As the size and complexity of data increases, tools facilitating effective knowledge extraction and communication of scientific data become ever more important. While color has always played a large role in scientific data visualization, its full potential remains untapped.

Samsel, trained as a visual artist, has been working with teams at Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop tools and strategies enabling scientists to harness the full potential of color to explore and communicate data.  She will lead a combination of presentations, hands-on sessions and discussions presenting the resources, tools and guidance developed in the visualization community to enable scientists to quickly and easily identify color solutions tailored to the specific structures in their data and the needs of their scientific domain.
She will discuss strategies and recommendations as well as specific resources available at SciVisColor.org. The visualization community has recently developed several tools for discrete color selection and custom colormap construction that are guided by a combination of perceptual principals, cognitive understanding and semantic color properties.

Samsel’s students, who are well versed in these tools and strategies, will be available to assist with the hands-on activities. Phil Wolfram, who is on LANL’s Climate Ocean Sea-Ice Modeling team and is a frequent collaborator of Samsel’s will also be on-hand to provide the scientific perspective and documentation of the impact of the strategies presented. Two additional color researchers will provide remote presentations: Karen Schloss on discrete and semantic color and Lyn Bartram on the Importance and Impact of associative color properties.