Challenges and Unsolved Problems

Abstract

Self-criticism, evaluation, solved and unsolved problems, and future directions are wide-spread themes pervading the visualization community today. The top unsolved problems in both scientific and information visualization was the subject of an IEEE Visualization Conference panel in 2004 [706]. The future of graphics hardware was another important topic of discussion the same year [414]. A critical evaluation of usability and utility of visualization software was also the focus of a recent panel discussion [307]. The topic of how to evaluate visualization came up again two years later [370, 852]. Chris Johnson recently published his list of top problems in scientific visualization research [409]. This was followed up by report of both past achievements and future challenges in visualization research as well as financial support recommendations to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Health (NIH) [410]. That report is the result of two workshops that took place in the Fall of 2004 and Spring of 2005 on visualization research challenges and also includes input from the larger visualization community. C. Chen recently published the first list of top unsolved information visualization problems [154]. Future research directions of topology-based visualization was also a major theme of a workshop on topology-based methods [341, 736].