Topological Data Visualization Workshop

June 9 - 13, 2025     University of Iowa

Organizers: George Clare Kennedy, Isabel Darcy, and James Traer, University of Iowa

Funded by NSF DMS RTG 2038103: PI Keiko Kawamuro

The workshop format will be in person; however, many talks will be available online. Thus we expect to have both in person and online participants. Not all activities will be available to online participants.

Some datasets are too small for standard statistical/data analysis to accurately characterize the data. Others are extremely large and data size reduction methods may be needed. One solution is to use topological data analysis to simplify and/or visualize data. This workshop will include both tutorials and research talks on topological techniques for visualizing data.

Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop to analyze their own data or data that will be provided. We will explore datasets via a new lens, and discuss any successes, frustrations, and/or questions with the group. If you have any dataset that was complex enough that you ran PCA to reduce dimensions, but small enough you could process it on your laptop, that dataset is probably a good candidate to bring along and explore with topological tools. We will also provide datasets from neuroscience.

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Schedule

All days start with coffee at 8:30am and talks at 9am. Most days end at 5:30pm. We will end the official part of the workshop at 12:30pm on Friday, but participants are encouraged to stay Friday afternoon to work on software development and/or collaborate on analyzing data sets after lunch on Friday.

Lunch will be on your own. There are many restaurants within walking distance.

NOTE: All times are in Central Time (CDT = UTC -5)

Location: SH 40

Click here for map from Graduate Hotel to Schaeffer Hall

Monday June 9
8:30am Coffee
9:00am Robert DeYeso III, University of Tennessee at Martin and Ethan Rooke, University of Iowa,   Introduction to TDA mapper       
9:30am James Traer, University of Iowa, Topological structures in the brain and where to look for them       
10:15am Coffee Break
10:45am George Clare Kennedy, Jacob Miller, Paria Karimi Kousalari, Mona Hardani, University of Iowa, Mapper implementations
11:30am Software Demo
12:30pm: Lunch
2:00pm Ishika Ghosh, Michigan State University Approximating Interleaving Distance Between Mapper Graphs via Loss Optimization        
3:00pm Halley Fritze, University of Oregon,   Multiscale 2-Mapper: Exploratory Data Analysis through the first betti number       
4:00 Coffee Break
4:30pm Halley Fritze, University of Oregon, Software Demo
5:30pm End of day 1
Tuesday June 10
8:30am Coffee
9:00am Fatemeh Shanehsazan, University of Iowa,  Filtration of Simplicial Complexes and Their Application to Mapper Graphs
9:30am Radmila Sazdanovic, North Carolina State University, (zoom)    The Shape of Relations: From Knot Invariants to Cancer Genomics  
10:30am Coffee Break
11:00am Jacob Miller, University of Iowa, Zen Sight: An Introduction
11:30am Mingzhe Li, University of Utah,     Comparing and Tracking Topological Structures via Optimal Transport  
12:30pm: Lunch
2:00pm Jonathan Victor,   Geometric analysis of perceptual spaces, (zoom)
3:00 Coffee Break
3:30pm Gregory Henselman-Petrusek Roek, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Open Applied Topology (zoom)   Open Applied Topology: A fast, flexible, user-friendly tool for manifold learning in TDA
5:30pm End of day 2
Wednesday June 11
8:30am Coffee
9:00am Lori Ziegelmeier, Macalester College,   Minimal Cycle Representatives in Persistent Homology using Linear Programming ,   
10:00am Coffee Break
10:30am software to find optimal cycle reps.
11:30am Bei Wang Phillips, University of Utah, (zoom)   Augmenting Lossy Compressors with Topological Guarantees
12:30pm: Lunch + Excursion
Thursday June 12
8:30am Coffee
9:00am Brad Theilman, Sandia National Laboratories,   Decomposing spiking neural networks with Graphical Neural Activity Threads
10:00am Brad Theilman, Sandia National Laboratories,     Tutorial Part 1
11:00am Coffee Break
11:30am Brad Theilman, Sandia National Laboratories,    Tutorial Part 2
12:30pm: Lunch
2:00pm Enrique G Alvarado, Iowa State University, Wild Mappers  
3:00 Coffee Break
3:30pm Lin Yan, Iowa State University,   Topology-Based Visualization Techniques for Scientific Data Exploration
4:30pm Discussion  
5:30pm End of day 4
Friday June 13
8:30am Coffee
9:00am George Clare Kennedy, University of Iowa,     Using Mapper to Visualize Aptamer Binding Affinities 
10:00am Coffee Break
10:30am Manish Saggar, Stanford University (zoom)     Beyond the Average: Using TDA-Based Mapper to Reveal the Hidden Shape of fMRI Data  
11:30am Discussion      
12:30pm End of official workshop
12:30 pm Lunch
2:00pm -- ?? Software development/Collaboration time      
7:30pm Optional: Shakespeare in the Park: Romeo & Juliet (free)
9:00pm Optional: Public Observing Night - Van Allen Observatory (free, 9 - 11pm)