Publications
2025
J. T. Otto, M. Khurana, N. Deutsch, B. P. S. Donitz, O. Elek and S. Davidoff, “MarsIPAN: Optimization and Negotiations in Mars Sample Return Scheduling Coordination,” in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 14-29, July-Aug. 2025, doi: 10.1109/MCG.2025.3558426.
L. Pham, K. Hu, M. Joo, N. White, A.A. Bloom, K. Blackwood, S. Lombeyda, H. Mushkin, S. Davidoff, “Interactive Visual Analytics of Carbon Cycle Science,” 2025 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), Vienna, Austria, 2025, pp. 86-90, doi: 10.1109/VIS60296.2025.00023.
L. Pham, K. Hu, M. Joo, N. White, A.A. Renchon, T. Schneider, K. Blackwood, S. Lombeyda, H. Mushkin, S. Davidoff, “Visualizing Climate Model Outputs with CliMAScope,” 2025 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), Vienna, Austria, 2025, pp. 201-205, doi: 10.1109/VIS60296.2025.00046.
2024
Austin P. Wright, Scott Davidoff, and Duen Horng Chau. 2024. Nested Fusion: A Method for Learning High Resolution Latent Structure of Multi-Scale Measurement Data on Mars. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 5969–5978. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671596
Benjamin Donitz, Jasmine Otto, Malika Khurana, Scott Davidoff, Madison Young, Matt Heverly and Harvey Elliott. (2024). Mars Sample Return Surface Relay Planning and Coordination. Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE Aerospace Conference (IEEE AERO 2024). https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO58975.2024.10521427
Racquel Fygenson, Kazi Jawad, Isabel Li, Francois Ayoub, Robert G. Deen, Scott Davidoff, Dominik Moritz, Mauricio Hess-Flores. (2024). Opening the black box of 3D reconstruction error analysis with VECTOR. Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE Conference on Visualization (IEEE VIS 2024). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.03503
Coscia, Adam, Haley M. Sapers, Noah Deutsch, Malika Khurana, John S. Magyar, Sergio A. Parra, Daniel R. Utter, Rebecca L. Wipfler, David W. Caress, Eric J. Martin, Jennifer B. Paduan, Maggie Hendrie, Santiago Lombeyda, Hillary Mushkin, Alex Endert, Scott Davidoff, and Victoria J. Orphan. (2024). DeepSee: Multidimensional Visualizations of Seabed Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 210, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642001.
2023
Conlen, Matthew, Jeffrey Heer, Hillary Mushkin, Scott Davidoff. (2023). Cinematic Techniques in Narrative Visualization. arXiv:2301.03109v1 (2023).
2022
Hendrie, Maggie, Hillary Mushkin, Santiago Lombeyda, and Scott Davidoff. “JPL/Caltech ArtCenter: Towards a collaborative methodology for interactive scientific data visualization.” Information Design Journal (2022).
2021
Ye, C., Hermann, L., Yildirim, N., Bhat, S., Moritz, D. and Davidoff, S. (2021). PIXLISE-C: Exploring the Data Analysis Needs of NASA Scientists for Mineral Identification. In Proceedings of the CHI Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction for Space Exploration (SpaceCHI 2021) arXiv preprint arXiv: 2103.16060.
2020
Bae, Suyun, Federico Rossi, Joshua Vander Hook, Scott Davidoff and Kwan-Liu Ma (2020). A Visual Analytics Approach to Debugging Cooperative, Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems Worldviews. IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), Salt Lake City, Utah, 2020.
Abigail C. Allwood, Lawrence A. Wade, Marc C. Foote, et al. (2020). PIXL: Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry. in Space Science Reviews Special Issue on Perseverance Rover (SSR). Ken A. Farley, Katie Stack-Morgan and Ken Williford (Eds.) 217(1-4).
Matthew Conlen (2020). FEATURE: How Big is Just One Gigatonne? Published March 3, 2020. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2933/visualizing-the-quantities-of-climate-change/
2019
Schurman, David; Nair, Pooja; Davidoff; Scott; Galvin; Adrian; Allwood, Abigail; Liu, Yang; Flannery, David; Hodyss, Robert P.; Lombeyda, Santiago; Hendrie, Maggie; Mushkin, Hillary; Heirwegh, Christopher (2019). PIXELATE: Novel Visualization and Computational Methods for the Analysis of Astrobiological Spectroscopy Data. In Proceedings of the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference.
2018
Boone, J. T., Tosca, M., Galvin, A., Nastan, A., Schurman, D., Nair, P., S. Davidoff, S. Lombeyda, H. Mushkin, & Hendrie, M. (2018, December). Redesigning for Research:
Accessible Data Interaction with MISR Fire Plumes. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.
Conlen, M., Stalla, S., Jin, C., Hendrie, M., Mushkin, H., Lombeyda, S., & Davidoff, S. (2018, April). Towards Design Principles for Visual Analytics in Operations Contexts. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 138). ACM.
