Kalina Borkiewicz - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Kalina Borkiewicz

This essay presents a real-world demonstration of the evidence-based science communication proces... more This essay presents a real-world demonstration of the evidence-based science communication process, showing how it can be used to create scientific data visualizations for public audiences. Visualizing research data can be an important science communication tool. Maximizing its effectiveness has the potential to benefit millions of viewers. As with many forms of science communication, creators of such data visualizations typically rely on their own judgments and the views of the scientists providing the data to inform their science communication decision-making. But that leaves out a critical stakeholder in the communications pipeline: the intended audience. Here, we show the practical steps that our team - the Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - has taken to shift towards more evidence-based practice to enhance our science communication impact. We do this using concrete examples from our work on two scientific documentary films, one on the...

Field campaign data archives are compiled of mostly raw data, with no straight forward way to und... more Field campaign data archives are compiled of mostly raw data, with no straight forward way to understand the data collection and sampling strategy (including coordination amongst collaborative sensor nodes), as well as no clear way to navigate through fused datasets for exploration and discovery. This greatly limits scientific advancement and returns on NASA investments in field campaigns. In this report, we detail prototype visualizations that fuse field campaign data from a wide range of sensor nodes. Links to relevant imagery is included in the text. Two main visualization prototypes were created: (1) The Data Fusion Dashboard focused on a visualization treatment that provides a navigable summary of a flight day; and (2) The Data Fusion Exposition focused on an exposition of the field campaign data as an educational product capable of reaching a broader audience, as well as a product that can be used to communicate to scientists important information about the field campaign. Our...

ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Computer Animation Festival

Data visualization breakdown, showing the data processing, data fusion, and design that went into... more Data visualization breakdown, showing the data processing, data fusion, and design that went into creating a cinematic scientific visualization of a collapsing ice cap.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Courses

Traditional Scientific Visualization Visualizations that are purely based on data, without added ... more Traditional Scientific Visualization Visualizations that are purely based on data, without added conceptual elements. Scientific Illustration Explanatory animations that illustrate scientific concepts. These do not use data. Traditional Scientific Visualization Visualizations that are purely based on data, without added conceptual elements. Scientific Illustration Explanatory animations that illustrate scientific concepts. These do not use data. Cinematic Scientific Visualization Images that are based on data, but may use illustration to fill in cognitive or narrative gaps. In contrast, a traditional scientific data visualization is based on research data and is often created by scientists rather than by filmmakers or artists. The dataset may be collected from the real world via satellite, telescope, microscope, or some other instrument; or it may be simulated based on the laws of physics. Cinematic scientific visualizations are situated between these two categories, comprising both a visualization of scientific data and a Hollywood-style artistic impression. Cinematic scientific visualization is defined by (1) its use of scientific data, (2) its aim of achieving intelligibility for a general public audience and (3) its visual appeal.

Frontiers in Communication

Presenting data in visually appealing formats has long been a useful science communication techni... more Presenting data in visually appealing formats has long been a useful science communication technique. Millions of people around the world have encountered scientific visualizations through documentary films on giant and small screens. Visual effects software from the film industry can increasingly be used to visualize scientific data. Such cinematic scientific visualization should be (a) based on real data, (b) understandable, and (c) entertaining for a public audience. To investigate what is known about how audiences respond to this type of science communication, this essay presents an overview of the literature on this topic, highlighting key findings, gaps, and directions for future research. The sprawling nature of the theoretical and empirical research literature on audience responses to cinematic scientific visualization makes it difficult to achieve comprehensive coverage of relevant studies and theoretical models. Recurring methodological limitations present further challeng...

SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Posters, 2018

Figure 1: Stills from the chromatophore visualization. (A) depicts colony of purple bacteria, (B)... more Figure 1: Stills from the chromatophore visualization. (A) depicts colony of purple bacteria, (B) shows the hero chromatophore, (C) depicts a photon hit and the beginning of an energy excitation.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Courses, 2017

Communicating Science Through Visualization in an Age of Alternative Facts Welcome to our course ... more Communicating Science Through Visualization in an Age of Alternative Facts Welcome to our course addressing science education through computer graphics. Kalina Borkiewicz, AJ Christensen, and John Stone are from the University of Illinois. Kalina and AJ are members of the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). John Stone is a member of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG) at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. We're here to advocate for cinematic scientific visualization-which helps explains complex scientific concepts for the public-which in turn helps them defend themselves against misinformation in popular media.

