At IEEE VIS 2024, the world's leading conference in the field of visualization, a paper from 2011, which Britta Weber and Hans-Christian Hege wrote together with cooperation partners at SFU Vancouver, Canada, and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, received the “IEEE VIS Test of Time Award” in the SciVis category.
The winning paper is "Tuner: Principled Parameter Finding for Image Segmentation Algorithms Using Visual Response Surface Exploration" by Thomas Torsney-Weir, Ahmed Saad, Torsten Möller, Hans-Christian Hege, Britta Weber, Jean-Marc Verbavatz, Steven Bergner.
The laudatory speech said: "The paper deals with the systematic exploration of high-dimensional parameter spaces structured as a two-stage process. A clever statistical approach to sparse sampling is combined with visual guidance to determine optimal response regions under uncertainty. Parameter space analysis is an ongoing hot topic in our field where explainability not only in the context of AI is still an important and open challenge. The impact of the paper is evidenced by the many and recent citations due to the numerous follow-up works which resulted from the Tuner paper. It is a fine piece of research based on solid theoretical foundations that touches on and integrates several pressing topics in our field: high-dimensionality, parameter spaces, visual guidance, uncertainty: Stay tuned, Tuner is to stay".
The Tuner Paper was selected in a two-stage process from a shortlist of 10 candidates from the 2011 vintage by the SciVis Test of Time Awards Committee. The IEEE VIS Test of Time Award is an accolade given to recognize papers presented at past IEEE VIS conferences whose contents are still vibrant and useful today, and which have had a significant impact and influence within and beyond the visualization community.
