A work by Maho Yamabe, a third-year student in the Doctoral Programs at the Graduate School of Media and Governance and a member of Professor Akira Wakita's laboratory at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, and his collaborators has won the Grand Prize at the 49th Visualization Symposium Art Contest. The Visualization Symposium Art Contest is an art contest hosted by The Visualization Society of Japan to recognize art works related to visualization. Yamabe and his collaborators' work, "3D Visualization of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Phylogenetic Tree," was highly praised for its artistic quality after being judged by a panel of judges and the general public, and won the Grand Prize, which is awarded to the most outstanding work.
【Award-Winning Work】
"3D Visualization of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Phylogenetic Tree"
Comment from the Award Winner, Maho Yamabe (3rd-year Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
I am honored to have been selected for this very prestigious award. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Nakagawa (School of Medicine, Tokai University), who co-authored this work and provided a great deal of advice, as well as Professor Wakita and everyone else who cooperated with us. This work is based on open data from the worldwide analysis of the genetic information of the novel coronavirus that threw the world into chaos. We developed a method to represent its phylogenetic tree in relation to time, latitude, and longitude, visualizing the evolutionary process and geographical spread of its variants. It visualizes how the widespread diffusion of virus variants was suppressed during the period when international travel restriction policies were issued, and how the Delta variant rapidly expanded, evoking the fierce battle between the virus's fury and human efforts to counter it. With the end of COVID-19 still not in sight, I created this work with the belief that an important role of information visualization is to communicate to society, in an easy-to-understand way and from a scientific perspective, what has been learned (and what is not yet known) through cutting-edge research in various fields such as life science, medical sciences, and epidemiology. Currently, we are not only pursuing this as art but are also advancing its use in news programs and its application to medical analysis tools, and we will continue our research.
Posted by: General Affairs, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office