SIGGRAPH ASIA Computer Animation Festival, 2019

This visualization of a scientific simulation shows the giant impact that formed the Moon. 4.5 bi... more This visualization of a scientific simulation shows the giant impact that formed the Moon. 4.5 billion years ago, the early Earth collided with a Mars-sized rock called "Theia", resulting in a spinning disk of lava and vaporized rock hotter than the surface of the sun. In this sequence, we see the first 24 hours of the 100-year process of our Moon's formation. This 1.1 million-point smoothed particle hydrodynamics model was 32 gigabytes and featured 492 data snapshots, which were interpolated by a factor of ten to play back smoothly on a 4K fulldome cinema screen. Using Houdini, special sprites used instanced spheres with a procedural falloff shader to face the hemispherical camera lens, to prevent intersection artifacts as particles evolved from solid to liquid to gas, and to avoid camera intersection. Other particles were surfaced as solids and liquids, and dynamic geometry lights allowed the emissive surfaces to illuminate diffuse surfaces. Processing and rendering a million translucent sprites was prohibitive on the AVL's 30-machine cluster, so the team used their custom Blurend pipeline to process imagery on the Blue Waters supercomputer. The shot was completed in Nuke, adding a Milky Way background and grading the mixing planet-forming material.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Posters, 2019

Cinematic scientific visualizations turn complex scientific phenomena and concepts into stunning ... more Cinematic scientific visualizations turn complex scientific phenomena and concepts into stunning graphics and make them easier for the general public to comprehend. Adding interactivity to cinematic scientific visualizations is highly beneficial especially for educational purposes, as it keeps the viewers engaged and promotes active learning [Cano et al. 2017]. Although there are existing software tools such as VisIt that are capable of handling large data sets and allow for interactive exploration, they are usually designed for scientists and not meant for producing cinematic visualizations for the general public. Creating aesthetically pleasing visualizations of scientific data helps to better communicate the scientific concepts, increase impact, and reach a broader audience [Borkiewicz et al. 2018]. As existing examples of visualizations that are both interactive and cinematic have mainly been produced with custom software, there is a lack of easily accessible tools for developin...

2021 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2021

Artifact removal is an integral component of cinematic scientific visualization, and is especiall... more Artifact removal is an integral component of cinematic scientific visualization, and is especially challenging with big datasets in which artifacts are difficult to define. In this paper, we describe a method for creating cloud artifact masks which can be used to remove artifacts from satellite imagery using a combination of traditional image processing together with deep learning based on U-Net. Compared to previous methods, our approach does not require multi-channel spectral imagery but performs successfully on single-channel Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). DEMs are a representation of the topography of the Earth and have a variety applications including planetary science, geology, flood modeling, and city planning.

The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is part of the the National Center for Supercomputing Applic... more The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is part of the the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The AVL is led by Professor Donna Cox, who coined the term "Renaissance Team", with the belief that bringing together specialists of diverse backgrounds creates a team that is greater than the sum of its parts, and members of the AVL team reflect that in our interdisciplinarity. We specialize in creating high-quality cinematic scientific visualizations of supercomputer simulations for public outreach.

Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source ... more Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source of life on Earth. An explanatory visualization depicting this process is presented in the form of an excerpt from the fulldome show Birth of Planet Earth. This accessible visual narrative shows a lay audience, especially children, how the energy of sunlight is captured, converted, and stored through a chain of proteins to power living cells. The visualization is the result of a multi-year collaboration among biophysicists, visualization scientists, and artists, which, in turn, is based on a decade-long experimental-computational collaboration on structural and functional modeling that produced an atomic detail description of a bacterial bioenergetic organelle, the chromatophore. The energy conversion steps depicted feature an integration of function from electronic to cell levels, spanning nearly 12 orders of magnitude in time scales modeled with multiscale computational approaches. This...

Astronomy and Computing, 2020

Scientific visualization tools are currently not optimized to create cinematic, productionquality... more Scientific visualization tools are currently not optimized to create cinematic, productionquality representations of numerical data for the purpose of science communication. In our pipeline Estra, we outline a step-by-step process from a raw simulation into a finished render as a way to teach non-experts in the field of visualization how to achieve production-quality outputs on their own. We demonstrate feasibility of using the visual effects software Houdini for cinematic astrophysical data visualization, informed by machine learning clustering algorithms. To demonstrate the capabilities of this pipeline, we used a post-impact, thermallyequilibrated Moon-forming synestia from Lock et al. (2018). Our approach aims to identify "physically interpretable" clusters, where clusters identified in an appropriate phase space (e.g. here we use a temperature-entropy phase-space) correspond to physically meaningful structures within the simulation data. Clustering results can then be used to highlight these structures by informing the color-mapping process in a simplified Houdini software shading network, where dissimilar phase-space clusters are mapped to different color values for easier visual identification. Cluster information can also be used in 3D position space, via Houdini's Scene View, to aid in physical cluster finding, simulation prototyping, and data exploration. Our clustering-based renders are compared to those created by the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) team for the full dome show "Imagine the Moon" as proof of concept. With Estra, scientists have a tool to create their own production-quality, data-driven visualizations.

