Clarification on CSC Variable and Dataset differences for SciVis Contest

[Manuel Pérez]

Dear Scivis Contest Team, 

I hope this message finds you well.

I am currently participating in the 2025 IEEE SciVis Contest and working with the dataset provided in the file  Dataset_VisContest_Rapid_Alloy_development_v3.txt. While analyzing the data and visualizing hot crack susceptibility using parallel coordinates, and analyzing PCA, I observed that the red (high CSC) lines in my visualizations tend to form a single large group. However, in the reference visualizations provided in the contest documentation, there appear to be two distinct red line clusters.

I would greatly appreciate your help clarifying the following points:

1. Is the CSC value used in the contest (reflected in your figures) the same as the one in column BE labeled CSC in the dataset Dataset_VisContest_Rapid_Alloy_development_v3.txt?

• Or is it derived or preprocessed in another way?

2. Was there a change in how CSC or other variables were computed in different versions of the dataset?

• Could you explain the difference in cluster patterns between my visualization and those in the contest examples?
  

3. Have the example visualizations been generated from the same dataset version that is currently available (v3)?

• Or were they based on a previous or filtered subset?

Understanding this would be really helpful to ensure that I'm analyzing the data correctly and interpreting CSC appropriately in the context of hot crack susceptibility.

Thank you very much in advance for your support!

Best regards,

Manuel Antonio Perez Gil

[Katrin Bugelnig]

Dear Manuel,

Thank you for your message!

Let me try to answer your questions:

1. In theory, the CSC value has been calculated in the same way for our example images and the contest dataset. However, the figures we have provided as an example do not display the Dataset_VisContest_Rapid_Alloy_development_v3.txt dataset. The figures are based on a reduced dataset, for which only three alloy scraps were considered for mixing, as opposed to six for the contest dataset. Therefore, the CSC value displayed in the example figures does not directly correspond to the given contest dataset.

2. Unfortunately, there was a problem with Thermo-Calc licence version compatibility when we performed the initial calculations (on the first two uploaded datasets). We were later able to fix the problem and recalculate the entire dataset. The calculated compositions in the final uploaded dataset differ from those in the previous datasets due to the recalculation with a modified step size between mixing ratios. The yield strength value changed for the final uploaded dataset because it was not calculated correctly due to the licence problem previously.

3. This was explained in point 1.

I hope you find this information helpful.
Please feel free to contact us at any time if you have any more questions.

best regards,

Katrin