On the 5^th and 6^th of September, 2022, Uppsala University Node Coordinator Ingela Nyström, together with her team, hosted the InfraVis Meeting Days. The InfraVis team, with representatives from nine partner universities, gathered to review the progress made by the Research Infrastructure, to brainstorm paths for future development, and to network.  

The first day included insightful presentations and interactive workshops. Uppsala University application experts Anders Hast, Stefan Seipel and Fredrik Nysjö presented, for instance, research projects on how visualizations can affect decision-making in medical practice and how visualization has helped with gender recognition in historical photo records, which now makes it possible to improve existing Gender Classification algorithms. Jonas Ahlstedt from the Lund University node held a workshop “From modelmaking to raytracing” where the InfraVis team got to work in pairs on simple 3D animations by the help of Blender. Considering the fact that not every InfraVis member is an animation expert, this workshop was a fun and educational team-building exercise.    

The second day was dedicated to presentations of pilot projects from each node, nine of them in total. The goal was to share insights that each node had arrived at throughout the proceeding of the pilot projects as well as to give one another feedback. The presentations included not only descriptions of research questions, required technical skills and visualization methods but also reflections on communication methods and project management – insights that were highly appreciated by all nodes. 

The second day also included the steering group meeting where one of the main points was prioritization of this year’s goals. Giving InfraVis Application Experts across all nine nodes opportunities to network, get to know one another better, and collaborate was identified as one of the most important grounds for the successful functioning of InfraVis.