Visual Informatics: Bridging Research and Practice

Visual informatics is a field of interest not just among the information technology and computer science community, but also other related fields such as engineering, me- cal and health informatics and education starting in the early 1990s. Recently, the field is gaining more attention from researchers and industry. It has become a mul- disciplinary and trans-disciplinary field related to research areas such as computer vision, visualization, information visualization, real-time image processing, medical image processing, image information retrieval, virtual reality, augmented reality, – pressive visual mathematics, 3D graphics, multimedia-fusion, visual data mining, visual ontology, as well as services and visual culture. Various efforts has been – vested in different research, but operationally, many of these systems are not pro- nent in the mass market and thus knowledge and research on these phenomena within the mentioned areas need to be shared and disseminated. It is for this reason that the Visual Informatics Research Group from Universiti – bangsaan Malaysia (UKM) decided to spearhead this initiative to bring together experts in this very diversified but important research area so that more concerted efforts can be undertaken not just within the visual informatics community in Malaysia but from other parts of the world, namely, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and USA. This first International Visual Informatics Conference (IVIC 2009) was conducted collaboratively, by the visual informatics research community from the various public and private institutions of higher learning in Malaysia, and hosted by UKM.