RSVP for VPSA : A Meta Design Study on Rapid Suggestive Visualization Prototyping for Visual Parameter Space Analysis.

Visual Parameter Space Analysis (VPSA) enables domain scientists to explore input-output relationships of computational models. Existing VPSA applications often feature multi-view visualizations designed by visualization experts for a specific scenario, making it hard for domain scientists to adapt them to their problems without professional help. We present RSVP, the Rapid Suggestive Visualization Prototyping system encoding VPSA knowledge to enable domain scientists to prototype custom visualization dashboards tailored to their specific needs. The system implements a task-oriented, multi-view visualization recommendation strategy over a visualization design space optimized for VPSA to guide users in meeting their analytical demands. We derived the VPSA knowledge implemented in the system by conducting an extensive meta design study over the body of work on VPSA. We show how this process can be used to perform a data and task abstraction, extract a common visualization design space, and derive a task-oriented VisRec strategy. User studies indicate that the system is user-friendly and can uncover novel insights.

Practical box splines for reconstruction on the body centered cubic lattice.

We introduce a family of box splines for efficient, accurate and smooth reconstruction of volumetric data sampled on the Body Centered Cubic (BCC) lattice, which is the favorable volumetric sampling pattern due to its optimal spectral sphere packing property. First, we construct a box spline based on the four principal directions of the BCC lattice that allows for a linear C(0) reconstruction. Then, the design is extended for higher degrees of continuity. We derive the explicit piecewise polynomial representation of the C(0) and C(2) box splines that are useful for practical reconstruction applications. We further demonstrate that approximation in the shift-invariant space---generated by BCC-lattice shifts of these box splines---is {twice} as efficient as using the tensor-product B-spline solutions on the Cartesian lattice (with comparable smoothness and approximation order, and with the same sampling density). Practical evidence is provided demonstrating that not only the BCC lattice is generally a more accurate sampling pattern, but also allows for extremely efficient reconstructions that outperform tensor-product Cartesian reconstructions.