A Collaborative Environment for Protein Visualization

We are currently developing a framework of distributed visualization and collaboration to help biochemistry and genomics researchers in understanding the function and nature of proteins. Our visualization system allows the examination of a molecule's different visual representations (backbone, space-fill, ball-stick, and ribbon models) and sharing the views amongst geographically distributed researchers. Furthermore, we provide an interactive tree representation, both for primary and secondary structures, which helps the users understand the underlying hierarchy. Our collaboration system provides a variety of annotating mechanisms for annotating parts of interest. Annotation of the 3D representations of protein molecules is provided through the concept called the sticky notes. These notes, which we believe is an invaluable tool for sharing ideas, can be associated with a whole protein molecule or some part of the molecule in the molecular hierarchy. The notes in our system are capable of conveying multimedia
information (e.g. audio, video) as well as textual information. Furthermore, their capabilities go beyond containing information to performing actions and monitoring the environment. This research is supported in part by the NSF, as part of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype Project.

Bio:
Yuan-Fang Wang is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University and his master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Wang's research activities center around digital libraries, computer vision, bioinformatics, and medical image analysis and robotics. Dr. Wang has received funding support from many federal agencies including NSF, NASA, and DARPA and also from private industries. He served as a consultant for a number of companies and was a faculty consultant at LG Electronics Research Center of America in summer 1998. He was the program co-chair of the 1998 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and is currently on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the the Pattern Recognition Journal.