Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)

We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds (VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments in this arena may be.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in the refereed proceedings of "Facets of Virtual Environments" (FaVE 2009), eds. F. Lehmann-Grube, J. Sablating, et al., ICST Lecture Notes Ser., Berlin: Springer Verlag (2009); version with full resolution color figures is available at http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publication

On encouraging multiple views for visualization

Visualization enables 'seeing the unseen', and provides new insight into the underlying data. However users far too easily believe or rely on a single representation of the data; this view may be a favourite method, the simplest to perform, or a method that has always been used! But, a single representation may generate a misinterpretation of the information or provide a situation where the user is missing the 'richness' of the data content! By displaying the data in multiple ways a user may understand the information through different perspectives, overcome possible misinterpretations and perform interactive investigative visualization through correlating the information between views. Thus, the use of multiple views of the same information should be encouraged. We believe the visualization system itself should actively encourage the generation of multiple views by providing appropriate tools to aid in this operation. We present and categorise issues for encouraging multiple views and provide a framework for the generation, management and manipulation of such views

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Studying the Emerging Global Brain: Analyzing and Visualizing the Impact of Co-Authorship Teams

This paper introduces a suite of approaches and measures to study the impact of co-authorship teams based on the number of publications and their citations on a local and global scale. In particular, we present a novel weighted graph representation that encodes coupled author-paper networks as a weighted co-authorship graph. This weighted graph representation is applied to a dataset that captures the emergence of a new field of science and comprises 614 papers published by 1,036 unique authors between 1974 and 2004. In order to characterize the properties and evolution of this field we first use four different measures of centrality to identify the impact of authors. A global statistical analysis is performed to characterize the distribution of paper production and paper citations and its correlation with the co-authorship team size. The size of co-authorship clusters over time is examined. Finally, a novel local, author-centered measure based on entropy is applied to determine the global evolution of the field and the identification of the contribution of a single author's impact across all of its co-authorship relations. A visualization of the growth of the weighted co-author network and the results obtained from the statistical analysis indicate a drift towards a more cooperative, global collaboration process as the main drive in the production of scientific knowledge.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

The LifeV library: engineering mathematics beyond the proof of concept

LifeV is a library for the finite element (FE) solution of partial differential equations in one, two, and three dimensions. It is written in C++ and designed to run on diverse parallel architectures, including cloud and high performance computing facilities. In spite of its academic research nature, meaning a library for the development and testing of new methods, one distinguishing feature of LifeV is its use on real world problems and it is intended to provide a tool for many engineering applications. It has been actually used in computational hemodynamics, including cardiac mechanics and fluid-structure interaction problems, in porous media, ice sheets dynamics for both forward and inverse problems. In this paper we give a short overview of the features of LifeV and its coding paradigms on simple problems. The main focus is on the parallel environment which is mainly driven by domain decomposition methods and based on external libraries such as MPI, the Trilinos project, HDF5 and ParMetis. Dedicated to the memory of Fausto Saleri.Comment: Review of the LifeV Finite Element librar