I am second year graduate student in computer science department. I have been working in distributed computing for a while now. Basically through my job before coming here and also as a research assistant in this department. I recently became more interested in compter vision and machine learning. As, I am in early stages of learning these fields I can not really say what kind of visualization challenges are involved. Apart from this I will also be interested in applying visualization techniques to data outside my domain. This way I guess I come in between the domain scientist and vis scientist.
I expect to learn some good design patterns for a wide set of data-sets with varying dimensions, scale etc. This might be very helpful as I am still not sure exactly the visualization challenges I might face. Additionally, I would also like to know about the recent trends in visualization research and about some useful visualization tool-kits. I am also looking forward for getting some hands on experience through assignments or project.
As for programming and design skills are concerned, I have a good amount of experience with handful of programming and scripting languages. I haven’t done much on the design side and not much work related to 3D graphics either. The main visualization experience is with system admin tools for visualizing network and cluster activities etc.