Distinguished Contributor of the IEEE Computer Society!

Sep 22, 2026

I am honored to be a designated Distinguished Contributor (DC) to the IEEE Computer Society! This distinction honors fewer than 0.5% of the society members. From the accolades: Recognition as a DC is a permanent designation honoring members and affiliates who have made significant and sustained technical contributions to computing, the Computer Society, the broader computing profession and community, and humanity. DC recognition is an acknowledgment of professional achievement, technical leadership, and sustained contributions to the computing community and affirms the difference their work has made to others.

New NIH R01 Smart and Connected Health (SCH) NIDCR award!

Sep 17, 2026

I am so incredibly happy to report we have received an NIH R01 award from NIDCR! NIH R01 DE037101: SCH: Flavor Charter: Precision Data-Driven Diagnosis, Monitoring and Guidance for Dysgeusia, Lead PI on multi-site project with U Iowa, UIC Co-Is: X. Zhang, H. Esmailbeigi, A. Salahudeen, $1,157,399, 09/17/2026-09/16/2030. This high risk, high reward project was reviewed by the NSF Smart and Connected Health (SCH) program, and is being funded by NIH NIDCR. It's a huge deal, because UIC has not received an SCH award in several years, despite a robust number of submissions each year.

At VCBM 2026

Sep 15, 2026

So happy to be attending VCBM'26, where I am chairing a session, presenting two works from our group, and meeting so many dear colleagues.

New ACS Training award to the Cancer Center!

Sep 14, 2026

I am honored to be part of the Cancer Center team which received a training award from the American Cancer Society (ACS): Advancing Urban Students in Medicine (AUSM) Post-Baccalaureate Program, Co-I (PI Paul Grippo; other Co-Is: J. Burdette, S. Kim, J. Kitajewski, A. Salahudeen, Y. Molina, L. Νοnn, L.M. Tussing-Humphreys), $660,000, 09/14/2026-09/13/2028. This is the same program which trained Bobo Lin with our group.

Siyuan dysphagia modeling paper at ICMLA'26

Sep 10, 2026

Congrats to Siyuan for an applied ML paper on modeling dysphagia from PROs: S. Zhao, E. A. Anyimadu, Z. G. Brumm, Y. Ma, C. D. Fuller, X. Zhang, G. E. Marai, and G. Canahuate, Dysphagia Risk Stratification in Head and Neck Cancer via Two-Stage PRO-Clinical Stacking, ICMLA 2026 (<25% acceptance rate), Rochester, MI, Oct. 2026. This is collaborative work among the University of Iowa, University of California San Francisco, University of Texas, and University of Illinois Chicago.

Farah physiological stress in VR paper

Sep 9, 2026

Congrats to EVL alumna Farah Kamleh on publising her BSMS project: F. Kamleh, A. Johnson, G.E. Marai, The Effects of Virtual Reality Environments on Physiological Stress: A Platform Comparison Between Room-Scale Displays and Desktop Computers, IEEE SWC 2026 XR-HEART Workshop, Sep 2026, Rende, Italy, Sept. 2026.

Congrats to Siyuan and team for a spatial transcriptomics paper at VIS'26!

Sep 6, 2026

Congrats to Siyuan and team for a terrific paper which will be presented at VIS'26: S. Zhao, M.N. Nipu, H. Fathollahian, O. Karginova, H. Chen, A. Salahudeen, G.E. Marai, Loom: Multi-Region Analysis of Spatial Transcriptomics with Local Neighborhoods and Global Trajectories, IEEE VIS'26, IEEE Trans. on Vis. and Comp. Graphics, Jan 2027. This is collaborative work with our colleagues in CS and in the Cancer Center, and was submitted to the Interaction and Design Area, on account of a novel and powerful visual encoding.

Collab survivorship work with MDACC published in Radiation Oncology

Sep 5, 2026

Congrats to our MDACC team collaborators in the MD Anderson Head and Neck Cancer Symptom Working Group for publishing this important cancer survivorship paper about sleep-related symptoms: G. Carevic, R. Gaur, W. Floyd, C.Dede, L. McCullum, C. Marquez, S. A. Faiz, M. M. Badawy, A. Jethanandani, G. E. Marai, A.S.R. Mohamed, J. Mathew, G. Canahuate, N. Mohamed, J. Phan, S. Haidacher, S. Mirbahaeddin, M. Spiotto, A. Lee, K. Hutcheson, A. Moreno, C. D. Fuller, MD Anderson Head and Neck Cancer Symptom Working Group. Sleep-related symptoms are associated with survival in oropharyngeal cancer radiotherapy survivors: Temporal characterization of patient-reported outcomes in a large-scale prospective longitudinal cohort, Radiation Oncology, Sep 2026.

New R01 NCI award to Ameen Salahudeen as ESI!

Sep 4, 2026

Heartfelt congratulations to UIC HDSR Institute member Ameen Salahudeen for his first R01 award, as an Early Stage Investigator, this is a huge accomplishment! The award details: NIH R01 CA304878: A multimodal approach to increase accuracy and generalizability in lung cancer early detection, Co-I (PI: A. Salahudeen, other Co-Is: A. Boyd, Y. Dai, Z. Chen, M. Strahan, E. Seltzer, V. Henderson, Y. Molina, R. Hopkins), $3.2M, 09/04/2026-09/03/2030.

New R21 NIBIB award for lymphedema detection!

Sep 2, 2026

We (Wei Tang and I) are incredibly happy to report we have received an NIH R21 award from NIBIB: EB037290: Image-based Detection and Spatial Monitoring of Secondary Lymphedema in Head and Neck Cancer, Lead PI on multi-site project with U Texas, UIC Co-I: W. Tang, $362,880, 09/02/2026-09/01/2028.

