Renaissance Computing Institute

Data visualization is a critical and ubiquitous tool used to support data analysis tasks across a variety of domains. Visualizations are valued for their ability to “show the data” graphically, rather than using letters and numbers, in a way that enables users to assign meaning to what they see. This in turn helps users analyze complex data, discover new insights, make data-driven decisions, and communicate with other people about their findings. The correctness of these findings is therefore clearly contingent upon the correctness of the inferences that users make when viewing or interacting with a data visualization tool. However, recent studies have shown that people often interpret visualized patterns as indicators of causal relationships between variables in their data even when no causal relationships exist. The result is that visualizations can dramatically mislead users into drawing erroneous conclusions. This project develops a new approach to visualization, based on the concept of counterfactual reasoning, designed to help users draw more accurate and generalizable inferences when analyzing data using visualization tools. The project’s results, including open-source software, are intended to be broadly applicable across domains. In addition, the project will be evaluated with data and users in the population health domain with the potential to contribute to improvements to human health.

The Galapagos Science Center, a state-of-the-art research facility in the Galapagos Islands, was established in 2008 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) to promote science and education to protect the island’s unique ecosystems.

ROBOKOP (Reasoning Over Biomedical Objects linked in Knowledge-Oriented Pathways) is a biomedical question-answering system based on a knowledge graph, meaning that it expresses data as a collection of nodes—such as genes and diseases—and edges that represent the relationships between the nodes. ROBOKOP uses multiple open biomedical databases to explore links between various biomedical data types and utilizes the BIOLINK model to express those data types. For example, it can be used to examine connections between a disease and a drug and then explore which genes might be involved in that relationship. ROBOKOP’s publicly accessible user interface (UI) allows users to address both relatively simple questions such as “what genes are associated with drug-induced liver injury?” and more complex ones such as “what drugs could be used to treat airborne pollutant–induced asthma exacerbations in patients who are non-responsive to traditional medications?”

Aerial Experimentation Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) is a $24 million grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to develop an advanced wireless research platform, led by North Carolina State University, in partnership with Wireless Research Center of North Carolina, Mississippi State University and Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; additional partners include Town of Cary, City of Raleigh, North Carolina Department of Transportation, Purdue University, University of South Carolina, and many other academic, industry and municipal partners. AERPAW, the nation’s first aerial wireless experimentation platform spanning 5G technologies and beyond, will enable cutting-edge research — with the potential to create transformative wireless advances for aerial systems.