Informatics News

Kitware to Improve DOE Knowledgebase System

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce $150,000 in Phase I SBIR funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The funding will be used to improve the DOE’s Systems Biology Knowledgebase (Kbase), a community-driven cyberinfrastructure for sharing and integrating biology and genetics data.

The project will specifically address the critical need of extracting meaningful knowledge from ever-growing volumes of scientific data by making improvements to Kbase. Three distinct improvements will be made to Kbase, including the design and incorporation of a new cloud-based architecture for genetics algorithms, integration of new visualization tools, and the ability to link algorithms to existing databases.

This Phase I effort will investigate the design of these new components and demonstrate how they will work by testing a sampling of algorithms prov

Kitware Introduces Visomics for Bioinformatics

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to introduce “Visomics,” an open-source application for performing biological research pertaining to genomics, protemomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics.

Visomics is built on top of Kitware’s powerful open-source toolkits and is easily configured to support underlying ‘omics applications, which can be customized to meet the particular needs of researchers. Currently in alpha/beta mode, Visomics provides the statistical methods, intuitive visualizations, and pre-existing chemical pathway diagrams that biologists need for the tracking, storage, analysis and evaluation of relationships and behaviors of large numbers of analytes and biomarkers.

Clinical researchers are using currently Visomics to delve deep into the areas of reproductive and perinatal health, cardiovascular disorders and breast cancer. By leveraging Visomics

Kitware Supports the VA's Open Source EHR

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce that it will be providing open-source expertise to the Informatics Applications Group (tiag) in support of the Department of Veteran Affair’s initiative to create a Custodial Agent for an Open Source Electronic Health Record. Visit osehrca.org for more information and to provide feedback.

Kitware's Cutting-Edge Research Leads To Record Growth and More Jobs

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware announced one of its largest growth periods in the company’s history. Revenue growth from $5.6M in 2005 to a projected $15M in 2010, buoyed by newly awarded research grants and contracts, has extended the company’s immediate hiring needs in both the New York and North Carolina offices. Kitware is expecting to add more than 30 percent to its workforce before the end of 2011.

Kitware’s technology portfolio includes 3D visualization and informatics, scientific databases, quality software process, medical imaging and computer vision. In addition to military groups like Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Kitware often partners with premier organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. National Labs, Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Kitware is also hire

Kitware Announces Opening of European Office

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lyon office allows the Company to continue its expansion
into European markets and better service its current
European customers and collaborators

CLIFTON PARK, NY – October 25, 2010 – Kitware, a software services company that builds open-source platforms and develops advanced research solutions, today announced the opening of its European Office Kitware SAS. Located in Lyon, France, the office will be headed by Julien Jomier, a current Kitware U.S. employee with expertise in software process, medical ima

ParaView 3.8.1 RC 1 Binaries Now Available

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The ParaView team is pleased to announce the availability of the ParaView 3.8.1 Release Candidate 1 binaries for download on the ParaView download page. Final binaries should follow shortly.

Release Notes:

ParaView 3.8.1 is a patch release over 3.8.0 with a a small set of improvements. The following are some noteworthy improvements and fixes.

ParaView now comes HDF5 1.8.5. This enables developers to create readers/plugins for ParaView that use newer versions of HDF5 easily. Also we are now including the C++ and the high level (hl) versions of the libraryfor those who wish to use their newer API.

Among the improvements are two new file formats. The first is a netcdf based reader for MPAS format ocean and atmosphere data sets. The second, available in source form only is a reader plugin that allows ParaView to read multi-resolution wavelet compressed VAPOR data format files. Thanks to John Clyn

Kitware Ranks No. 1655 on the 2010 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 172%

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Inc. magazine today ranked Kitware NO. 1655 on its fourth annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. Music website Pandora, convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Brooklyn Brewery, and Radio Flyer, maker of the iconic children’s red wagon, are among the prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“The leaders of the companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 have figured out how to grow their businesses during the longest recession since the Great Depression,” said Inc. president Bob LaPointe. “The 2010 Inc. 5000 showcases a particularly hardy group of entrepreneurs.”

Kitware, Inc. is a leader in the creation and support of open- source software

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees, Looking to Hire More

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team:

Jacob Becker

Jacob joined Kitware's Computer Vision Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Jacob received his B.S. in Computer Science and Archaeology from the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse (UW-L) in 2001 and his M.S. in Computer Science from RPI in 2009. While at RPI he researched aligning a 2D image to a 3D model and filling in holes in LiDAR data using evidence provided by a single aligned 2D image.

Aasish Chaudhary

Aashish joined Kitware's Scientific Computing Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Aashish received his B.S. (Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Devhi Ahilya University (India) in 2000 and his M.S. in Industrial Engineering with minor in Computer Science from Iowa State University. His thesis work involved researching, design

DARPA Awards Kitware with $99,000 to Pioneer Adaptive, Geospatial Visual Information System

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Research to increase safety and effectiveness of missions by improving battlefield information delivery

Kitware has received a $99,000 grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop an adaptive geospatial visual information system that will improve the dissemination of knowledge contained in data sources through the configuration of data preferences and density preference.