Nafiul comparative genome analysis paper at VCBM'26

Aug 30, 2026

Congrats to Nafiul Nipu and our collaborators at Los Alamos and at the National Lab of the Rockies for this paper stemming from Nafiul's internship with them: N. Nipu, G. Johnson, C. Roth, D. Rogers, S. R. Starkenburg, C. R. Steadman, G. E. Marai, MultiPASE: Shape-Aware Comparative 3D Genome Analysis, EuroGraphics Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) 2026, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Sept. 2026

Collab survivorship work with UCSF published in The Laryngoscope

Aug 25, 2026

Congratulations to Zachary, Eric, Guadalupe and team for publishing this important cancer survivorship paper about diagnosing swallowing dysfunction: Z. Brumm, E. Anyimadu, M. Kohli, J. Silver, B. Manduchi, K. Hutcheson, A. Gulati, G.E. Marai, T. Crosby, C. Rosen, V. Young, G. Canahuate, Y. Ma, MDADI as a Screening Tool for VFSS-Graded Swallowing Impairment in Head and Neck Cancer Patients, The Laryngoscope 2026. This work stems from an ongoing collaboration between the University of California San Francisco, University of Iowa, and University of Illinois Chicago. It shows the MD Anderson Cancer Center MDADI survey can be used to identify swallowing impairment without requiring burdensome video fluoroscopy swallow tests.

Third annual Institute incubator bootcamp was a success

Aug 24, 2026

Happy to report the 2026 Health Data Science Research Institute incubator was a success! This year's edition was a focused, highly-structured event bridging AI research and Heart, Lung, Blood and Sleep Disorders research on campus. We have made 4 seed awards to interdisciplinary teams that were formed during the bootcamp.

ConGAT paper published in Computers and Graphics and VCBM 2026

Aug 20, 2026

Congratulations to Hossein Fathollahian and team for publishing this important work in the Computers and Graphics journal:
H. Fathollahian, S. Zhao, N. Nipu, M. Salahshour, L. Duan, W. Tang, S. Boorboor, G. E. Marai. ConGAT: Context-Aware Graph Attention Visual Analysis for 3D Region of Interest Discovery in Multiplexed Microscopy Images, Computers & Graphics 2026. The work will be presented at The 16th EuroGraphics Symposium on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) 2026, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

VIS'26 area chairing wrap-up

Aug 10, 2026

Happy to wrap up my Applications Area chairing duties for IEEE VIS'26. It's been such a pleasure working with Wes and Renata.

Nafiul Nipu doctoral defense!

July 28, 2026

Congratulations to Nafiul Nipu on his successful PhD defense! Nafiul has had a distinguished doctoral trajectory at UIC, marked by significant accolades and awards, including a CoE Excellence in Teaching award, and inclusion in the IEEE Computing Edge magazine.

ISMB Keynote

July 13, 2026

I am honored to deliver an ISMB Keynote in Washington DC. The title is: Healthy Skepticism in AI: a BioVis Research Agenda, and the Keynote is hosted by the BioVis COSI track.

Sanjana Srabanti doctoral defense!

July 8, 2026

Congratulations to Sanjana Srabanti on her successful PhD defense! Proud of how far you have come along, Sanjana, and of all your accomplishments! Sanjana is being co-advised by my EVL colleague Fabio Miranda, who should receive full advising credit for her uncertainty vis and urban analytics work.

Research faculty mentor to 19 faculty in the past 2 years

June 15, 2026

I was stunned to realize I have research-mentored 7 faculty members across colleges in 2025-2026, and 12 faculty members across colleges in 2024-2025, through the UIC Institute for Health Data Science Research that I co-direct with Andy Boyd. These are quarterly small-group research-focused mentoring meetings that Andy and I have jointly with each seed awardee team. They definitely require more effort than standard faculty mentoring sessions in CS, but they are so rewarding.

BioVis Vis research and software gap paper at VisGap EuroVis'26

June 5, 2026

A nice paper ensuing from the BioMedVis Dagstuhl meeting earlier this year: J. Aerts, M. Behrisch, K. Bühler, J. Byška, M. Flotho, K. Furmanová, P. Huo, H. Jambor, B. Kozlikova, G. E. Marai, M. Siwek, A. van den Brandt (alphabetical order) How to Initiate Communication and Foster Collaboration between Biomedical and Visualization Experts, The Gap between Visualization Research and Visualization Software (VisGap) Workshop June 2026.

Long-term symptom burden paper at ICHI 2026

June 1, 2026

Congrats to Guadalupe and team for this paper on long-term symptom burden modeling for survival prediction: Y. Wang, E. Anyimadu, C. D. Fuller, A. C. Moreno, X. Zhang, G. E. Marai, G. Canahuate, Improving Survival Prediction of Head and Neck Cancer Patients by Modeling Long-term Symptom Burden, IEEE Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI) June 2026.

Congrats to Frank and Hrushi on their MS graduation!

May 10, 2026

Congrats to Frank Wang on his MS graduation! Frank has been such a tremendous contributor to the UIC ARPA-H project, where he designed the COMPASS visual analysis interface for patient discharges. Congrats to Hrushi Joshi on his MS graduation! Hrushi has helped with the flavor charter interface updates and recruitment.

College Teaching Excellence Award to Nafiul!

May 5, 2026

Congrats and well-deserved to Nafiul Nipu for receiving an UIC College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award 2025! Nafiul has been repeatedly called The GOAT (the Greatest of All Times) by our students.

BioVis Meetups webinar

Apr 15, 2026

I am so happy to deliver the BioVis Meetups Apr 2026 webinar. The presentation is titled: Recent Trends and Challenges in Biological Data Visualization, and the recording will be available through the biovis.net website.

Best Paper Award at ACM SAC 2026!

Mar 25, 2026

Heartfelt congratulations to Eric Anyimadu and team on receiving a Best Paper Award in Information Systems at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2026 in Thessaloniki, Greece! The paper is authored by E. Anyimadu, X. Zhang, C.D. Fuller, G. E. Marai, G. Canahuate, its title is Advancing Normal Tissue Complication Probability Modeling with Supervised Contrastive Learning for Predicting Osteoradionecrosis, and it was submitted to the ASH Track (Applied Computing in Healthcare) at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) 2026.

