We are a joint research institute between Simon Fraser University (SFU), the University of British Columbia (UBC), and the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), dedicated to effective and innovative education and knowledge enrichment.
VIVA was created to promote visual analytics, to provide training on visual analytics tools, techniques, and theory, and to connect students and researchers with industry. VIVA supplies training to students, researchers, and individuals from small, medium and large organizations from various industries, so all can learn to solve problems with the help of visual analytics, and from each other.
In 2007, The Boeing Company (Boeing) provided an industrial research grant to UBC and SFU to jointly study visual analytics. The general goals of the grant were to establish the visual analytics field in Canada, to disseminate visual analytics research results in Canada to Government agencies and business organizations, and to discover how visual analytics might be used within Boeing. In 2010, a similar gift was given by Boeing to both universities to establish VIVA. In 2014, BCIT became a member institution of VIVA.