About

John C. Hart is a Professor and Director of Online and Professional Programs in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as the Executive Associate Dean of the Graduate College. His research focuses on computer graphics and data visualization, with support from notable organizations such as Adobe, AT&T, DARPA, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, NVIDIA, and the NSF. He has collaborated with graphics hardware manufacturers, defense contractors, visual effects studios, game developers, and a medical imaging startup, and has provided intellectual property expertise for companies including Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, and Samsung. Prof. Hart recently designed, launched, and directs the Master of Computer Science in Data Science program, an innovative online master's degree offered through the Coursera platform, which has become the second largest graduate program at UIUC. His 'Data Visualization' MOOC on Coursera has reached over 360,000 learners. He has held editorial roles such as the graphics area editor for ACM Books and past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, and has contributed to influential publications including 'Real-Time Shading' and 'Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach.' Additionally, he is an executive producer of the documentary 'The Story of Computer Graphics.' Prof. Hart earned his Ph.D. from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991.

Research topics

• Psychotherapist
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Art
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• A Methode or comfortable beginning for all vnlearned, whereby they may be taught to read English, in a very short time, with pleasure: So profitable as straunge, put in light, by I.H. Chester Heralt

  Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Aesthetics
  • Visual arts
  Publisher

• Real‐Time Analytic Antialiased Text for 3‐D Environments

  Computer Graphics Forum · 2019-11-01 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Text is a crucial component of 3‐D environments and virtual worlds for user interfaces and wayfinding. Implementing text using standard antialiased texture mapping leads to blurry and illegible writing which hinders usability and navigation. While super‐sampling removes some of these artifacts, distracting artifacts can still impede legibility, especially for recent high‐resolution head‐mounted displays. We propose an analytic antialiasing technique that efficiently computes the coverage of text glyphs, over pixel footprints, designed to run at real‐time rates. It decomposes glyphs into piecewise‐biquadratics and trapezoids that can be quickly area‐integrated over a pixel footprint to provide crisp legible antialiased text, even when mapped onto an arbitrary surface in a 3‐D virtual environment.

  PublisherDOI

• Use of computational modeling combined with advanced visualization to develop strategies for the design of crop ideotypes to address food security

  Nutrition Reviews · 2018-01-02 · 33 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Sustainable crop production is a contributing factor to current and future food security. Innovative technologies are needed to design strategies that will achieve higher crop yields on less land and with fewer resources. Computational modeling coupled with advanced scientific visualization enables researchers to explore and interact with complex agriculture, nutrition, and climate data to predict how crops will respond to untested environments. These virtual observations and predictions can direct the development of crop ideotypes designed to meet future yield and nutritional demands. This review surveys modeling strategies for the development of crop ideotypes and scientific visualization technologies that have led to discoveries in "big data" analysis. Combined modeling and visualization approaches have been used to realistically simulate crops and to guide selection that immediately enhances crop quantity and quality under challenging environmental conditions. This survey of current and developing technologies indicates that integrative modeling and advanced scientific visualization may help overcome challenges in agriculture and nutrition data as large-scale and multidimensional data become available in these fields.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimizing next-generation cloud gaming platforms with planar map streaming and distributed rendering

  Network and System Support for Games · 2017-06-22 · 2 citations

  article

  We propose a new cloud gaming platform to address the limitations of the existing ones. We study the rendering pipeline of 2D planar maps, and convert it into the server and client pipelines. While doing so naturally gives us a distributed rendering platform, compressing 2D planar maps for transmission has never been studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose a compression component for 2D planar maps with several parametrized modules, where the optimal parameters are identified through real experiments. The resulting cloud gaming platform is evaluated through extensive experiments with diverse game scenes. The evaluation results are promising, compared to the state-of-the-art x265 codec, our platform: (i) achieves better perceptual video quality, by up to 0.14 in SSIM, (ii) runs fast, where the client pipeline takes ≤ 0.83 ms to render each frame, and (iii) scales well for ultra-high-resolution displays, as we observe no bitrate increase when moving from 720p to 1080p, 2K, and 4K displays. The study can be extended in several directions, e.g., we plan to leverage the temporal redundancy of the 2D planar maps, for even better performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Crops In Silico: Generating Virtual Crops Using an Integrative and Multi-scale Modeling Platform