Short paper at ACM SAC 2026

Mar 25, 2026

Congrats to Filipo, Xinhua and team for a highly competitive short paper at ACM SAC 2026: F. Corna, X. Zhang, G. Canahuate, S. K. Attia, A. S. Mohamed, M. Naser, C. D. Fuller, G.E. Marai, Imitation Learning with Superhuman Policy Gradient Optimization for Sequential Cancer Treatment Decisions, ASH Track (Applied Computing in Healthcare) Short Papers/Poster Program at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) 2026, Thessaloniki Greece, March 2026. (6% acceptance rate).

Eurogin'26 medical congress presentation

Mar 15, 2026

I am honored to present my group's work at the Eurogin medical congress in Vienna, Austria. I have been invited to speak in the AI Forum track about Web-based Survival and Toxicity Prediction Systems.

Second-gen Ensembles paper in Computer Graphics Forum

Mar 5, 2026

Congratulations to Nafiul Nipu for having this core component of his PhD dissertation published: N. Nipu, S. Zhao, B. Maharathi, J.A. Loeb, G.E. Marai, Neurosurgery Network Pattern Analysis with 2nd Generation Ensembles, Computer Graphics Forum, March 2026.

Working on new CS concentration on gaming

Feb 15, 2026

I am designing and shepherding (with S. Boorboor) a new BS in CS concentration on Gaming and Real-Time Computing, to help with CS undergraduate recruitment.

JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics paper

Feb 1, 2026

Congratulations to the Cancer Center team led by Dr. Ameen Salahudeen for a new JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics paper: A.A. Salahudeen, A.J. Zakkar, N. Perwaiz, V. Harikrishnan, W. Zhong, V. Narra, F. Yousef, D. Kim, M. Burrage-Burton, A. A. Lawal, V. K. Gadi, M. C. Korpics, S. J. Kim, Z. Chen, A. A. Khan, Y. Molina, Y. Dai, G. E. Marai, H. Meidani, R. H. Nguyen, A hybrid computer vision model to predict lung cancer in diverse populations, JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, Feb 2026.

Francesco MS graduation!

Dec 5, 2025

Heartfelt congratulations to Francesco Botto for his successful MS thesis defense! Francesco not only built a smartphone app for flavor survey collection and shepherded recruitment and enrollment, he also built an interface for analyzing the results.

Siyuan paper in Nucleic Acids Research!

Dec 4, 2025

Congrats to Lei and Siyuan (roommates!) for a prestigious publication stemming from a course they took together with my colleague Prof. Chattopadhyay and which they kept refining over the past year: C. Chronis, M. Chen, L. Du, S. Zhao, B. Ye, P. Delafrouz, H. Farooq, D. Chattopadhyay, G.E. Marai, Z. Shao, J. Liang, D.M. Czajkowsky, ChromPolymerDB: A High-Resolution Database of Single-Cell 3D Chromatin Structures for Functional Genomics, NAR-02636-2025, Nucleic Acids Research, 2025.

BioMedVis Challenge 2025 Award to Hossein Fathollahian and team

Nov 25, 2025

Congratulations to Hossein Fathollahian and team on receiving a BioMedVis Challenge 2025 Award of Merit at VIS 2026! The Awards of Merit recognize outstanding research submissions addressing the challenge which have a student first author. The submission details are: H. Fathollahian, S. Zhao, M. Nipu, G.E. Marai, Attention-based Region of Interest Discovery in 3D Tissue Images, IEEE BioMedVis Challenge 2025.

New Dataset and Descriptor published!

Nov 15, 2025 The ORN dataset behind the earlier ORN Predictor software we developed last year is now publicly available, along with the dataset prediction: N. West, S. Kamel, A. Wentzel, Z. Kaffey. M. Abdelaal, G.E. Marai, G. Canahuate, X. Zhang, M. Chen, K. Wahid, J. Rigert, K. Brock, M. Chambers, A. Otun, R. Aponte-Wesson, R. He, M. Naser, K. Hutcheson, A. Mohamed, L. van Dijk, A. Moreno, S. Lai, C.D. Fuller, L. Humbert-Vidan, Clinical and dosimetric dataset of time-to-event normal tissue complication probability for osteoradionecrosis, Nature Scientific Data, Nov 2025

New project collecting food flavor data published

Nov 12, 2025

Congrats to Francesco et al. for this paper describing our efforts to capture the flavor of a canonical set of foods: F. Botto, G. Canhuate, X. Zhang, C. D. Fuller, G. E. Marai, FlavorCharter: Development of a Smartphone App for Quantifying Food Flavor, Workshop on Computational Gastronomy: Data Science for Food and Cooking (CoGamy) at the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2025, pp. 1-7, Washington DC, November 12 2025.

VAHC'25 Keynote

Nov 7, 2025

I am honored to deliver the Keynote at the Visual Analytics in Healthcare 2025 meeting at IEEE VIS 2025 in Vienna, Austria. The keynote title is: The Blackbox Patient and the Power of Many.

New patient-reported-outcomes work at EMBS 2025

Oct 26, 2025

Congrats to Eric, Guadalupe and team for another important work on patient reported outcomes data: E. Anyimadu, X. Zhang, C.D. Fuller, G. E. Marai, G. Canahuate, Attention-Augmented Bi-Directional LSTM for Improved Forecasting of Patient-Reported Outcomes, BHI 2025 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics, Atlanta, Georgia, October 26-29, 2025.

CG&A Special Issue on BioVis published!

Sep 30, 2025

So happy to see this labor of love published! The BioVis Special Issue on Recent Trends and Challenges in Biological Data Visualization is out in the IEEE Comp. Graphics & Applications Sep/Oct 2025 issue. This was a joint editorial effort with the wonderful Jillian Aurisano at the University of Cincinnati.

