As most of you know, I received Honorable Mention in the IEEE Visualization 2005 Contest last year. The project was to visualize an older dataset from Bharat Soni of a windfield over the city of New Orleans, resulting from the 1996 Bright Field accident.

Last week down in sunny Orlando, Florida, the guys from CEI held CEIViz06, an annual conference focused mostly on the features and capability of Ensight. My boss, Paul Adams, was there presenting a paper on
“High-Quality Ray Tracing of Terascale Simulations” when he had an interesting discovery. The presentation right before his was by Professor Ahmed K. Noor, Director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Environments, Old Dominion University, NASA Langley Research Center. Entitled
“Visualization Technologies – Frontiers and Beyond”, it was a “pie in the sky” presentation of the future of vizualization and data analysis. Paul was really surprised to see him suddenly put up a slide showing my contest entry. Dr. Noor did give me proper credit, although he implied that it was done as an ERDC MSRC project which it wasn’t. Also, Paul told me that he said it was a visualization of the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which it obviously was not. My former master’s professor Robert Moorhead was there and corroborates his story, and was equally surprised since he knows Dr. Soni as well.

I was initially flattered, as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I was at first anxiously awaiting seeing his presentation when it was posted online, so I could post it here & use it in my “body of work”. It would be my first referenced work, so I was kinda excited. But the more I heard about it from Paul, Dr Moorhead, and others, the more worried I got. The ERDC MSRC has done work for Hurricane Katrina, and this wasn’t it. This wasn’t even close. Finally, the presentations were posted on CEI’s website, and this one was surprisingly not included. After a few failed attempts, I finally managed to contact Dr. Noor via his email and was somewhat surprised to hear that he essentially has no intentions to publish his presentation. Rather than having a Powerpoint (or equivalent) presentation, his is pretty much all Macromedia based and not very suited for distribution. He says that he mentioned during the presentation that the work was from before Katrina, but evidently that slight detail was lost amongst the crowd as several people think the visualization is from Katrina. He also seemed rather irate and offended at me bringing the entire thing up.

So at this point, I’m kinda at a loss. It’s basically beyond my control, it’s his word vs Paul and Dr Moorhead’s about what was said, and it seems I won’t get to see the presentation for myself. I kinda feel like I need to “defend” my work, but there’s really nothing I can do. I mean, he’s the Director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Environments at NASA Langley, and I’m basically a nobody in comparison. I wanted to find that this was all an honest mistake and easily remedied, but it seems that how it is now is how it’s going to stay. He did mention that he may be writing a paper for publication soon, using the information from this presentation, perhaps I’ll have the chance to correct any misconceptions then. I guess all I can do for now is just post here that I’m aware of the presentation, and that the work is not related to Hurricane Katrina.
[tag:katrina][tag:visualization][tag:conference][tag:cei]

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