Between October 18 th and 20 th, 1998, I attended the IEEE Information Visualization Symposium 1998 and Visualization Toolkit Tutorial in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. These were held as part of the IEEE Visualization 1998 conference. The conference included several other tutorials, the Volume Visualization 98 symposium, two workshops, several Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions and the paper/panel presentations. I did not attend these other events. The conference events are described on the web site - http://www.erc.msstate.edu/infovis98. (Note: InfoVis 1999 web site is: http://www.erc.msstate.edu/infovis99) Conference proceedings are online in the IEEE Computer Society Digital Libray: http://www.computer.org/conferen/proceed/infovis/9093.
The overall conference attendance was about 400 people for the days I was there. This was more than the expected turnout and most of the sessions were over crowded. There were not enough printed materials for the tutorial and I did not get hard copy. I met quite a few very interesting people, including several who’s work I have followed for several years. The overall tone of the Info Vis symposium was similar to the Siggraph conferences of the early 1980s. This is a technology that will become main stream within three to five years. Both Microsoft and Intel are very interested in information visualization and the especially application of 3d graphics. They hope that it will develop applications essential to the PC user and those users will need to continue upgrading hardware and software to take advantage of the technology. Representatives of the Intelligence Community were also in attendance and are very supportive of the technology.
The major highlights of the conference were the Keynote and Capstone speakers (George Robertson and Edward Tufte). The demonstration of Pad++, panel on C&C very interesting. A number of the paper sessions were interesting and noted below.