The 2nd Health Data Science Institute bootcamp is a success

Aug 25, 2025

The 2025 Bootcamp organized by the Health Data Science Institute I co-direct was the second time such an event took place on the UIC campus, and it was an unmitigated success.

New JCO paper

Aug 2, 2025

Congratulations to Eric and Guadalupe for an excellent new paper on methodology for survival modeling based on patient-reported-outcomes: E. Anyimadu, Y. Wang, A. C. Moreno, C. D. Fuller, X. Zhang, G. E. Marai, G. Canahuate, Evaluating Dimensionality Reduction for Patient-Reported Outcome-Based Survival Modeling in Head and Neck Cancer Patients, Journal of Clinical Oncology Aug. 2025.

Welcome Khairi Reda and Saeed Boorboor!

Aug 1, 2025

So excited to welcome our new EVL colleagues Khairi Reda and Saeed Boorboor! Khairi is returning to UIC as an Associate Professor, and Saeed is joining us as an Assistant Professor. Welcome!

VAHC'25 paper from Nafiul Nipu

July 31, 2025

Congratulations to Nafiul Nipu for this new paper describing the lessons we learned a year after deploying an interactive risk predictor for head and neck cancer outcomes to the medical profession: N. Nipu, L. van Dijk, G. Canahuate, C.D. Fuller, G.E. Marai, Lessons from the Development and Deployment of an Interactive Oncological Risk Estimator, VAHC 2025 (16th workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare), in conjunction with IEEE VIS 2025, Vienna, Austria, pp. 1-7, November 2025.

Moving to the new CS building!

July 23, 2025

So happy to be relocating to the new CS building on campus. My new office is in CDRLC, 850 W Taylor St.

EMBC presentation of new mHealth project

July 18, 2025

Thrilled to be presenting this new project from our group, which leverages consumer-grade mHealth technology to support investigating sarcopenia in head and neck cancer patients during radiation therapy treatment. The software platform, mEnergy, blends a Withings scale and a Fitbit smartwatch with SpO2 capabilities to monitor remotely in near real-time a subjects's body composition trends, sleep disturbances that could indicate apnea, and levels of physical activity which could indicate fatigue: N. Nipu, A. Wentzel, N. Heshmati Molaei, N. Sangi, X. Zhang, G. Canahuate, C. D. Fuller, G. E. Marai, mEnergy: Development of a Novel mHealth Multi-device Platform for Near Real-time Remote Assessment of Energy Disorders, pp.1-7, The 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) 2025 (podium presentation).

New VIS paper from Sanjana Srabanti

July 16, 2025

Congratulations to Sanjana on her new VIS paper: StreetWeave: A Declarative Grammar for Street-Overlaid Visualization of Multivariate Data, Sanjana Srabanti, G. Elisabeta Marai, Fabio Miranda, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (To appear). The paper proposes a design space for street-overlaid visualizations, and a declarative grammar to operationalize such space.

NSF CAREER Award to Assistant Professor Wei Tang!

June 15, 2025

Congratulations to my wonderful mentee Wei Tang for receiving a prestigious NSF CAREER award! This year the UIC CS department faculty have received a record of 3 NSF CAREER awards.

New projects from the Videogame Design course

May 15, 2025

A new set of terrific projects from the Videogame Design course I taught this Spring. CS426 is essentially a pretty tough software engineering/project management/game design course, where students learn not only about game design and implementation, but also about working together as a team. I'm always floored with the quality of the games our students produce by the end of the semester: https://www.evl.uic.edu/cs426/gallery/index.html.

New EVL paper on Immersive Analytics

March 5, 2025

Luc Renambot will present this new EVL paper at the IEEE VR 2025 Workshop on Immersive Visualization Laboratories - Past, Present and Future: L. Renambot, M. Papka, J. Talandis, M. Brown, G.E. Marai, L. Long, F. Miranda, D. Tsoupikova, D. Plepys, N. Soni, Immersive Analytics at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, IEEE VR 2025 Workshop on Immersive Visualization Laboratories - Past, Present and Future.

Terrific new multi-site paper predicting orodental toxicity after radiation therapy

Jan 10, 2025

Here's a new terrific paper with our MD Anderson collaborators, and an accompanying interactive decision support tool created by my group, describing a validated model for ORN risk stratification using multi-institutional cohorts: L. Humbert-Vidan, S. Kamel, A. Wentzel et al, Externally validated digital decision support tool for time-to-osteoradionecrosis risk-stratification using right-censored multi-institutional observational cohorts, Radiotherapy and Oncology, pp. 1-9, 207, Elsevier 2025.

Congratulations to Dr. Andrew Wentzel for a successful defense!

Dec 10, 2024

Heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Wentzel, who has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled Visual Computing Design for Explainable, Spatially-aware Machine Learning. It's been such a joy to work with you, Andrew.

New CGA paper reflecting on data visualization lessons from the pandemic

Dec 5, 2024

Excited to see this joint paper from the Dagstuhl pandemic visualization seminar accepted for publication by the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine: T. Baumgartl, M. Ghoniem, T. von Landesberger, G.E. Marai, S. Miksch, S. Scheithauer, N, Srivastava, Empowering Communities: Tailored Pandemic Data Visualization for Varied Tasks and Users, pp.1-8, IEEE Comp Graph. App, Jan 2025.

Health Data Science Institute seed awards announced

Dec 2, 2024

Extremely happy to announce the three winning teams of seed awards from the Institute I co-direct with Andrew Boyd.

Google Health meeting

Nov 21, 2024

Pleased to be part of the UIC working group meeting with the Google Health team.

MD Anderson Cancer Center visit

Nov 11, 2024

Thrilled to be visiting in person, together with Guadalupe Canahuate, our collaborators at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston Texas, and to hold a seminar and a mentoring session.

Serving on the UIC Senate Research Committee

Nov 10, 2024

Honored to represent the College of Engineering on the UIC Senate Research Committee.

