2023 Year Book | Visualization Laboratory enhances collaboration opportunities

One of the most famous photos of Albert Einstein was taken in the library at the Carnegie Science Observatories. Under the watchful eye of George Ellery Hale’s portrait, the legendary physicist looks over his shoulder at an unseen audience and writes an equation on a dusty chalkboard. 

In a pre-computing age, communal areas such as the library often served as ideas laboratories, where concepts could be debated and fleshed out collectively. Although scientific enterprises are still highly collaborative, astronomers’ workspaces are often solitary and siloed today. 

This is why Juna Kollmeier, Founding Director of the Carnegie Theoretical Astrophysics Center (CTAC), designed and developed a fully immersive visualization environment, or VizLab, where Observatories scientists could come together to interrogate novel data sets and probe the mysteries of the cosmos. 

The VizLab grew directly from the computational infrastructure that Carnegie Science theorists built over the past decade at the Observatories, thanks to the generous support of NASA and The Ahmanson  Foundation, the latter of which was also a major funder of the Viz Lab. 

“I envisioned a space where teams could work together as they synthesize an unprecedented amount of data. 21st-century data require 21st-century laboratories,” she said when the VizLab launched in a refurbished campus garage in 2020. “I wanted to capture the collaborating that is often done together in front of blackboards, but with the capability of interrogating huge simulations and datasets.”

The lab was built around an immersive visualization display system with 35 2D- and 3D-capable flat panels in the shape of a cresting wave. This screen configuration was designed to represent the tsunami of data rushing into the astronomical field. Thanks to advances in instrumentation and the next generation of astronomical surveys, more data is available than at any time in history. 
 

In order to keep pace with the software needs of theorists using the VizLab to advance their science, the CTAC team brought Chris Couto from Caltech’s Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering (SASE) onboard. This program aims to accelerate discovery by connecting recent graduates in computer science and related fields with scientists who increasingly rely on software innovation to push the boundaries of their fields. 

With Couto’s guidance, CTAC researchers have been developing new tools to take advantage of the VizLab’s capabilities. Couto is expanding off of the VizLab’s Unity game engine system, which can display and manipulate point-cloud data sets, to implement more sophisticated visualization capabilities, rendering of hydrodynamics simulations,  instrument CAD models, IFU data, and more. This can produce both fixed snapshots and full animations.  Other areas of development for Couto include adding more ways to interact with data and improving ease of use of the system via user interface (UI) design, data management, and accessibility. 

“I’m very proud of all the ways we’ve been able to enhance the VizLab experience since I arrived in 2022 and have more planned improvements on the horizon,” said Couto. 

“So far, I've mainly used the VizLab for interactive visualizations of simple datasets,” said Ethan Nadler, a Carnegie-USC joint postdoctoral fellow and a member of CTAC. “I would like to scale this up to visualize full cosmological simulations, including as a function of time.”

Nadler also taps into the VizLab’s capabilities to connect with local students, many from historically underrepresented groups. He used support from  Carnegie Science’s DEI Mini-grant program to develop a 10-week course for USC Hybrid High School students in collaboration with local arts organization Create Now.  

The course not only introduced students to dark matter concepts but also provided coding and data visualization training, skills applicable to many careers beyond theoretical astronomy. And it has continued long past its original mandate. For the past three years, he has hosted the students from the school for their “Introventure” week, which enables participants to learn about different career options. 

“The students run interactive Jupyter notebooks to create models of stellar streams, and they project these onto the VizLab screen to explore,” Nadler said. “They're always amazed by seeing their data in 3d!”

Nicole Sanchez, a joint Carnegie-Caltech National  Science Foundation MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Fellow also used the VizLab for outreach efforts. Her FAST  Workshop provided a weeklong research training program for local community college students to learn coding and introductory research skills.  

“The extra-large screen available in the VizLab made it an ideal teaching location, and the students had a great time working in the space,” Sanchez explained. 

As part of Staff Scientist Andrew Benson’s research group, Sanchez and her colleagues have used the VizLab space for regular check-ins. 

“The space is well designed and set up for scientific collaboration with whiteboards, monitors, and a lot of moving parts that allow you to set up the perfect space for different types of scientific gatherings,” she adds. “Whether it's discussing a new paper over coffee or having a group meeting at the whiteboard, it's well set up to create multiple connection points between different members of the community.”