Mario Valle - Visual Scientist

I like to see things. I like to contribute to scientists’ discovery work. I like to collaborate with people passionate for their work.

For this reason I work at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) since 2003 helping scientists from the most diverse fields to understand their data. This means mainly scientific visualization, but also tools development and cooperative projects.

In my daily job I don’t develop materials and ideas for scientists only. In fact there are interesting connections between visualization and computing with school and education. Time permitting, I try to share these ideas in talks and writings.

Scientific Visualization

I am involved with visualization since 1995. At the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) I help the center’s users in extracting the knowledge hidden in their data, mostly by visualization techniques, by melding different areas’ methods but also by more traditional ways. In those pages you will find material, experience and resources deriving from this work.

General visualization resources: An introduction to visualization in ten slides and in an interview . A list of tools to getting started with visualization. Material and ideas around Art and Visualization. Do not forget my book : Introduzione alla Visualizzazione Scientifica.

Chemistry Visualization resources: STM4 ChemViz platform. A list of free ChemViz tools. A study about representation in chemistry with a small collection of visualization errors in ChemViz. The Perfect Tool Project tried to cover what should be needed to make chemistry visualization tools more usable. The CrystalFp library that had contributed to a paper published on Nature.

Visual communication resources: Final product preparation (video, images …). Visualization on the Web. And a small collection of (un)informative images.

AVS & AVS/Express resources: AVS/Express tutorial. Remember that STM4 is built on top of AVS/Express.

Scientific Data Management resources: This theme is not strictly visualization, but is the basis for an ordered discovery process for which visualization is an important piece. Here is an introduction to SDM and my DescEditor, a file collection management tool.

Work related things

The canonical publication list (ordered by year). Talks & teaching activities. If you need them here are a short bio, my CV and my contact details. Almost forgot, my group at CSCS is called Scientific Community Engagement.

During the move to CSCS I collected my thinking about moving from industry to academia that you could find interesting.

Montessori’s ideas, science and supercomputers

Maria Montessori ideas and her method are not something from the 19^th century, something old and dusty. They have a sound scientific fundament and I continue to find commonalities between these ideas and my work with scientists and supercomputers. For example look at: “Montessori è moderna, parola di scienziato!” (Talk official page).

Can we learn something from computational scientist’s work? Thinking about mathematic & school . Slides from my talk: “Viaggio attorno ai numeri: matematica e Montessori” .

Digital natives, scientists and Montessori method in my talk: “More is Different – Parola di nativo digitale… e di Premio Nobel” given at ABCD Salone dell’educazione (Genova – Nov. 2011).