PRO-based stratification paper at BHI'24

Nov 9, 2024

Congratulations to our collaborators at University of Iowa and MD Anderson Cancer Center for a paper leveraging our work together to improve the toxicity risk stratification of head and neck cancer patients: Anyimadu, E.A., Wang, Y., Floricel, C., Kamel, S., Moreno, A.C., Fuller, C.D., Zhang, X., Marai, G. and Canahuate, G.M., PRO-based Stratification Improves Model Prediction for Toxicity and Survival of Head and Neck Cancer Patients, in IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2024. This paper was also selected for publication in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics 2024.

Medical digital twin work presented at IEEE VIS'24

Oct 13, 2024

Heartfelt congratulations to Andrew Wentzel and team for our paper on a digital twin for the head and neck cancer treatment decision process, which is presented this week at IEEE VIS'24: A. Wentzel, S. Attia, X. Zhang, G. Canahuate, C.D. Fuller, G.E. Marai, DITTO: A Visual Digital Twin for Interventions and Temporal Treatment Outcomes in Head and Neck Cancer, pp. 1-11, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comp. Graphics, Jan 2025 / VIS 2024. Sadly, the conference is virtual due to the hurricane impact on Tampa.

Spatial transcriptomics work presented at the BioVisMedChallenge 2024

Oct 11, 2024

Congratulations to Siyuan for his first paper as part of our lab, on spatial transcriptomics visualization, as part of the BioMedVis Challenge at IEEE VIS'23: S. Zhang, G.E. Marai, A Part-to-Whole Circular Cell Explorer, IEEE BioMedVis Challenge, IEEE VIS, 2024.

IEEE VIS 2025 Area Chair

Sep 15, 2024

Honored to co-chair the IEEE VIS'25 Applications Area together with Wes Willet. My advisees will not be able to submit to this area next year.

Chartered NIH study section membership

Sep 2, 2024

Deeply honored to have been vetted and approved as a chartered member of the NIH Clinical Informatics and Digital Health (CIDH) study section for the next 4 years.

Excellent MS and PhD program admission yield

Aug 30, 2024

Happy to see, as the CS Director of Graduate Admissions, the highest incoming MS and PhD cohort in several years.

The Health Data Science Institute bootcamp is a success

Aug 12, 2024

The 2024 Bootcamp organized by the Health Data Science Institute I co-direct was the first time such an event took place on the UIC campus, and it was a great success.

BI-LAVA active learning for image labeling paper accepted by CGF

Aug 10, 2024

Incredibly pleased to see Juan's work accepted by the Computer Graphics Forum. Congratulations to the team, including our Peruvian summer intern Will Berrios! J. Trelles, A. Wentzel, W. Berrios, H. Shatkay, G.E. Marai BI-LAVA: Biocuration with Hierarchical Image Labeling through Active Learning and Visual Analytics pp.1-15, Comp. Graph. Forum 2024

Patient Reported Outcomes paper presented at DEXA'24

Aug 1, 2024

Congratulations to our collaborators at University of Iowa and MD Anderson Cancer Center, and particularly to Eric and Guadalupe, for having this paper presented at DEXA'24: E. A. Anyimadu, C.D. Fuller, X. Zhang, G.E. Marai, G. Canahuate, Collaborative Filtering for the Imputation of Patient Reported Outcomes, 35th Database and Expert Systems Applications Conference (DEXA 2024), Naples, Italy, Aug 2024.

EVL history paper accepted by Presence

Aug 1, 2024

Such a joy to see this wonderful history (led by the great Maxine Brown) of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory published by Presence: Johnson, L. Renambot, G.E. Marai, D. Tsoupikova, M.E. Papka, L. Long, D. Plepys, J. Talandis, M.D. Brown*, J. Leigh, D.J. Sandin, T.A. DeFanti, Electronic Visualization Laboratory?s 50th Anniversary Retrospective: Look to the Future, Build on the Past, pp. 1-51, Presence: Virtual and Augmented Reality, MIT Press 2024.

Co-Chairing the Vis/SciVis Test of Time Awards Committee for VIS'24

July 15, 2024

Honored to co-chair with Edi Groller the Vis/SciVis Test of Time Awards committee for IEEE VIS'24.

Serving on the DPI Executive Committee

July 10, 2024

I have been elected to serve as a UIC representative on the Discovery Partners Institute EC.

Digital twin work featured in IEEE Computing Edge!

July 1, 2024

So proud to see Nafiul's pioneering work in contrail digital twins featured in the the IEEE Computing Edge magazine, which gets sent to all IEEE Computer Society members.

Pandemic visualization paper accepted by CGF

June 30, 2024

Congrats to Andrew Wentzel and co-authors on having their pandemic visualization paper accepted by the Computer Graphics Forum journal: A. Wentzel, L. Levine, V. Dhariwal, Z. Fatemi, A.Bhattacharya, B. Di Eugenio, A. Rojecki, E. Zheleva, G.E. Marai, MOTIV: Visual Exploration of Moral Framing in Social Media, pp. 1-14, Computer Graphics Forum 2024

Welcome to our Summer Interns!

June 30, 2024

Welcome to David Rios, Rayyan Rashid, and Yuseph Shilleh to EVL! This great undergraduate team will work with us and the College of Medicine specialists on cleaning up, transcribing, and analyzing lung cancer data.

Serving on the Honors Council at UIC

May 30, 2024

Honored to serve on the UIC Honors College Council this year.

Faculty Fellow of the Year, Honors College UIC

May 15, 2024

Humbled to receive the Faculty Fellow of the Year award from the UIC Honors College.

Congrats to Farah Kamleh on her graduation with a BSMS degree!

May 9, 2024

Congratulations to Farah Kamleh for her BSMS in CS degree graduation as part of the UIC Honors College! It's been such a pleasure working with you.

Congrats to Andrew Wentzel for College-level Research Award!

May 2, 2024

Congratulations and well-deserved to Andrew Wentzel for receiving the UIC College of Engineering Exceptional Research Promise Award this year!

