Congratulations to Valerio Pascucci and Kree Cole-McLaughlin on receiving the IEEE Visualization 15 Year Test of Time Award for their paper "Efficient computation of the topology of level sets."

Using topological approaches to analyze level sets from scalar field has been an important branch of methods in the SciVis community. While the theories of contour trees had been known prior to this paper, efficient and robust computation of contour trees and other topological features from a discrete data set has been a challenge. In this paper, the authors provided a detailed account of the implementation of contour tree computation. The improved efficiency and the enhanced feature namely the Betti number makes the topological approach more practical and accessible to the scientific community. Considering the citation counts, the importance of the work, and the potential impact to the application areas, the SciVis Test of Time award committee selected this paper as the 2002 SciVis Test of Time award winner.


About the Award
The IEEE VIS Test of Time Award is an accolade given to recognize articles published at previous conferences whose contents are still vibrant and useful today and have had a major impact and influence within and beyond the visualization community.

Papers are selected for each of the three conferences (VAST, InfoVis and SciVis) by Test of Time Awards panels appointed by the conference Steering Committees.

The decisions are based on objective measures such as the numbers of citations, and more subjective ones such as the quality and longevity and influence of ideas, outreach, uptake and effect not only in the research community, but also within application domains and visualization practice.