The core of Kitware's research will focus on overcoming suboptimal data access due to either network or device constraints and allowing for adaption to individual cognitive preferences. Individual users will be able to select and prioritize their desired data sources and adjust the parameters for visual information density of the display based upon preference, network, or the capabilities of their web-enabled device. Data feed preferences are then saved within a user profile to allow for automatic future adjustment.

VTK 5.6

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is planning to release VTK 5.6 this spring. Since the previous release, 270 new C++ classes have been added. The new features in VTK include improved support for line charts and bar charts that don't depend on Qt. With this release VTK provides a new text analysis module. Another major improvement is support for parallel rendering.

This release also includes changes that improve performance. VTK can now locate and insert non-uniformly distributed points three times faster than the previous version.

We've improved GPU support in VTK. The vtkGPUVolumeRayCastMapper has been migrated from VTKEdge to VTK. VTK 5.6 contains a GPU-based real time Line Integral Convolution (LIC) with enhanced image contrast and LIC + geometry compositing for dense vector field / flow visualization. These are just the highlights. For a complete list of changes, visit the VTK Wiki and search "VTK 5.6 Release Planning."

ParaView 3.8

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.8. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. This release includes several performance improvements, bug fixes for users, and plenty of new features for plugin and application developers. We have made it easier to locate cells/points in your dataset using queries. Search the ParaView Wiki for "Find Data using Queries" for more information.

The plugin loading and management dialog was redesigned to make it easier to load plugins. It's now possible to configure plugins to be auto-loaded every time ParaView starts. We've added support for plotting over curves and intersection lines using the filters "Plot On Sorted Lines" and "Plot On Intersection Curves".

A couple of GPU-based rendering/visualization techniques have been incorporated along with GPU-based volume rendering support for 3D image volumes, which

ParaView 3.6.2 Now Available

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.6.2. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. ParaView 3.6.2 contains the following new features and improvements:

The Python interface has been revamped, an exciting new extension to the Paraview Python interface is Python trace. The goal of trace is to generate human readable, not overly verbose, Python scripts that mimic a user's actions in the GUI. See the "Python Trace" article on page 6 of the October 2009 Kitware Source for more details.

ParaView 3.6.2 includes a collection of statistics algorithms. You can compute descriptive statistics (mean, variance, min, max, skewness, kurtosis), compute contingency tables, perform k-means analysis, examine correlations between arrays, and perform principal component analysis on arrays. More in

ParaView 3.6 Released

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.6. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. This release includes several new features along with plenty of bug fixes addressing a multitude of usability and stability issues including those affecting parallel volume rendering.

Based on user feedback, ParaView's Python API has undergone a major overhaul. The new simplified scripting interface makes it easier to write procedural scripts mimicking the steps users would follow when using the GUI to perform tasks such as creating sources, applying filters, etc. Details on the new scripting API can be found on the Paraview Wiki. We have been experimenting with adding support for additional file formats such as CGNS, Silo, Tecplot using VisIt plugins. Since this is an experimental feature, only the Linux and Windows binaries distributed from our website support these new file formats.

ParaView now

OverView

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware will be releasing an alpha version of a new toolkit called OverView alongside of the ParaView 3.6 release later this month. The OverView application was designed to support informatics analysis and visualization methods which can be applied to data from sources such as relational databases, spreadsheets and XML. The application supports features such as automatic graph layout, hierarchical organization of data, graph analysis algorithms and charting.

OverView also integrates 2D and 3D geospatial views for plotting relational data on the globe. Kitware, in conjunction with Sandia National Labs, will continue to explore and develop informatics tools which combine information visualization, statistical analysis, and linked views to facilitate interactive data exploration. Please visit sandia.gov/OverView for more information on this application and kitware.com for more information on Kitw

InfoVis and Earth Kit

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Titan project with Sandia National Laboratories is focused on building informatics capabilities into VTK. There is now a mostly functional charting library in VTK based on Qt, which supports line, bar and stacked charts. We are working with Doug Gregor from Indiana University to integrate distributed-memory graph algorithms into VTK, and we are also integrating with Sandia's multi-threaded graph library. Current work on the geospatial view includes 2D projections, multi-texturing, and dynamic labeling. Many informatics filters and views have been made into in ParaView plug-ins which will soon be part of the ParaView repository, along with a new informatics-centric client called OverView.

One of the needs at Sandia is VTK interoperability with Matlab. To use Matlab code from VTK, we are developing a Matlab programmable filter for VTK, which can execute arbitrary Matlab code. To use VTK from Matlab, we are combining Matlab's extensive Java support with VTK's Java wrappers. While being developed w

Earth Kit Update

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Earth Kit is an open-source geospatial visualization library created through a contract with Sandia National Labs. Earth Kit is part of the new VTK view/representation architecture. This new architecture enables geographic visualizations to be easily integrated into applications that also have other visualization components. For example, an analyst may be interested in visualizing a network consisting of individuals and events. The Titan Informatics Toolkit's "graph layout" view may be used in conjunction with an "Earth" view in order to visualize the network in different ways. The view selections will be linked, making it easy to correlate information in both views.

Earth Kit is being used as part a prototype application being put together by the Computer Vision group to display video and tracks superimposed on the Earth. The work on this project began in the summer of 2007.