Congrats to the cs426 class!

Apr 30, 2024

Congratulations to this year's cs426 Videogame Design and Development class! It's been such a joy to be able to teach this class again after a few years off.

Associate Editor for CGA

Apr 3, 2024

Honored to be appointed as an Associate Editor for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. Together with Jillian Aurisano at University of Cincinnati, we will also edit a Special Issue on Bioinformatics Data Visualization.

Participating in the Dagstuhl Pandemic seminar

Feb 24, 2024

Happy to be in the Dagstuhl Pandemic Data Visualization seminar, and to meet such cool researchers across the disciplines.

Director of the new UIC Institute for Health Data Science Research!

Feb 15, 2024

Honored to be a co-founder and appointed Director of the UIC Institute for Health Data Science Research together with Andy Boyd and a great team of co-directors. An initiative of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the institute aims to bridge data science and computing research on campus with healthcare research at UIC.

Kiviat Defense project images featured on the cover of Journal of Imaging Science and Technology

Jan 10, 2024

Kiviat Defense project images are featured on the cover of the Journal Imaging Science and Technology issue for Dec. 2023. Congratulations, Mirko and team!

Paper from MS thesis presented at Electronic Imaging 2024

Jan 7, 2024

Andrew Wentzel is presenting at EI 2024 work stemming from Mirko Mantovani's MS thesis: M. Mantovani, A. Wentzel, J. Trelles, J. Michaelis, G.E. Marai Kiviat Defense: An Empirical Evaluation of Visual Encoding Effectiveness in Multivariate Data Similarity Detection, Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, Jan 2024. The paper has also been published in the JIST journal, under the journal-first submission model.

Welcome, Hossein!

Jan 5, 2024

Happy Hossein Fathollahian was able to join our group this semester. Hossein comes to us from Iran. Welcome!

MouseScholar paper presented at BIBM'24

Dec 10, 2023

Congrats to Juan Trelles for presenting his work at the BIBM 2023 conference (19% acceptance rate)! Hagit, you are so missed. J. Trelles, C. Floricel, C. Arighi, H. Shatkay, D. Raciti, M. Ringwald, G.E. Marai,
MouseScholar: Evaluating an Image+Text Search System for Biocuration, IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) 2023, December 2023, Istanbul, Turkey.

At Dagstuhl BioVis Seminar

Nov 23, 2023

Happy to meet old friends and make new friends at the Dagstuhl BioVis seminar this year.

At IEEE VIS'23 in Melbourne

Oct 23, 2023

Honored to be chairing the Best Papers session and to co-chair the Test of Time session at the conference. Also happy to see Andrew Wentzel's work on Pandemic Stay-At-Home Attitudes presented at the PandemicVis workshop, and Carla Floricel's work presented in the main conference.

New $3M NIH UG3 award!

Oct 1, 2023

I am a relatively small cog in a new NIH UG3 award to UIC, which is a bit over $3M over three years, made to PI Jeffrey Loeb (Neurology and Rehabilitation) and the rest of the team Title: Integration and interoperability of complex data and tissues from the human brain (UG3 TR004501). This cooperative agreement aims to: 1) build and deploy a federated INTUITION platform at multiple sites to standardize data extraction, integration, and exchange; 2) perform epilepsy specific multimodal data and tissue harmonization and set up training programs for coherent data and tissue collection across all sites; and 3) build and integrate analytical tools for automation and analysis.

NIH Study Section service

Sep 30, 2023

Honored to serve on the CIDH panel at NIH. Huge responsibility, reviewing thousands of pages of project proposals, most with multi-million budgets of taxpayer funding.

New NSF award to EVL!

Sep 20, 2023

Happy to be on the team awarded another $1.5M from the National Science Foundation for a Major Research Instrumentation project. NSF CNS-2320261 Research Infrastructure: MRI: Track 2 Acquisition of Data Observation and Computation Collaboratory (DOCC). PI: A. Johnson, Co-PIs: M. Papka, G.E. Marai, F. Miranda, N. Soni.

Workshop presentation at ISC 2023

Sep 15, 2023

Glad to see this work presented at the HPC Precision Medicine workshop at ISC 2023: S. Gawane, X. Zhang, G. Canahuate, A. Wentzel, A. Mohamed, L. van Dijk, C.D. Fuller, G.E. Marai, Interpretable Transformer-based Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Longitudinal Head-and-Neck Cancer Treatment, Sixth ISC Workshop on HPC Applications in Precision Medicine, Oct 2023. Congratulations, Sarang, Xinhua, and team!

Paper accepted at the Vis4PandEmRes, colocated with IEEE VIS'23

Sep 1, 2023

Our paper describing the constrained design process we followed during the pandemic to enhance knowledge about the efficacy of Stay at Home orders in the US has been accepted by the Vis4PandEmRes workshop: A. Wentzel, L. Levine, V. Dhariwal, Z. Fatemi, A. Bhattacharya, B. Di Eugenio, A. Rojecki, E. Zheleva, G. E. Marai, A Lens to Pandemic Stay at Home Attitudes, IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for Pandemic and Emergency Responses 2023 (Vis4PandEmRes), Oct. 2023, Melbourne, Australia. Congratulations, Andrew and team!

Carla awarded Travel Scholarship by the UI Cancer Center

Aug 30, 2023

Congratulations to Carla Floricel for receiving a travel scholarship of $500 from the University of Illinois Cancer Center, to help support her VIS'23 trip to Melbourne, Australia.

Juan Trelles defends thesis

Aug 24, 2023

Congratulations, Dr. Trelles! So proud of your accomplishments. Juan will be joining Epsilon as a data scientist.

Siyuan Zhao and Nasibeh Heshmati join our group

Aug 16, 2023

Welcome to the group and to EVL, Siyuan and Nasibeh! Siyuan joins us from WPI, and Nasibeh joins us from Iran, both as junior graduate students.