2013
Daniel Barella, Sarah Churng, Conrad Egan, Rashad Moarref, Mitul Luhar, Hillary Mushkin, Scott Davidoff, Maggie Hendrie & Beverley J. McKeon (2013) Deconstructing wall turbulence – visualization of resolvent modes. in American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS-DFD) Gallery of Fluid Motion.
Follow-on Funding
2023
VECTOR (2022 summer project): $50k to support Kazi Jawad (2022 summer intern) to develop VECTOR. VECTOR is now used daily in Perseverance operations, and will be adopted by Mars Sample Return. It’s also being prototyped for adoption in Earth Science terrain reconstruction.
GRIT (2022 summer project)t $5k to run a user study on GRIT, as a potential tool to measure the accuracy and effectiveness of rover long duration drives, as part of Mars Sample Return.
PIXLISE (2018 summer project) development was continued with $1.2M as part of Mars 2020’s Perseverance Extended Phase E. Additional $60k to continue Austin Wright (2020 summer intern) to develop a dust detection machine learning algorithm for PIXL reflectance spectroscopy data.
2022
MarsIPAN (2021 summer project): $110k to support Jasmine Otto (2021 summer intern) to continue to develop the software. It will be adopted as part of a novel ground tool for the Mars Sample Return Ground Data System.
2021
PIXLISE. $60k for Austin Wright to develop machine learning to detect for spectral anomalies known as diffraction peaks.
2020
PIXLISE. To develop it and make it open source: $50k from the JPL Data Science program for studies of Machine Learning for Astrobiology; $839k from JPL; and $260k from Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
$60,832 from JPL Climate Science Outreach to explain the planetary scale impact of climate change.
MOSAIC. $30K to investigate debugging of unexpected multi-robot system behavior, by visualizing asymmetries in robot worldviews
2017
TrajectorSketch. Our collaborators received $470k to further develop the project for integration into NASA’s Advanced Multi-Mission Operations System (AMMOS) within the Mission Ground System and Services Program (MGSS).
2017
RSketch. Our collaborators received $1.5M to turn it into an application for visual sequencing as part of the Rover Planning Subsystem for the Mars 2020 Ground Data System.
2015
Cellerie. The Elowitz Lab invested $30K to finalize and launch the software.
News
2026
“Atomic Dragons”, a group exhibition by the intergenerational collective SWANS (Slow War Against the Nuclear State), was curated by Emily Butts for the Pitzer College Art Galleries. It featured Clouds (2025/2020), a data visualization courtesy of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech/ArtCenter Data to Discovery Program and the Climate Modeling Alliance, Caltech.
2025
“Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art” was curated by Julie Joyce, Stephen Nowlin, and Christina Valentine and took place at the Williamson Gallery at the ArtCenter College of Design. As a part of Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the exhibition featured the following Data to Discovery projects: N3D (2024/2015), 3DDNA (2024/2016), and GRVIN (2024/2018).
2024
“Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920-2020” curated by Peter Collopy and Claudia Bohn-Spector was a part of Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide. It featured the data visualization projects N3D (2024/2015) and 3DDNA (2016).
“Nested Fusion: A Method for Learning High Resolution Latent Structure of Multi-Scale Measurement Data on Mars”, a publication on an ML model for PIXLISE by Austin P. Wright, Scott Davidoff, and Duen Horng “Polo” Chau, was a best paper runner-up at the 2024 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
Santiago Lombeyda and Hillary Mushkin participated in the panel discussion, “Data in the Digital Age”, moderated by Maggie Hendrie at the 2024 Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) Symposium at ArtCenter. https://www.artcenter.edu/connect/events/data-dilemma.html
2023
PIXLISE (2018 summer project) won a silver medal in the 2023 NASA Software of the Year competition.
2022
MISR Enhanced Research and Lookup Interface (MERLIN), a tool we first prototyped in 2018 to view and interact with NASA fire plume data, was developed into a production-grade tool. Hosted by the NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center, the published version provides online public access to the data. Using our design, it enables new search, visualization and analysis capabilities beyond those that were available through the old MISR interface. https://l0dup05.larc.nasa.gov/merlin/merlin
2020
Scott Davidoff and Hillary Mushkin spoke about our work in a Design Observer Studio Session co-hosted by Jessica Helfand and Sarah Churng. (June 2020)
2019
PIXLISE was adopted in July 2019 as the primary ground data interface for Mars 2020’s PIXL instrument. It is also part of an Australian PIXL Operations Center based at QUT and sponsored by the Australian Space Agency and Australian Research Council to allow round-the-clock analysis of PIXL data using PIXLISE.
2018
MERLIN is featured in the NASA/JPL Education article, Seeing Science: Using Visualizations to Help NASA Study Wildfires: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2018/10/15/seeing-science-using-visualizations-to-help-nasa-study-wildfires/
2017
RSketch 2017 NSF Vizzy Award Finalist.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/index.jsp
2016
3DDNA and TrajectorSketch are featured in Pasadena Now, in an article titled, Caltech’s Visualization Program Brings Data to Life. See:http://www.pasadenanow.com/main/caltechs-visualization-program-brings-data-to-life/
2015
Our LIGO project is memorialized in a permanent display on the Caltech campus in the West Bridge building. It was also featured in Caltech E&S March 2015.