We're back in 2017 with Erich Ess, lead engineer on Jet.com's Core Platform team, presenting on foundational work to visualize fluid motion: Imaging Vector Fields Using Line Integral Convolution (http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2370/2000/1999/cabral.pdf) by Brian Cabral and Leith Leedom.
Intro
Line Integral Convolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral_convolution) is one of the most intuitive data visualization techniques around. It's dropping paint in a river to see how the current is flowing: to visualize a vector field simply take an image and have the vector field smear the colors. The result is a powerful alternative to using arrows or stream lines. And while the intuition is very straightforward, the actual mathematics that power the technique are very complex.
Erich Ess (@egerhardess (https://twitter.com/egerhardess)) is a lead engineer on the Core Platform team at Jet.com (https://jet.com). His current work focuses on semantics for programmatic represention of distributed processes and advanced monitoring and insight platform for high distributed high volume systems. Before that he was a CTO in Chicago and an engineer in San Diego. He studied Computer Science and Pure Mathematics in college and did research in scientific visualization before escaping academia.
