The VIBE team's mission is to design elegant visualization and interaction techniques that span the full spectrum of devices and displays.

Today’s computer user is inundated with information, and making sense of this growing mountain of material is becoming an overwhelming task. In addition, information is presented to us with little to no regard for our current cognitive state. More powerful methods for presenting the information users need to make sense out of can greatly reduce cognitive load. VIBE is exploring the use of non-invasive, sensing technologies that might give a read as to the user’s cognitive state. This will allow us to better ascertain whether or not to let information “through” to the user at various points in time, instead of interrupting them and reducing their task flow.

Some user interface designs do not scale well to the available screen real estate. Windows are hard to access on very large or heterogeneous displays. Notifications come up where one is not attending, and windows open in unexpected places or are improperly sized for their contents. The VIBE team hopes to position and scale the presentation of a user's information clusters appropriately for the real estate and devices available. They intend to invent new solutions for how to make important content available and easy to interact with on any device, and on any surface.

Mobile technology has allowed us to better track many statistics about our own behavior as these personal devices are with us all the time. A segment of the VIBE group is exploring the use of mobile technology to track health-related information, using wearable health monitoring devices, mobile phones and the computer.

As more and more of our information becomes digital, the computer can be used to store memories for the user that can be used for reminding, reminiscing, and sharing with others. A large collaboration between VIBE and BARC, called Memex, concerns novel methods for analyzing streams of media about a user’s life, in addition to developing new visualization and intelligent summarization methods for these digital memories.

Founded in 1994, the Perceptual Science Group of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT does research into human visual perception, machine vision, and image processing.

Some of their research areas are : visual search, gesture recognition, event perception, image statistics, image data compression, image enhancement, object recognition, ...

The Perceptual Science Group is led by four professors in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT

• Edward Adelson. Professor of Vision Science, focuses on topics in human and machine vision, including mid-level vision, motion analysis, perceptual organization, and image data compression.
Whitman Richards. Professor of Cognitive Science, currently focuses on high-level vision and the question of how perceptual knowledge is represented and structured.
Ruth Rosenholtz. Principal Research Scientist, is investigating human vision; particularly visual attention and visual searches.
Aude Oliva. Assistant Professor of Visual Sciences is investigating high-level human cognition and computational modeling of visual cognition.

The Data Visualization Research Lab (DVRL) has the goal of carrying out research into advanced interactive visualization. The lab has a special interest in techniques that can be applied to ocean mapping and ocean technologies in general.

Research in the lab relates to the problems of 3D geographical information systems (3D GIS), visualization of large information structures, 3D interactive techniques, multi-resolution rendering, data base issues and practical applications of virtual reality.

DVRL is directed by Dr. Colin Ware

The Human-Computer Interaction lab of the University of Maryland is devoted to the research on advanced User Interfaces and their associated development processes.

Their research takes into account the whole development life-cycle, from the initial design technology to the evaluation of the end user performance, including the implementation issues.

The lab has developed  new theories, methodologies, and technologies. Their most recent work includes Information Visualisation, interfaces for digital libraries, multimedia resources for learning communities, zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), technology design methods with and for children, and instruments for evaluating user interface technologies.

Particularly relevant are the summaries of research on the Spotfire project and on treemaps

This is an active and pioneering group, whose leader is Ben Shneiderman, one of the gurus in the field. Do not miss it if you want to be aware about what happens in HCI.

The Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) was established in 1990 as an interdisciplinary research unit of the University of West Florida. Since that time, IHMC has grown into one of the US premier research institutes with more than 100 researchers and staff investigating a broad range of topics related to understanding cognition in both humans and machines with a particular emphasis on building computational tools to leverage and amplify human cognitive and perceptual capacities.

Much of the research effort at IHMC is focused on what has become known as "human-centered computing". This emerging concept embodies a “systems view,” in which human thought and action and technological systems are seen as linked and equally important aspects of analysis, design, and evaluation. They see these as "cognitive protheses", computational systems that leverage and extend human intellectual capacities.

Current active research areas include: knowledge modeling and sharing, adjustable autonomy, advanced interfaces and displays, communication and collaboration, computer-mediated learning systems, intelligent data understanding, software agents, expertise studies, work practice simulation, knowledge representation, and other related areas.

IHMC is the creator of (CmapTools) that enable the users to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as Concept Maps.

IHMC researchers receive funding from a wide range of government and private sources. IHMC research partners have included: DARPA, NSF, NASA, Army, Navy, Air Force, NIMA, NIH, DOT, IDEO, Noikia, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, Procter & Gamble, Boeing, SAIC, and IBM among others.

Currently, we have a vast amount of information stored on computer disks, and we access this information with mouse, keyboard, and screen. In the future, we will have the disk space and communication speed to access far greater information spaces. We will access information spaces via physical space — walls, ceilings, and floors. Similarly, input devices may be operated from the arms of our armchairs, or tables, and equipment may be operated with winks and nods, or by speech.

The interfaces of the future must be able to cope with much larger bandwidths between humans and machines. These interfaces will use visual representations of the information, and we will explore the information using multimodal methods such as audio, visualisation, gesture, and speech.

IMAGEN is developing such interfaces Current IMAGEN projects are:

• Visualisation and Analysis of Large and Complex Networks (VALACON): IMAGEN reseachers make pictures of biological and sociological networks
• Visualisation and Interaction Collaborative Access Table (VICAT): We have created a new kind of table called a CAT. Using a CAT, widely distributed teams can collaborate
• Perceptually Effective Multi-Modal Interfaces (PEMMI): Research into speech and gesture based on natural human-machine interaction with adaptive multi-modal output generation
• Visual Information Access Room (VIAR): A model of the ideal office of the future, the VIAR is a laboratory for testing and assessing IMAGEN’s research ideas

The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) is a collaborative undertaking among organizations in the commercial, government, and research sectors aimed at promoting greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. CAIDA provides a neutral framework to support cooperative technical endeavors.

CAIDA Goals

• Encourage the creation of Internet traffic metrics (in collaboration with IETF/IPPM and other organizations); and work with industry, consumer, regulatory, and other representatives to assure their utility and universal acceptance.
• Create a collaborative research and analytic environment in which various forms of traffic data can be acquired, analyzed, and (as appropriate) shared.
• Foster the development of advanced methodologies and techniques for: traffic performance and flow characterization, simulation, analysis, and visualization. Specific areas of future impact include real-time routing, instability diagnosis and evolution for next generation measurement and routing protocols (multicast and unicast)

An important set of tools for analysis and measurement in the web can be found at (http://www.caida.org/tools/)

The GVU Center is at the forefront of research that combines in-depth studies of human capabilities, needs, and practices, cutting-edge graphical display techniques, augmented spaces that merge physical and virtual elements, intelligent sensing, and novel input, output and wearable technologies.

By creating an interdisciplinary framework that spans the Georgia Tech campus as well as many outside collaborators, the GVU Center enables collaborative research that is often difficult to achieve in traditional academic and industrial settings.

The goal of the GVU Center is to advance the state of the art of the interaction between people, computing machines, and information by developing technologies that naturally reflect the abilities and behavior of people.

GeoVISTA Center is the Pennsylvania State University Geographic Visualization Science, Technology, and Applications Center. GeoVISTA was established as a center of excellence within the Department of Geography in fall 1998 and since then has: assembled an interdisciplinary team of researchers and students working on topics in GIScience, initiated a range of interdisciplinary research foci, and accomplished important research goals through internal initiatives and externally funded grants.

GeoVISTA's mission is to conduct and coordinate integrated and innovative research in Geographic Information Science (GIScience), with an emphasis on geovisualization. The focus is on developing powerful human-centered methods and technologies that make it possible for scientists and decision makers to solve scientific, social, and environmental problems through computer-supported, visually-enabled analysis of the growing wealth of geospatial data.

Currently, diverse critical scientific and societal issues are prompting the generation of large volumes of geospatial data and demands for geospatial information technologies that allow this data to be used efficient and effectively. The issues include understanding health-environment interactions, assessing terrorist threats, planning for dramatic changes in regional demographics across the country, and fusing perspectives for strategic environmental risk management. GeoVISTA Center is well positioned to address these research challenges.