Parallel Computing, 2021

Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source ... more Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source of life on Earth. A visualization depicting this process, based on multiscale computational models from electronic to cell scales, is presented in the form of an excerpt from the fulldome show Birth of Planet Earth. This accessible visual narrative shows a lay audience, including children, how the energy of sunlight is captured, converted, and stored through a chain of proteins to power living cells. The visualization is the result of a multi-year collaboration among biophysicists, visualization scientists, and artists, which, in turn, is based on a decade-long experimental-computational collaboration on structural and functional modeling that produced an atomic detail description of a bacterial bioenergetic organelle, the chromatophore. Software advancements necessitated by this project have led to significant performance and feature advances, including hardware-accelerated cinematic ray tracing and instanced visualizations for efficient cell-scale modeling. The energy conversion steps depicted feature an integration of function from electronic to cell levels, spanning nearly 12 orders of magnitude in time scales. This atomic detail description uniquely enables a modern retelling of one of humanity's earliest stories-the interplay between light and life.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Courses on - SA '19

The Astronomical Journal

We have entered the era of large multidimensional data sets represented by increasingly complex d... more We have entered the era of large multidimensional data sets represented by increasingly complex data structures. Current tools for scientific visualization are not optimized to efficiently and intuitively create cinematic production quality, time-evolving representations of numerical data for broad impact science communication via film, media, or journalism. To present such data in a cinematic environment, it is advantageous to develop methods that integrate these complex data structures into industry-standard visual effects software packages, which provide a myriad of control features otherwise unavailable in traditional scientific visualization software. In this paper, we present the general methodology for the import and visualization of nested multiresolution data sets into commercially available visual effects software. We further provide a specific example of importing adaptive mesh refinement data into the software Houdini. This paper builds on our previous work, which describes a method for using Houdini to visualize uniform Cartesian data sets. We summarize a tutorial available on the website www.ytini.com, which includes sample data downloads, Python code, and various other resources to simplify the process of importing and rendering multiresolution data.

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

This essay presents a real-world demonstration of the evidence-based science communication proces... more This essay presents a real-world demonstration of the evidence-based science communication process, showing how it can be used to create scientific data visualizations for public audiences. Visualizing research data can be an important science communication tool. Maximizing its effectiveness has the potential to benefit millions of viewers. As with many forms of science communication, creators of such data visualizations typically rely on their own judgments and the views of the scientists providing the data to inform their science communication decision-making. But that leaves out a critical stakeholder in the communications pipeline: the intended audience. Here, we show the practical steps that our team - the Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - has taken to shift towards more evidence-based practice to enhance our science communication impact. We do this using concrete examples from our work on two scientific documentary films, one on the...

Field campaign data archives are compiled of mostly raw data, with no straight forward way to und... more Field campaign data archives are compiled of mostly raw data, with no straight forward way to understand the data collection and sampling strategy (including coordination amongst collaborative sensor nodes), as well as no clear way to navigate through fused datasets for exploration and discovery. This greatly limits scientific advancement and returns on NASA investments in field campaigns. In this report, we detail prototype visualizations that fuse field campaign data from a wide range of sensor nodes. Links to relevant imagery is included in the text. Two main visualization prototypes were created: (1) The Data Fusion Dashboard focused on a visualization treatment that provides a navigable summary of a flight day; and (2) The Data Fusion Exposition focused on an exposition of the field campaign data as an educational product capable of reaching a broader audience, as well as a product that can be used to communicate to scientists important information about the field campaign. Our...

ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Computer Animation Festival

Data visualization breakdown, showing the data processing, data fusion, and design that went into... more Data visualization breakdown, showing the data processing, data fusion, and design that went into creating a cinematic scientific visualization of a collapsing ice cap.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Courses

Traditional Scientific Visualization Visualizations that are purely based on data, without added ... more Traditional Scientific Visualization Visualizations that are purely based on data, without added conceptual elements. Scientific Illustration Explanatory animations that illustrate scientific concepts. These do not use data. Traditional Scientific Visualization Visualizations that are purely based on data, without added conceptual elements. Scientific Illustration Explanatory animations that illustrate scientific concepts. These do not use data. Cinematic Scientific Visualization Images that are based on data, but may use illustration to fill in cognitive or narrative gaps. In contrast, a traditional scientific data visualization is based on research data and is often created by scientists rather than by filmmakers or artists. The dataset may be collected from the real world via satellite, telescope, microscope, or some other instrument; or it may be simulated based on the laws of physics. Cinematic scientific visualizations are situated between these two categories, comprising both a visualization of scientific data and a Hollywood-style artistic impression. Cinematic scientific visualization is defined by (1) its use of scientific data, (2) its aim of achieving intelligibility for a general public audience and (3) its visual appeal.