CS Director of Graduate Admissions and Co-Director of Graduate Studies

Aug 15, 2023

Honored to continue serving as the CS Director of Graduate Admissions and Co-DGS. Some accomplishments from the past year: Admissions data analysis, fee negotiations, active recruitment, and faculty coordination, resulting in a 2-month process shift, 14.7% more doctoral applications, a 20% increase in the number of doctoral offers made, a 15.1% doctoral yield increase, and an 70% increase in the incoming doctoral cohort, all compared to the average over the prior 8 years.

Paper accepted by Bioinformatics Advances

July, 2023

The journal Bioinformatics Advances has accepted our paper: J. Trelles Trabucco, C. Arighi, H. Shatkay, G. E. Marai, "Enhancing biomedical search interfaces with images", Bioinformatics Advances, July 2023. This work presents CORD-19 IMAGE SCHOLAR: a publication retrieval system for the CORD-19 documents from the Allen Institute collection that contain both the desired text and desired image modalities (such as "cell" and "microscopy"), and which presents the document information along with the relevant images in those documents. See the system here. Congratulations, Juan and team, and we miss you so much, Hagit.

Paper accepted at VIS 2023 and by TVCG

July, 2023

IEEE VIS'23 has accepted our paper: C. Floricel, A. Wentzel, A. Mohamed, C.D. Fuller, G. Canahuate, G.E. Marai, Roses Have Thorns: Understanding the Downside of Oncological Care Delivery Through Visual Analytics and Sequential Rule Mining, pp. 1-11, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comp. Graphics, Jan 2024 / VIS 2023. Congratulations, Carla, Andrew, and team! Carla will be presenting this work in Melbourne, Australia in October.

IEEE VIS'23 Best Paper Awards Committee chair

July, 2023

Honored to chair the IEEE VIS Best Paper Awards Committee this year. What a privilege to read such a large number of nominated papers. And what a pleasure to work with the committee and with the paper chairs this year.

Paper accepted by the Frontiers in Oncology Journal

July, 2023

Frontiers in Oncology has accepted our paper: A. Wentzel, A. S. R. Mohamed, M. Naser, L. V. van Dijk, K. Hutcheson, A. Moreno, C. D. Fuller, G. Canahuate, G.E. Marai, "Multi-Organ Spatial Stratification of 3-D Dose Distributions Improves Risk Prediction of Long-Term Self-Reported Severe Symptoms in Oropharyngeal Cancer Patients Receiving Radiotherapy: Development of a Pre-Treatment Decision Support Tool",
Frontiers in Oncology journal, section Head and Neck Cancer, July 2023. Congratulations, Andrew and long-time and dear collaborators!

Paper accepted by ICHI 2023

June, 2023

The International Conference on Healthcare Informatics has accepted our paper: Y. Wang, L. Van Dijk, A. S. R. Mohamed, M. Naser, C. D. Fuller, X. Zhang, G. E. Marai, G. Canahuate, Improving prediction of late symptoms using LSTM and patient-reported outcomes for head and neck cancer patients, pp. 1-10, IEEE-ICHI The 11th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics 2023, Houston TX. Tommy (Y. Wang) will be presenting the work at the conference. Congratulations!

Grace Hopper Scholarship to Sanjana

June 2023

Congratulations to Sanjana Srabanti for receiving a Grace Hopper Scholarship to attend GHC'23!

University of Illinois Scholar and $45K award!

May 20, 2023

I can scarce believe it, but I have been recognized as a University of Illinois Scholar (across the three campuses, Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana Champaign)! From the College announcement: "Professor G. Elisabeta (Liz) Marai is a scientist, inventor, and leader in the field of visual computing. Marai excels both in core computer science, where her work has led to breakthroughs in theoretical research and citations in textbooks, and in interdisciplinary research. Her ongoing work with oncologists, leading to better treatments for neck cancers, is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary, data-driven translational research." The award comes with a $45K fund over three years. It wouldn't have happened without great colleagues, including my advisees.

Selection to the CRA Leadership Workshop

May 15, 2023

So proud to have been selected for the 2023 CRA (Computing Research Association) Leadership Workshop. I've learned so much, and it was such a privilege to meet all these amazing people.

Paper accepted by the Oral Oncology Journal

May 5, 2023

The Oral Oncology journal has accepted our paper: G. Canahuate, A. Wentzel, A. S. R. Mohamed, L. V. van Dijk, D. M. Vock, B. Elgohari, H. Elhalawani, C. D. Fuller, G. E. Marai, "Spatially-aware clustering improves AJCC-8 risk stratification performance in oropharyngeal carcinomas", Oral Oncology, 2023. Congratulations, team!

Co-Chairing the IEEE VIS Test of Time SciVis 2023 committee

May 1, 2023

Honored to co-chair the IEEE VIS'23 Test of Time Award committee for Vis/SciVis, together with Helwig Hauser. What a privilege to read these amazing 25-year old, 14-year old, and 13-year old papers, and see history unfolding. And what a pleasure to work with the committee and with the other ToT chairs this year.

Chairing the EuroVis'23 Best Paper Committee

Apr 30, 2023

Honored to chair the EuroVis'23 Best Paper Award Committee. What a privilege to read great papers before the conference, and to work with the BPA committee.

UIC Senate appointment

Apr 15, 2023

Proud to serve as a UIC senator starting this month.

Honors College award to Farah Kamleh

Apr 5, 2023

Congratulations to Farah Kamleh, for receiving a research grant from the Honors College for her CAVE2 work! Farah's project examines the benefits of mindfulness in a CAVE2 environment versus a regular display. Farah has been accepted into our Masters of Science program at UIC CS.

