Annual Winners Announced in Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge

First place—Illustration: “Still Life: Five Glass Surfaces on a Tabletop”; image courtesy of Richard Palais, University of California, Irvine and Luc Benard

Sometimes the best way to express a scientific idea is through an image that grabs the eye and invites viewers to wonder what they’re seeing.

Fourteen images and multimedia presentations, each using innovative approaches to encapsulate a scientific story, have won the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

The contest, currently in its fourth year, recognizes outstanding achievement in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results and scientific phenomena. The judges’ criteria for evaluating the entries included visual impact, innovation and accuracy.

First place—Photography: “An Egyptian Child Mummy”; image courtesy of Robert Cheng, Paul Brown, and Rebecca Farig, Stanford University; and Christof Reinhart, Volume Graphics

The winning entries communicate information about complex mathematical concepts, the intricacies of the human body, air flight patterns, the latest scientific imaging technologies to analyze Leonardo da Vinci’s art, and more. The 22 September 2006 issue of Science will feature all of these entries, which will also be freely available through the journal’s website. The entries will also be displayed at the NSF website.

The winning entries are in five categories:

Illustration

First Place:
Richard Palais, University of California, Irvine
Luc Benard
“Still Life: Five Glass Surfaces on a Tabletop”

Second Place:
Caryn Babaian, Bucks County Community College, Newtown, Pennsylvania
“A Da Vinci Blackboard Lesson”

Informational Graphics

First Place:
Nils Sparwasser, Thorsten Andresen, Stephan Reiniger, and Robert Meisner, German Aerospace Center
“Hawaii, the Highest Mountain on Earth”

Second Place:
Louis Borgeat, François Blais, and John Taylor of the National Research Council, Canada
Christian Lahanier of the Centre de recherché et de restauration des musées de France
“Mona Lisa Montage”

Interactive Multimedia

First Place:
Travis Vermilye, Stephen Humphries, and Andrew Christensen, Medical Modeling, Golden, Colorado
Kenneth Slayer, International Craniofacial Institute, Dallas, Texas
“Conjoined Twins”

Second Place:
Jack Bradbury, Guillaume Iacino, Erica Olsen, and Robert Grotke, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University
“A Real-Time Audio and Video Sound Visualization Tool”

Noninteractive Multimedia

First Place (tie):
Aaron Koblin, University of California, Los Angeles
“Flight Patterns”

Drew Berry, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne, Australia; Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, University of Melbourne; and Francois Tetaz
“Body Code”

Honorable Mentions:
Curtis DuBois, Lummi Island, Washington
“The Handwritten 'e'”

Matt Heying, Changwon Suh, and Krishna Rajan, Iowa State University
Simone Seig, Universität de Saarland
“Materials Informatics”

Jennifer Brennan, ADNET Systems Inc./NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Waleed Abdalati,
Horace Mitchell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Walter Meier, National Snow and Ice Data Center
“A Short Tour of the Cryosphere”

Flavio Fenton and Elizabeth Cherry, Cornell University
“Cardiac Bioelectricity and Arrhythmias”

Further information about the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge is available here.

Natasha Pinol

21 September 2006