Frontiers in Communication

Presenting data in visually appealing formats has long been a useful science communication techni... more Presenting data in visually appealing formats has long been a useful science communication technique. Millions of people around the world have encountered scientific visualizations through documentary films on giant and small screens. Visual effects software from the film industry can increasingly be used to visualize scientific data. Such cinematic scientific visualization should be (a) based on real data, (b) understandable, and (c) entertaining for a public audience. To investigate what is known about how audiences respond to this type of science communication, this essay presents an overview of the literature on this topic, highlighting key findings, gaps, and directions for future research. The sprawling nature of the theoretical and empirical research literature on audience responses to cinematic scientific visualization makes it difficult to achieve comprehensive coverage of relevant studies and theoretical models. Recurring methodological limitations present further challeng...

SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Posters, 2018

Figure 1: Stills from the chromatophore visualization. (A) depicts colony of purple bacteria, (B)... more Figure 1: Stills from the chromatophore visualization. (A) depicts colony of purple bacteria, (B) shows the hero chromatophore, (C) depicts a photon hit and the beginning of an energy excitation.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Courses, 2017

Communicating Science Through Visualization in an Age of Alternative Facts Welcome to our course ... more Communicating Science Through Visualization in an Age of Alternative Facts Welcome to our course addressing science education through computer graphics. Kalina Borkiewicz, AJ Christensen, and John Stone are from the University of Illinois. Kalina and AJ are members of the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). John Stone is a member of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG) at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. We're here to advocate for cinematic scientific visualization-which helps explains complex scientific concepts for the public-which in turn helps them defend themselves against misinformation in popular media.

SIGGRAPH ASIA Computer Animation Festival, 2019

This visualization of a scientific simulation shows the giant impact that formed the Moon. 4.5 bi... more This visualization of a scientific simulation shows the giant impact that formed the Moon. 4.5 billion years ago, the early Earth collided with a Mars-sized rock called "Theia", resulting in a spinning disk of lava and vaporized rock hotter than the surface of the sun. In this sequence, we see the first 24 hours of the 100-year process of our Moon's formation. This 1.1 million-point smoothed particle hydrodynamics model was 32 gigabytes and featured 492 data snapshots, which were interpolated by a factor of ten to play back smoothly on a 4K fulldome cinema screen. Using Houdini, special sprites used instanced spheres with a procedural falloff shader to face the hemispherical camera lens, to prevent intersection artifacts as particles evolved from solid to liquid to gas, and to avoid camera intersection. Other particles were surfaced as solids and liquids, and dynamic geometry lights allowed the emissive surfaces to illuminate diffuse surfaces. Processing and rendering a million translucent sprites was prohibitive on the AVL's 30-machine cluster, so the team used their custom Blurend pipeline to process imagery on the Blue Waters supercomputer. The shot was completed in Nuke, adding a Milky Way background and grading the mixing planet-forming material.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Posters, 2019

Cinematic scientific visualizations turn complex scientific phenomena and concepts into stunning ... more Cinematic scientific visualizations turn complex scientific phenomena and concepts into stunning graphics and make them easier for the general public to comprehend. Adding interactivity to cinematic scientific visualizations is highly beneficial especially for educational purposes, as it keeps the viewers engaged and promotes active learning [Cano et al. 2017]. Although there are existing software tools such as VisIt that are capable of handling large data sets and allow for interactive exploration, they are usually designed for scientists and not meant for producing cinematic visualizations for the general public. Creating aesthetically pleasing visualizations of scientific data helps to better communicate the scientific concepts, increase impact, and reach a broader audience [Borkiewicz et al. 2018]. As existing examples of visualizations that are both interactive and cinematic have mainly been produced with custom software, there is a lack of easily accessible tools for developin...

2021 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2021

Artifact removal is an integral component of cinematic scientific visualization, and is especiall... more Artifact removal is an integral component of cinematic scientific visualization, and is especially challenging with big datasets in which artifacts are difficult to define. In this paper, we describe a method for creating cloud artifact masks which can be used to remove artifacts from satellite imagery using a combination of traditional image processing together with deep learning based on U-Net. Compared to previous methods, our approach does not require multi-channel spectral imagery but performs successfully on single-channel Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). DEMs are a representation of the topography of the Earth and have a variety applications including planetary science, geology, flood modeling, and city planning.

