Visualization in Science and Education (Assoc. Prof. Matti Mäkelä):

Advanced computer graphics provides means of visualizing scientific data and complicated formal structures and interactions which have earlier been difficult to manage and conceive by human brains. Scientific visualization offers a method to make pictures from the abstract material produced by scientific models and measurements. Thus, the natural human ability to see and think visually is utilized besides the traditional scientific thinking. The same applies in education, too. One essential problem is to select a proper type of pictures for representing the abstract data and to formalize the transformation from data to pictures. Another problem is the visual literacy, that is the ability to express thoughts by pictures, and the ability to interpret pictures. The scope of this research is to find out practical recommendations to attack these problems. The present activities will include animation tools, and visualization and hypermedia applications for education. As the problem area is highly interdisciplinary there are several contacts within the university, and with the Helsinki University of Technology, the Center for Scientific Computing, and the University of Industrial Arts (Helsinki), among others.

Publications: [269-271, 274-276].