After earning a PhD in computer science, I started my academic career at the University of Tennessee as an assistant professor in 2001, became an associate professor in 2007 and a full professor in 2013. My research is in the systems area of data analytics and visualization. Recently, focusing on how to deliver data-intensive analytics and visualization to thin front-ends such as laptop, mobile phone, and Hololens. I am also interested in applied research in data science and visual analytics. My research has been funded by NSF, DOE, DOI/NPS, Intel, and NASA. The following are a few examples of our recent research.

Tapestry was first published in 2017 and won best paper award at IEEE LDAV'17. It turns scientific visualization into microservices. From an architectural perspective, Tapestry breaks traditional monolithic pipelines into a novel decoupled pipeline. In result, Tapestry's efficient and transparent use of fine-grained job partitioning, parallelism, and containers, has made it easy to deliver scientific visualization to user-devices as large as the powerwalls and as small as the Hololens and smart phones. In all cases, instantaneously from cloud instances. Furthermore, Tapestry has introduced "scale of audience" as a new quality metric for data-intensive scientific visualization for the first time. Tapestry's github.io page contains live demos, explainer video, and github repo.

An example of our applied research is the GSM Species Mapper. That work’s data science pipeline starts from Discover Life in America’s ATBI inventory, models species presence in the biodiversity hotspot of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park using HPC resources at University of Tennessee, extracts features and creates overlays, and then makes dynamic visualizations of the interactions between the species and the environment available over the Internet. The analytics of the Species Mapper are used for bio-inventory management, education, and public engagement. That project is in close collaboration with Sarah Lowe at University of Tennessee’s School of Art.

Another work of ours started with anonymized records of more than 140,000 past students of University of Tennessee, and led to discoveries of how students actually progress through the university curricula. In many cases, the gaps between the reality and the assumptions made by administrators and faculty are gasping. Those analytics have fundamental implications on advising, student choices, and future curriculum design. For details of the methodology, please refer to our paper “Modeling and Visualizing Student Flow” in IEEE Transactions on Big Data. To see a live demo, please email me.

If you are interested in our work on analytics that revealed inverting roles between mainstream media and social media during the last presidential election, please contact Sally McMillan, Courtney Childers, and Stuart Brotman, at University of Tennessee's School of Advertising and Public Relations and School of Journalism and Electronic Media.

Our research packages released before 2013 are available through the following links: VCB (LGPL license, funded by NSF ACI, CNS and DOE ECPI), SQI (LGPL license, funded by DOE SciDAC and DOE ECPI), BIL (LGPL license, funded by DOE SciDAC), and Eden (BSD license, funded by NSF OCI).

1. Tanner Hobson, James Hammer, Paul Preston Provins, and Jian Huang, "Interactive Visualization of Large Turbulent Flow as a Cloud Service", IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2021 (DOI: 10.1109/TCC.2021.3091387).
2. Mohammad Raji, Jeremiah Duncan, Tanner Hobson, and Jian Huang, "Dataless Sharing of Interactive Visualization", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2020 (DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2020.2984708).
3. Tanner Hobson, Jeremiah Duncan, Mohammad Raji, Aidong Lu, and Jian Huang, "Alpaca: AR Graphics Extensions for Web Applications", Proc. of IEEE VR, March 2020, Atlanta, GA (DOI: 10.1109/VR46266.2020.00036).
4. Alok Hota and Jian Huang, "Embedding Meta Information into Visualizations", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2019 (DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2916098).
5. Tahir Mahmood, Willis Fuler, Neelesh Mungoli, Jian Huang, and Aidong Lu, "Improving Information Sharing and Collaborative Analysis for Remote GeoSpatial Visualization Using Mixed Reality", Proc. of IEEE ISMAR, Beijing, China, October, 2019 (DOI: 10.1109/ISMAR.2019.00021).
6. Mohammad Raji, Alok Hota, Tanner Hobson, and Jian Huang, "Scientific Visualization as a Microservice", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2018 (DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2879672).
7. Mohammad Raji, John Duggan, Blaise DeCotes, Jian Huang, and Brad Vander Zanden, "Modeling and Visualizing Student Flow", IEEE Transactions on Big Data, 2018 (DOI: 10.1109/TBDATA.2018.2840986).

Please refer to this page for a complete list of my publications.

CS360 Systems Programming

CS452/556 Computer Graphics

CS302 Fundamental Algorithms

CS361 Operating System

EECS 401/402 Senior Design Series

CS494/594 Networked Games

CS594 Visualization & Adv. Computer Graphics

HPC for General Data Analysis and Visualization

Multivariate Temporal Features in Scientific Data

Parallel Visualization - An Introduction

Remote Visualization - A Survey

Program Committee, IEEE Visualization Conference, 2008-2010, 2014-2016, 2019-2021

Subject Area Editor, Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2012-2019

Program Committee, SC Conference, 2013

Proposal Panelist, American Association for Advancement of Science, 2010, 2013

Program Committee, DMESS Workshop, Intl Conf. on Computational Sciences, 2011-2014

Program Committee, IEEE Symp. on Large-Scale Data Analysis & Visualization, 2011

Program Committee, Intl Conference on CAD & Graphics, 2011

Program Committee, IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, 2009-2011

Proposal Panelist, DOE Office of Science, 2007, 2009-2011

Proposal Panelist, National Science Foundation, 2008, 2010, 2011

Proposal Reviewer, G8 Research Councils, 2010

Program Committee, Eurographics Symp. on Parallel Graphics & Visualization, 2004, 2006, 2008

Conference Committee, IEEE Visualization Conference, 2005 and 2006

Program Committee, International Workshop on Volume Graphics, 2005