The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is part of the the National Center for Supercomputing Applic... more The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is part of the the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The AVL is led by Professor Donna Cox, who coined the term "Renaissance Team", with the belief that bringing together specialists of diverse backgrounds creates a team that is greater than the sum of its parts, and members of the AVL team reflect that in our interdisciplinarity. We specialize in creating high-quality cinematic scientific visualizations of supercomputer simulations for public outreach.

Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source ... more Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source of life on Earth. An explanatory visualization depicting this process is presented in the form of an excerpt from the fulldome show Birth of Planet Earth. This accessible visual narrative shows a lay audience, especially children, how the energy of sunlight is captured, converted, and stored through a chain of proteins to power living cells. The visualization is the result of a multi-year collaboration among biophysicists, visualization scientists, and artists, which, in turn, is based on a decade-long experimental-computational collaboration on structural and functional modeling that produced an atomic detail description of a bacterial bioenergetic organelle, the chromatophore. The energy conversion steps depicted feature an integration of function from electronic to cell levels, spanning nearly 12 orders of magnitude in time scales modeled with multiscale computational approaches. This...

Astronomy and Computing, 2020

Scientific visualization tools are currently not optimized to create cinematic, productionquality... more Scientific visualization tools are currently not optimized to create cinematic, productionquality representations of numerical data for the purpose of science communication. In our pipeline Estra, we outline a step-by-step process from a raw simulation into a finished render as a way to teach non-experts in the field of visualization how to achieve production-quality outputs on their own. We demonstrate feasibility of using the visual effects software Houdini for cinematic astrophysical data visualization, informed by machine learning clustering algorithms. To demonstrate the capabilities of this pipeline, we used a post-impact, thermallyequilibrated Moon-forming synestia from Lock et al. (2018). Our approach aims to identify "physically interpretable" clusters, where clusters identified in an appropriate phase space (e.g. here we use a temperature-entropy phase-space) correspond to physically meaningful structures within the simulation data. Clustering results can then be used to highlight these structures by informing the color-mapping process in a simplified Houdini software shading network, where dissimilar phase-space clusters are mapped to different color values for easier visual identification. Cluster information can also be used in 3D position space, via Houdini's Scene View, to aid in physical cluster finding, simulation prototyping, and data exploration. Our clustering-based renders are compared to those created by the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) team for the full dome show "Imagine the Moon" as proof of concept. With Estra, scientists have a tool to create their own production-quality, data-driven visualizations.

Parallel Computing, 2021

Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source ... more Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the primary energy source of life on Earth. A visualization depicting this process, based on multiscale computational models from electronic to cell scales, is presented in the form of an excerpt from the fulldome show Birth of Planet Earth. This accessible visual narrative shows a lay audience, including children, how the energy of sunlight is captured, converted, and stored through a chain of proteins to power living cells. The visualization is the result of a multi-year collaboration among biophysicists, visualization scientists, and artists, which, in turn, is based on a decade-long experimental-computational collaboration on structural and functional modeling that produced an atomic detail description of a bacterial bioenergetic organelle, the chromatophore. Software advancements necessitated by this project have led to significant performance and feature advances, including hardware-accelerated cinematic ray tracing and instanced visualizations for efficient cell-scale modeling. The energy conversion steps depicted feature an integration of function from electronic to cell levels, spanning nearly 12 orders of magnitude in time scales. This atomic detail description uniquely enables a modern retelling of one of humanity's earliest stories-the interplay between light and life.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Courses on - SA '19

The Astronomical Journal

We have entered the era of large multidimensional data sets represented by increasingly complex d... more We have entered the era of large multidimensional data sets represented by increasingly complex data structures. Current tools for scientific visualization are not optimized to efficiently and intuitively create cinematic production quality, time-evolving representations of numerical data for broad impact science communication via film, media, or journalism. To present such data in a cinematic environment, it is advantageous to develop methods that integrate these complex data structures into industry-standard visual effects software packages, which provide a myriad of control features otherwise unavailable in traditional scientific visualization software. In this paper, we present the general methodology for the import and visualization of nested multiresolution data sets into commercially available visual effects software. We further provide a specific example of importing adaptive mesh refinement data into the software Houdini. This paper builds on our previous work, which describes a method for using Houdini to visualize uniform Cartesian data sets. We summarize a tutorial available on the website www.ytini.com, which includes sample data downloads, Python code, and various other resources to simplify the process of importing and rendering multiresolution data.

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific