Tensor field visualization - Between theory and applications

In this seminar, I will talk about my experiences from first industry contacts that arose from a collaboration with a research group in mechanical engineering. The group’s interest lies in the virtual development process of industrial parts and especially the analysis and modeling of fiber-reinforced polymers. Virtual product development based on simulations is today standard in many industrial and university environments. The models are becoming increasingly complex in their geometric design and the materials used. A lot of money and effort is invested in the development of new simulation software and virtual models with impressive results. However, the analysis of the simulation results is becoming more and more demanding and comparatively little effort is made to provide tools that exploit the data in its full diversity, from scalars to tensor fields. The collaboration we originally focusing on the development of novel tensor field visualization methods, but then more and more moved towards applying the entire zoo of basic visualization methods in a specific application. My talk is based on a presentation that I gave at the German industrial meeting on plastics and simulations last year in Munich and the responses that I got from this meeting.

Short Bio: Ingrid Hotz is currently a Professor in scientific visualization at Linköping University. She received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. After a PostDoc at the University of California Davis in the USA, she led an Emmy-Noether researcher group at the Zuse Institute Berlin. For two years she led the scientific visualization group at the German aerospace center in Braunschweig.  Her research interests include data analysis and scientific visualization, ranging from basic research questions to effective solutions to visualization problems in applications. This includes developing and applying concepts originating from different areas of computer sciences and mathematics, such as computer graphics, computer vision, dynamical systems, computational geometry, and combinatorial topology.