Paper accepted at EuroVis'23 and by CGF

Mar 5, 2023

EuroVis 2023 has accepted our submission: A. Wentzel, C. Floricel, G. Canahuate, M. Naser, A. Mohamed, C.D. Fuller, L. Van Dijk, G.E. Marai, DASS Good: Explainable Data Mining of Oncology Imaging and Toxicity Data, pp. 1-13, Computer Graphics Forum 2023 / EuroVis 2023. DASS is a visual computing system designed to help scientists build machine learning models that classify head and neck cancer patients into groups, based on their risk of developing permanent side effects from radiation therapy. Its visual interface helps data scientists to build a model for each side-effect by visualizing the patients' anatomical and other clinical data, and to figure out what parameters the model should consider, such as which organs may be damaged when side effects occur, what amount of radiation dose causes the damage to the organs, and how many risk groups to create. DASS also has features for explaining to clinicians the finished models and examining whether their predictions perform well, and the reasons behind why a given patient belongs in a certain risk group. DASS was created by visual computing researchers at EVL, in collaboration with clinicians at the MD Anderson Cancer Center and data mining specialists at University of Iowa, and is supported by funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH awards NCI-R01-CA258827 and NLM-R01-LM012527), and US National Science Foundation (NSF awards CDSE-1854815 and CNS-1828265).

NIH Study Section service

Feb, 2023

Honored to serve on the CIDH panel at NIH. Huge responsibility.

Paper accepted by BMC Pulmonary Medicine

Dec 5, 2022

The journal BMC Pulmonary Medicine has accepted our submission "Alveolus Analysis: A Web Browser-based Tool to Analyze Lung Intravital Microscopy", by A. L. Politowicz; A. T. Burks; Y. Dong; Y. M. Htwe; S. M. Dudek; G. E. Marai; P. Belvitch. So glad to see this interdisciplinary work accepted for publication. The work stems from a CS529 VDS project with wonderful graduate students Alex Politowicz, Andrew Burks, and Yushen Dong, and the project is open source.

Hosting sabbatical

Nov 28, 2022

So happy to host at UIC/EVL Guadalupe Canahuate's sabbatical break this term! Prof. Canahuate (University of Iowa) will present her research on "Scalable high-dimensional similarity searches using a query driven dynamic quantization" in a departmental colloquium on Nov 30th 2022.

Images included in new medical vis textbook

Nov 20, 2022

Two images from our group's work (Andrew Wentzel's TSSIM and Carla Floricel's THALIS) have been selected for inclusion in a new medical visualization textbook by R. Raidou and B. Preim. So nice to see these projects have an impact outside our collaboration with M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Paper presentation at VIS'22

Oct 22, 2022

Nafiul Nipu, a doctoral student in our group, is presenting our full paper "Visual Analysis and Detection of Contrails in Aircraft Engine Simulations" at VIS'22.

Doctoral Colloquium presentation at VIS'22

Oct 19, 2022

Juan Trelles, a doctoral student in our group, is presenting his work in the Doctoral Colloquium at VIS'22.

Paper accepted in the European Journal of Cancer

Oct 19, 2022

Our HNC-PREDICTOR paper led by Sanne van Dijk, "Head and Neck Cancer Predictive Risk Estimator to Determine Control and Therapeutic Outcomes of Radiotherapy (HNC-PREDICTOR) Development, international multi-institutional validation, and web-implementation of clinic-ready model-based risk stratification for head and neck cancer", has been accepted by the European Journal of Cancer. This paper includes a clinic-ready interactive web-interface for risk prediction, created together with PhD student Nafiul Nipu and myself, and hosted at EVL: HNC-Predictor.

Graduate application fee waivers in effect for Fall'2023

Oct 16, 2022

Thanks to an agreement between the College of Engineering and the Office of Admissions, all applicants for the Computer Science Graduate Program Fall'23 qualify for an application fee waiver (international students will pay $100, and domestic students will pay $0). For instructions, please see our department's graduate admissions page. Proud to have played a small part in brokering this agreement, as the CS Director of Graduate Admissions.

DGA appointment

Aug 16, 2022

I have been officially appointed as Director of Graduate Admissions and Co-Director of Graduate Studies, while Jakob Eriksson is on a sabbatical leave. Big shoes to fill in.

Promotion to full professor

Aug 16, 2022

I have been officially promoted to full professor. It wouldn't have happened without the support of wonderful students and advisees, collaborators, and colleagues in my field and at my institution.

Paper accepted at VIS'22

Aug 1, 2022

Nafiul Nipu's and Carla Floricel's paper on contrail visualization has been officially accepted at VIS'22!

Papers program co-chairing at EuroVis'22

June 4, 2022

I am co-chairing the Papers Program at EuroVis'22 in Rome, together with the wonderful Rita Borgo and Tobias Schreck. We are also co-guest editing the CGF issue correponding to the accepted papers.

Seminar at VRVis

May 19, 2022

I am visiting and giving a colloquium at VRVis in Vienna about the immersive analytics work done at EVL.

Seminar at University of Vienna

May 16, 2022

I am visiting and giving a guest seminar at University of Vienna.

Colloquium at TU Wien

May 13, 2022

I am giving a colloquium at TU Wien to my lovely hosts, about grounding data vis theory in practice.

Paper presentation

March 26, 2022

Sanjana Srabanti presented our paper on healthcare disparities in head and neck cancer at PacificVis'22!

WinterGraph'22

March 5, 2022

I am participating in WinterGraph'22, as a guest of Edi Groller's group.

Seminar at Utah SCI

Jan 26, 2022

I am giving a virtual guest seminar at Utah SCI.

Seminar at NYU Tandon

Dec 9, 2021

I am giving a seminar at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, as a guest of Claudio Silva's group.

Seminar at UI Cancer Center

Dec 2, 2021

I am giving a virtual seminar at University of Illinois Cancer Center, where I am a member.

Sabbatical 2021-2022

Sep 1, 2021

I will be on a sabbatical break Fall 2021 (NYU) and Spring 2022 (TU Vienna).

Test-of-time award

July 10, 2021

Our paper on RuleBender has received a Test of Time Award for the ten-years most impactful biovis paper at ISMB'21! So proud of my team: Adam Smith, Wen Xu, Yao Sun and James Faeder. Miss you all.