GeoVISTA has been successful in securing multi-year support for a broad range of GIScience research topics. Projects include semantics for database interoperability, knowledge construction from high-dimensional geospatial data, developing a national geocollaboratory to enable study of regional human impacts of global environmental change, design and implementation of collaborative visualization/GISystem tools for use in land cover categorization and environmental risk management, multi-modal interfaces to GIS, task-oriented visualization of uncertainty, and web-based tools to support statistical, graphic, and domain science literacy.

IKE stands for Information and Knowledge Engineering, a department of the Danube University Krems in Austria. The group is concerned with computer-tools, methods, and concepts that support humans in coping with complex information spaces, mainly in the medical domain.

Their efforts are directed to making complex information structures more comprehensible, facilitate new insights, and enable knowledge discovery.

At this, human abilities as well as users' needs and tasks are central issues to assist in situations where complex decisions need to be made.

The main focus in research and teaching of the Department of Information and Knowledge Engineering with particular consideration of Health Care are the following three topics:

• Information Visualization & Visual Analytics
• Plan Management
• Bridging the gap between theory and practice

This group does research in five areas, ranging from basic research to application development:

• 'Basic Visualization and Interaction Techniques', investigating novel ways of exploring information. These include new types of visualizations based on 3D graphics, animation, distortion and other types of techniques. They are also working on enabling the user to interact with visualizations, manipulate them, change views, make queries, aggregate data, and perform other information-extraction operations. The interaction techniques are based on the broader notion of "physicalization" of abstract spaces. Prototypes developed by this group are: SDM, VQE and solarPlots.
• 'Automated Visualization Design', designing systems that help users efficiently create visualizations that support their tasks. To do this research is done in the variety of factors that contribute to the expressiveness and effectiveness of visualizations and formalize this knowledge to enable automated design. In this area the group has developed three systems that work together to provide expertise for end users: SAGE, which is an expert system specialized in graphic design, SageBrush, which is an interface for sketching visualizations, and SageBook, which is a browsable and searchable collection of visualizations that can serve as models or be adapted to the specific needs of the user.
• 'Multimedia Explanations', applying the principles of communication to develop new methods for automated generation of multimedia presentations. Their focus is on natural language and information graphics explanations of quantitative and relational domains. A distinguishing feature of that approach is the principled use of intentions in planning the presentation and realizing the plan in both text and graphics. The group is developing the AutoBrief system, which is a generic multimedia generation system, and using it for explanation of problems and causal relations in the domain of transportation scheduling.
• 'User Interface Environments', developing data exploration environments where users directly perceive and act upon information. For several years the group has been collaborating with MAYA Design Group on Visage - a prototype environment, which takes a radically "information-centric" user interface approach. Visage provides techniques for locating, selecting, visualizing, manipulating, analyzing and communicating information. Visage is intended to serve as a common interface to a variety of applications providing specialized services to the user. A distinct part of Visage is VQE - a tool for visually querying complex data bases and supporting such operations as dynamic aggregation and computing derived attributes.
• 'Interfaces for Applications', aims to make viable and endure under tests of real life the concepts developed in research. Therefore, the group is engaged in application development collaborating with users and demonstrating how they can perform their tasks more efficiently by using adequate visualization tools. Their first attempt at building an interface to an application system was the integration of Visage, Sage, and Autobrief into a single coherent interface of an automated reactive scheduling system.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Visualization (Vis) are key-technologies for communication. They enable not only the fast, meaningful and concice processing of data in a time of growing amounts of data, but also the realistic display of and the interaction with past, current and future objects and surroundings.

VRVis is one of Austrias leading research and development companies in the area of Virtual Reality and Visualization and a substantial part of Europes second largest computer graphics research group, which is located in Vienna. In the above mentioned fields VRVis is offering contract-research, consulting and development of products. The research work of VRVis encompasses basic as well as applied research and enables thus a successful connection between the academic and the economic world.