  Frontiers in Plant Science · 2017-05-15 · 139 citations

  articleOpen access

  Multi-scale models can facilitate whole plant simulations by linking gene networks, protein synthesis, metabolic pathways, physiology, and growth. Whole plant models can be further integrated with ecosystem, weather, and climate models to predict how various interactions respond to environmental perturbations. These models have the potential to fill in missing mechanistic details and generate new hypotheses to prioritize directed engineering efforts. Outcomes will potentially accelerate improvement of crop yield, sustainability, and increase future food security. It is time for a paradigm shift in plant modeling, from largely isolated efforts to a connected community that takes advantage of advances in high performance computing and mechanistic understanding of plant processes. Tools for guiding future crop breeding and engineering, understanding the implications of discoveries at the molecular level for whole plant behavior, and improved prediction of plant and ecosystem responses to the environment are urgently needed. The purpose of this perspective is to introduce Crops in silico (cropsinsilico.org), an integrative and multi-scale modeling platform, as one solution that combines isolated modeling efforts toward the generation of virtual crops, which is open and accessible to the entire plant biology community. The major challenges involved both in the development and deployment of a shared, multi-scale modeling platform, which are summarized in this prospectus, were recently identified during the first Crops in silico Symposium and Workshop.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimizing next-generation cloud gaming platforms with planar map streaming and distributed rendering

  2017-06-01 · 10 citations

  article

  We propose a new cloud gaming platform to address the limitations of the existing ones. We study the rendering pipeline of 2D planar maps, and convert it into the server and client pipelines. While doing so naturally gives us a distributed rendering platform, compressing 2D planar maps for transmission has never been studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose a compression component for 2D planar maps with several parametrized modules, where the optimal parameters are identified through real experiments. The resulting cloud gaming platform is evaluated through extensive experiments with diverse game scenes. The evaluation results are promising, compared to the state-of-the-art x265 codec, our platform: (i) achieves better perceptual video quality, by up to 0.14 in SSIM, (ii) runs fast, where the client pipeline takes ≤ 0.83 ms to render each frame, and (iii) scales well for ultra-high-resolution displays, as we observe no bitrate increase when moving from 720p to 1080p, 2K, and 4K displays. The study can be extended in several directions, e.g., we plan to leverage the temporal redundancy of the 2D planar maps, for even better performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Hierarchical Watershed Ridges for Visualizing Lagrangian Coherent Structures

  Mathematics and visualization · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• SVGPU: real time 3D rendering to vector graphics formats

  High Performance Graphics · 2016-06-20 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  We focus on the real-time realistic rendering of a 3-D scene to a 2-D vector image. There are several application domains which could benefit substantially from the compact and resolution independent intermediate format that vector graphics provides. In particular, cloud streaming services, which transmit large amounts of video data and notoriously suffer from low resolution and/or high latency. In addition, display resolutions are growing rapidly, exacerbating the issue. Raster images for large displays prove a significant bottleneck when being transported over communication networks. However the alternative of sending a full 3D scene worth of geometry is even more prohibitive. We implement a real time rendering pipeline that utilizes analytic visibility algorithms on the GPU to output a vector graphics representation of a 3D scene. Our system SVGPU (Scalable Vector on the GPU) is fast and efficient on modern hardware, and simple in design. As such we are making a much needed step towards enabling the benefits of vector graphics representations to be reaped by the real time community.

  PublisherDOI

• Visualization Systems

  University of Illinois eBooks · 2016-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Visualization of Non-Numerical Data: Introduction

  University of Illinois eBooks · 2016-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• SI2-SSE: Collaborative Research: Lagrangian Coherent Structures for Accurate Flow Structure Analysis

  NSF · $252k · 2010–2014

• Analysis and Visualization of Complex Graphs

  NSF · $300k · 2006–2009

• Robust Lagrangian Surface Propagation with Topological Control

  NSF · $400k · 2003–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Guy L. Steele

  Oracle (United States)

  286 shared

• Laxmikant V. Kalé

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  219 shared

• Josep Torrellas

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  74 shared

• Edward F. Gehringer

  74 shared

• Cédric Bastoul

  74 shared

• Pen-Chung Yew

  74 shared

• Pedro J. García

  University of Castilla-La Mancha

  73 shared

• John Reppy

  University of Chicago

  73 shared

Awards & honors

• ACM Books - Graphics Area Editor
• ACM Transactions on Graphics - Past Editor-in-Chief
• Real-Time Shading - Co-author
• Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach - Contributing…
• The Story of Computer Graphics - Executive producer