Research Interests
My research efforts are focused on understanding how we can leverage the Semantic Web to support the field of visualization. In particular, the Visualization Knowledge (VisKo) project aims at capturing the knowledge about the capabilities provided by visualization toolkits such as Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) to automatically synthesize applications that generate visualizations requested by scientists.
In the past, my interests were focused on capturing and presenting provenance to users through graphical tools such as Probe-It! Because many scientific provenance traces reference scientific datasets and Probe-It! was an attemtp to present all provenance information to users graphcially, including referenced datasets, it was natural to direct my research efforts to how we could leverage provenance information to help us automatically visualize datasets.
I particularly enjoy applying my expertise in visualization to scientific domains such as Geophysics, as I have done with CYBER-ShARE's seismic data, as well as Atomosphereic science, as I have done with NASA GSFC's aerosol and brightness temperature data. In both these disciplines, I was able to facilitate a rich visualization environment though the application of my VisKo technology.
I also have enjoyed working with Homeland Security scenarios, in which I instrumented a Prolog based threat detection system with provenance capturing facilities, as to provide a full disclosure of why a shipping vechicle crossing a port-of-entry might be considered a threat.
The following are some of my research interests and associated technologies:
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Education
- BS Computer Science - University of Texas at El Paso - May 2004
- MS Computer Science - University of Texas at El Paso - November 2007
- PhD Computer Science - University of Texas at El Paso - In Progress
Publications By Year
DBLP [2011][2010][2009][2008][2007][Coauthor Graph]2011
- Nicholas Del Rio and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. Visualization Queries. To Appear in the American Geophysical Fall Meeting (AGU 2011), San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 5-9
- Nicholas Del Rio, Gregory Leptoukh, Christopher Lynnes and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. Towards Infusing Giovanni with a Semantic and Provenance Aware Visualization System. To appear in the American Geophysical Fall Meeting (AGU 2011), San Francisco. Calif., Dec. 5-9
2010
- Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Leonardo Salayandia, Nicholas Del Rio, and Ann Q. Gates. On the Use of Abstract Workflows to Capture Scientific Process Provenance. In The 2nd Workshop on the Theory and Pratice of Provenance (TaPP'10) at USENIX, San Jose, CA, February 2010.
- Nicholas Del Rio, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva and Hugo Porras. Browsing Proof Markup Language Provenance: Enhancing the Experience. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Provenance and Annnotation Workshop (IPAW 2010), LNCS, Springer, Troy, NY, June 15-16, pages 274-276, 2010.
- Nicholas Del Rio and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. Leveraging an ESIP Data-Type Ontology to Support Visualization. American Geophysical Fall Meeting (AGU 2011), San Francisco, Calif., Dec.13-17
2009
- Nicholas Del Rio, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva and Raed Aldouri. Identifying and Explaining Map Quality Through Provenance: A User Study. In Proceedings of the Workshop of Explanation-Aware Computing (EXACT 2009), LNCS, Springer, Pasadena, Calif., July 11-13, 2009.
- James Michaelis, Li Ding, Zhenning Shangguan, Stephan Zednik, Rui Huang, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Nicholas Del Rio and Deborah L. McGuinness. Towards Usable and Interoperable Workflow Provenance: Empirical Case Studies using PML. In Proceedings of the Workshop on the role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management (SWPM 2009), IEEE Internet Computing, Washington DC, USA, October 25, 2009.
2008
- Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Nicholas Del Rio, Vladik Kreinovich, and Alejandro Castaneda. TrustMap: Towards Trust Recommendations for Maps. In Proceedings of the Terra Cognita 2008 Workshop, October 26, 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany.
- Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Deborah L. McGuinness, Nicholas Del Rio, Li Ding. Inference Web in Action: Lightweight Use of the Proof Markup Language.International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008). 2008: 847-860
- Pinheiro da Silva, Geoff Sutcliffe, Cynthia Chang, Li Ding, Nick del Rio, Deborah L. McGuinness. Presenting TSTP Proofs with Inference Web Tools. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Practical Aspects of Automated Reasoning (PAAR/ESHOL 2008). 2008.
2007
- Nicholas Del Rio and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. Identifying and Explaining Map Imperfections Through Knowledge Provenance Visualization. Technical report UTEP-CS-07-43a, The University of Texas at El Paso, June 2007. pdf
- Nicholas Del Rio, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Ann Q. Gates, and Leonardo Salayandia. Semantic annotation of maps through knowledge provenance. In proceedings of the second International Conference on Geospatial Semantics (GeoS), Mexico City, Mexico. Volume 4853 of LNCS, pages 20-35. Springer, 2007. pdf ppt
- Nicholas Del Rio and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. Probe-it! visualization support for provenance. In Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC 2), Lake Tahoe, NV, USA. Volume 4842 of LNCS, pages 732-741. Springer, 2007. pdf
- Nicholas Del Rio. Provenance Support for Quality Assessment of Scientific Results: A User Study. MS Thesis, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, 2007. pdf ppt
- This thesis describes how Probe-It! can be used by scientists to evaluate the quality of scientific workflow results, namely gravity contour maps. This document presents a background of similar work, a detailed description of Probe-It! (i.e., how it was implemented and its composing views and viewers), and a user study providing statistically sound evidence that scientists can evaluate the quality of scientific results using Probe-It! better than scientists without access to the tool.
