Abstract
The study of biological processes carried out in living organisms is among the central foci of modern science. The field is nowadays by large extent computational, there are many kinds of digital models that characterize particular aspects of life. To provide a comprehensive view on biological phenomena, visualization offers itself for integrating multiple models into one visual environment.
One of the interesting challenges, associated with such a visual integration, is to communicate phenomena that are simultaneously described on several spatial and temporal scales. In my talk we will discuss a variety of visualization techniques that bridge several orders of magnitude of spatial scale by interactively rendering structural information from a single atom level (10?10 m) up to the scale of entire viruses or bacteria with a complete molecular machinery (ca. 10?6 m). Integrative structural biology models are very dense and consist of many structures each of these serving a particular function. In order to convey such information clearly, I will discuss how visual abstractions help us to visualize multiple scales and how these techniques can be used to deal with the structural occlusion inherent in the integrative model. To convey a living structure, large structural models can be extended with dynamic biological models of physiology. In the last part of my talk I will discuss an integration of molecular reaction pathways with the structure. The reactions are modelled quantitatively, can be executed in run-time during interactive visualization to allow for interactive visual steering of the simulation parameters.

Bio
Ivan Viola is Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria and Adjunct Professor at University of Bergen, Norway. He received M.Sc. in 2002 and Ph.D. in 2005 from Vienna University of Technology, Austria. His research is focusing on effective visualization methods that are well understandable by humans. Viola co-authored several scientific works published in international journals and conferences such as IEEE TVCG, IEEE Vis, EG CGF, and EG EuroVis and acted as a reviewer and IPC member for conferences in the field of computer graphics and visualization. He is member of Eurographics, IEEE Computer Society, VGTC, and ACM.
He has won Best Paper Awards at InfoVis'13, BioVis’12, InfoVis’11, GI’10 and Honorable Mention Awards at CHI'14, InfoVis'14 and EuroVis’12. He is a co-author of the Nature Methods “Points of View” column. In 2013 he co-edited the Special Issue on Visual Analytics in the IEEE Computer journal. Additionally, he is actively contributing to the scientific community by serving on the organizing and program committee of several scientific events as well as by acting as a reviewer for high-quality journals and conferences.