Founded in 2000, VRVis is an example for the successfull Kplus initiative by the federal government and the City of Vienna. Nowadays the VRVis GmbH (Ltd.) has, as well as the headquarters in Vienna (TechGate), a branch in Graz. Currently approx. 50 highly qualified researchers, 15 to 20 students (diploma thesis or internships) and six administrative employees are working at VRVis.

Due to its motivated and internationally renowned employees VRVis has achieved a leading position in the following key-competence areas:

• software development in the field of "3D computer graphics"
• transformation of scientific research results into solutions for the entrepreneurial use within given time and cost constraints
• consulting over the use and adaptation of new technologies within companies as well as the acquisition of funding for r&d
• active know-how transfer through the "heads" of VRVis-researchers who become employees at clients
• established within the international "Graphics Community" and cost- efficient use of the resources from partnership university-institutes

The mission of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is to understand the dynamics and implications of interaction among people in immersive virtual reality simulations (VR), and other forms of human digital representations in media, communication systems, and games.

Researchers in the lab are most concerned with understanding the social interaction that occurs within the confines of VR, and the majority of our work is centered on using empirical, behavioral science methodologies to explore people as they interact in these digital worlds. However, often it is necessary to develop new gesture tracking systems, three-dimensional modeling techniques, or agent-behavior algorithms in order to answer these basic social questions. Consequently, we also engage in research geared towards developing new ways to produce these VR simulations.

The main subjects of the research programs tend to fall under one of three larger questions:

• What new social issues arise from the use of immersive VR communication systems?
• How can VR be used as a basic research tool to study the nuances of face-to-face interaction?
• How can VR be applied to improve everyday life, such as legal practices, and communications systems

Some of the projects where the Lab is involved are :

• Transformed Social Interaction: Research on the social presence as well as task performance within collaborative virtual environments
• Avatar identity: What are the implications of having an avatar, that is, a digital model that represents you in virtual reality? Research into ties that individuals have to an avatar. Specifically, how much does an avatar need to resemble (both visually and behaviorally) its respective owner in order for person-specific influences to take effect?
• The Proteus Effect: Cyberspace grants us great control over our self-representations. At the click of a button, we can alter our gender, age, attractiveness, and skin tone. In a series of studies, we've explored how putting people in avatars of different attractiveness or height change how they behave in a virtual environment.
• Homuncular flexibility: In this line of studies, we have examined a concept first developed by Jaron Lanier called “homuncular flexibility”— learning to remap physical degrees of freedom onto digital representations in interactive tasks
• Learning in Immersive VR: Research on how immersive virtual reality extends the benefits of video learning, allowing the user to enter the same world as the teacher.
• Haptic Communication in Social Interaction: Exploring the use of networked digital touch in collaborative virtual environments
• Facial Tracking and Emotion Abstraction in Communication : Studying the transmission and reception of emotions in avatars by tracking the location of facial anchor points in real-time.

The Computational Visualization Center is a cross disciplinary effort whose mission is to develop and improve the core technologies for comprehensive computational modeling, simulation, analysis, and visualization of natural and synthetic phenomena, and then utilize them as an integrated tool for rapid discovery.

The Center is under the joint auspicies of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

CVC's remote visualization project aims to make their high-performance visualization software and hardware available from scientist's desktops.

The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is an initiative within the University College London to develop emerging computer technologies in several disciplines which deal with geography, space, location, and the built environment. CASA is run under the Directorship of Michael Batty, Professor of Spatial Analysis and Planning (UCL).

The kinds of computation involved cover geographic information systems (GIS), computer-aided architectural design, spatial analysis and simulation, and methodologies for planning and decision support.

CASA is currently undertaking many research projects which deal with spatial problems and policies. These range from linking urban design to GIS to online multi-user environments. Projects range from blue-skies research to applied consulting and policy advice to local municipalities and the private sector. These are organised through UCL Business.

As a Research Centre within one of the UK's oldest universities, CASA provides expertise in IT based spatial decision systems and spatial analysis. The expertise of the centre is drawn from archaeology, architecture, cartography, computer science, environmental science, geography, planning, remote sensing, geomatic engineering, and transport studies. This generates a unique blend of personnel who operate from CASA and associated Departments within University College London