Visualization is the process of transforming data into insight. Insight allows for the analysis and exploration of data at all levels of scholarship, informs decision making, and fosters advancement…

This federal contract award, valued at $197,600.00, was granted to Gordon Research Conferences (GRC), a non-profit organization that organizes and facilitates international scientific conferences. The award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will support the planning and execution of two biennial GRC Visualization in Science and Education (GRC-VSE) conferences in 2019 and 2021. These conferences aim to bring together researchers from various disciplines to share and discuss novel research on data visualization, with a focus on educating skilled visualizers and visualizing uncertainty. The conferences will feature plenary talks, discussions, poster sessions, and opportunities for collaboration through mini-grants. This award is not associated with any set-aside designation and is intended to complement funding from GRC and other sources to fully implement the proposed conferences.

Visualization is the process of transforming data into insight. Insight allows for the analysis and exploration of data at all levels of scholarship, informs decision making, and fosters advancement in research. In this space we explore how to educate people to become more proficient visualization users. This proposal is requesting NASA funding to support two biennial GRC visualization in science and education GRC-VSE gatherings that provide a platform for the dissemination of novel cutting-edge research and foster a rich exchange of ideas. The conferences aim to attract a wide range of disciplines for which data visualization plays a significant role in knowledge discovery and education, to facilitate networking and relationship building among experts in the field and new emerging scholars, and to foster lifelong professional collaborations. To address these aims the goals of the proposed conferences are three-fold: to attract high caliber speakers across a wide range of disciplines to initiate and inspire scholarly dialog; to broaden participation by an eclectic transdisciplinary community of participants - particularly new and emerging scholars - to spark boundary-spanning exchange of ideas and solutions and to create a mechanism for innovative partnerships and ideas to thrive and develop between conferences. We are cognizant of the evolving role of visualization in a data-driven world and the need to educate skillful visualizers as well as understanding and exploring uncertainty that exists in visualization. The proposed 2019 and 2021 GRC-vses are designed to enable thought provoking, out-of-the-box, divisively rich discussions at the interface between visualization and education. The 2019 GRC-VSE, educating skillful visualizers will focus on how to educate people to become more proficient visualization users from two perspectives those who create visualizations and those who strive to create learning experiences that deepen learners ability to extract information and form inferences from visualizations. Topics for the 2021 GRC-VSE theme, visualizing uncertainty include visually representing things sensed but not literally seen, modeling dynamics and processes only partially documented, facilitating decision making in the face of uncertainty for example, visualizing potential outcomes ranging from medical prognoses to climate change and storytelling to contextualize and humanize uncertainty. Each conference will leverage signature GRC-VSE traditions: daily plenary talks by carefully selected speakers who are world leaders in their fields, extensive discussions orchestrated by a facilitator who is also an expert in the theme of the session, and daily poster sessions where non-speaker attendees present their work in progress and receive feedback from attending experts. Poster sessions are significant opportunities for participants to meet and discuss future and potential collaborations. To foster such collaborations and the cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines, participants are encouraged to develop transformative proposal ideas for visionary mini-grants. Much like an extended brain storming session, proposals are conceived and fully executed during the GRC week with submission on the last day of the conference. Funding from mini-grants serve as seed funding to get the proposal idea up and going, and recipients return to the next conference to disseminate their results. We are confident the proposed 2019 and 2021 GRC-vses are befitting of the high quality, long-standing reputation of GRC. The topics are current and based on 2017 GRC-VSE discussion worthy. The proposed NASA funding of $197,600 will complement funding from the GRC organization and other sources to complete the funding needed to fully implement the proposed conferences. We are excited about the prospect of NASA's continued support for and participation in these groundbreaking conferences.