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TUSHAR ATHAWALE, PH.D.

Tushar Athawale is a Computer Scientist in the Visualization Group (led by Dr. David Pugmire) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He is a Joint Faculty Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He received M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in May 2014, and May 2015, respectively (advisor: Prof. Alireza Entezari). He specializes in uncertainty visualization for efficient and trustworthy scientific data discovery, with additional research interests in topological data analysis, large-scale visualization, and high-performance computing.

Dr. Athawale is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Award (2025) from the DOE's Office of Science (SC), Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal and as a Program Chair for IEEE VIS 2026 conference, the premier and largest conference in the data visualization field.

Prior to joining ORNL, Dr. Athawale was a postdoctoral fellow at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah (advisor: Prof. Chris R. Johnson). He was previously a full-time employee at MathWorks, the developer of the MATLAB computing software, before joining SCI.

PhD Dissertation:


Quantification and Visualization of Spatial Uncertainty in Isosurfaces for Parametric and Nonparametric Noise Models

T. M. Athawale
 [PhD dissertation preprint] [BibTex] [PhD defense presentation slides] [Proposal presentation slides] (University of Florida, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2015)
Defense committee: Dr. Alireza Entezari (Chair), Dr. Arunava Banerjee, Dr. Anand Rangarajan, Dr. Manuel Bermudez, and Dr. Haldun Aytug (External)
Abstract

Isosurfaces are the key entities in visualization, and recent research has focused on the visualization of uncertain data. We study positional uncertainty in isosurfaces when data uncertainty is modeled with parametric and nonparametric density models. Noise in sampled data leads to topological and geometric variations in the extracted isosurface. We propose probabilistic techniques that reduce topological uncertainty in isosurfaces and resolve ambiguities in identifying topological configurations. We also characterize, in closed form, a random variable modeling the geometric uncertainty in isosurface extraction. Closed-form characterization of geometric uncertainty allows analytic computation of expected value of level-crossing location, as well as the variance. While former quantity can be used for constructing a stable isosurface for uncertain data, the latter can be used for visualizing the spatial uncertainty in the extracted isosurface. We show computational advantage of proposed analytic approach over expensive Monte-Carlo sampling approach for quantifying geometric uncertainty. The advantages of nonparametric statistical models over parametric noise models for uncertainty characterization are evident from our experiments on ensemble datasets and uncertain scalar fields. We also propose a novel approach that leverages nonlocal statistics for accurate characterization of underlying uncertainties in the nonparametric framework.