeding capabilities

The UH CyberCANOE will provide an alternative approach to constructing ultra-resolution display environments by using new and completely seamless direct view light emitting diode displays, rather than traditional projection technologies or liquid crystal displays. The net effect is a visual instrument that exceeds the capabilities and overcomes the limitations of the current best-in-class systems at other U.S. universities.

“This comes at the best time for �鶹��ý as the number of students interested in information and computer science is skyrocketing. Last year about 170 freshman computer science students entered the program, this year we will receive 270,” said Leigh. “The University of �鶹��ý’s CyberCANOE will give these students access to better technology than what will be available on the continent.”

The new 2D and 3D stereoscopic display environment with almost 50 Megapixels of resolution will provide researchers with powerful and easy-to-use, information-rich instrumentation in support of cyberinfrastructure-enabled, data-intensive scientific discovery.

Increasingly, the nation’s computational science and engineering research communities work with international collaborators to tackle complex global problems. Advanced visualization instruments serve as the virtual eyepieces of a telescope or microscope, enabling research teams and their students to view their data in cyberspace, and better manage the increased scale and complexity of accessing and analyzing the data.

“I’m highly excited about this multidisciplinary collaboration between information and computer sciences, the Academy for Creative Media System and electrical engineering,” said co-principal investigator and UH Mānoa Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering David Garmire. “It will advance the state of the art in research infrastructure for information-rich visualization and immersive experience while providing unique opportunities for the student body.”

Creating new opportunities in computer science research

At least 46 researchers, 28 postdocs, 833 undergraduates and 45 graduate students spanning disciplines that include oceanography, astrobiology, mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical research, archeology, and computational media are poised to use the CyberCANOE for their large-scale data visualization needs. The CyberCANOE will also open up new opportunities in computer science research at the intersection of data-intensive analysis and visualization, human-computer interaction and virtual reality.

UH System’s Academy for Creative Media (ACM) founder and director Chris Lee, who is also a co-principal investigator on the grant, said, “ACM System is thrilled to be able to continue to support Jason Leigh and his team in securing a second NSF Grant. This new CyberCANOE builds upon the two earlier ‘mini’ CyberCANOEs, which ACM System fully financed at UH Mānoa and UH West Oʻahu.”

The new CyberCANOE, which is expected to be built in about three years, will enable Leigh’s advanced visualization laboratory to provide scientific communities with highly integrated, visually rich collaboration environments; to work with industry to facilitate the creation of new technologies for the advancement of science and engineering; and to continue ongoing partnerships with many of the world’s best scientists in academia and industry. With the CyberCANOE, the lab will also support the country’s leadership position in high-performance computing and in contributing advancements to complex global issues, such as the environment, health and the economy.

—By Kelli Trifonovitch

Potential investors got to see some of the exciting developments at the at a technology showcase in October. The presentations included:

• “C������-CANOE 3D virtual reality environment” by Jason Leigh, UH ����ԴDz� professor of
• “Anatomical 3D models on the zSpace virtual reality platform” by Jesse Thompson, technical director for anatomical imaging at the
• “Telescope mirror technology for the solar industry” by Professor and MorphOptic co-founder Jeff Kuhn
• “Realistic brain phantom for MRI research and development” by UH ����ԴDz� graduate students Kyoko Fujimoto and Trent Robertson

The event was sponsored by UH’s , UH ����ԴDz�’s and .

Guests included entrepreneurs, potential investors, intellectual property attorneys, defense contractors and other parties interested in licensing UH innovations.

Photos from the event

View photos on the .

—By Kelli Trifonovitch

Modern science is increasingly data-driven, collaborative in nature and international. Large-scale simulations and instruments produce petabytes of data, which is subsequently analyzed by tens of thousands of scientists scattered across the globe.

The and the are partnering on a project led by to accurately understand the current use of scientific data networks, while planning for the required capacity of international network circuits.

NSF grant funds network traffic analysis

The has awarded a grant of $5 million for the five-year project called NetSage. The project is an open privacy-aware network measurement analysis and visualization service designed to address the needs of today’s international networks. NetSage will monitor and visualize all the network traffic flowing over the National Science Foundation’s next generation, high-speed, international and national research networks.

Co-Principal Investigator Jason Leigh, director of the University of �鶹��ý at Mānoa’s , explained that the NetSage project is similar to an automobile traffic map that people depend on to get to work in the morning.

NetSage aids in visualizing network problems

Leigh said, “NetSage will be used to figure out whether there is congestion or outages and what the cause is, so that problems can be quickly fixed and future networks can be better planned.”

UH Mānoa’s share of the grant is $1 million over five years. �鶹��ý’s role is to work with all the network partners around the world to visualize the international network map using the enormous amount of data that will be collected. In addition the project aims to develop the next generation of networking engineers through internship opportunities working with under-represented students in Indiana and �鶹��ý.

NetSage was funded by the National Science Foundation Award #1540933.

—By Kelli Trifonovitch