John Martirano

Visualizing the Global | Computer Modeling, Ecology, Politics

I Organized this cross disciplinary seminar at UIUC. I also developed a couple of demos including a 20-node tiled visualization of various layers output from the Parallel Climate Model AND an interactive visualization of global energy consumption from 1965-2002 for 73 countries driven by the data provided by the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. The Parallel Climate Model visualization involved a distributed python backend which consumed, processed and loaded model data to a projected display cluster. To accomplish the data-visualization and navigation on 20 parallel display nodes, I utilized Partiview, an open-source, C++ based, interactive data visualization tool written by Stuart Levy.

• http://access.ncsa.illinois.edu/Stories/Silicon/

I was the orginal architect and author of this 100% Java data-mining system.  Once known as D2K (Data to Knowledge), this system was most fundamentally a model for designing custom data-mining solutions.  It was as well a rapid application development environment for the development of those solutions with a powerful run-time environment. I wrote the original prototype for D2K while working for the Automated Learning Group at NCSA.  Tom Redman (from the Mosaic project) would soon join the team to create the interface and RAD component of the system.  David Tcheng’s ideas were the intellectual foundations of many of the algorithms implemented within the system.  I did 2 more major rewrites of the infrastructure during my time in the ALG during which time this small research group grew from 3 to well more than a dozen people increasingly focused on some aspect of D2K.  D2K quickly turned into a flagship effort of NCSA and certainly of ALG and subsequently become the central tool for a startup company specializing in real-time analytics: River Glass.  There is now a project underway to develop a next generation evolution of this software, a semantic-driven system called Meandre of which I am only an interested observer.

• An article about some work done in D2K.