Part 4 Outreach

From its inception, the Center's outreach efforts have grown to include several intensive summer programs, a range of events and activities, and numerous interactive tours of Center facilities given at all sites. In all these undertakings the Center makes available its expertise to help share knowledge and excitement about the field of computer graphics and to help students and teachers become effective participants in a world of new visual communication technologies.

1.0 Multi-site Outreach

The geographically dispersed nature of our Center means that Center sites and programs are available to educators, students, and other interested parties in a number of regions across the country at individual and joint site events. The televideo system is an integral part of these programs. For instance, although the Brown and Utah summer program participants stayed in their respective classrooms, they were able to hear and interactively participate in lectures given by the PIs at Brown, Utah, Cornell, and UNC.

The televideo system also played a key role during the Cornell Theory Center's annual Kids on Campus day in April. With help from Center researchers, children at the Ithaca Sciencenter and at the Program of Computer Graphics interacted remotely with students at Brown University, who modeled creatures according to the children's design requests. A three-way whiteboard on which kids could write and draw was also demonstrated.

For that project and to provide an infrastructure for continued projects, the Center has installed equipment and provided technical assistance at the Sciencenter to enable the Sciencenter to create its own WWW server (http://www.sciencenter.org). Having a color graphics workstation in the museum enables visitors to learn more about the museum and explore links to other science education resources over the Internet. By having its own home pages and server, the Sciencenter can also reach out to schools and other science museums to increase awareness of its resources and special programs. We are continuing to explore our connection to the Sciencenter as part of a new research project involving education and community outreach. The goal of the project is to develop networked multimedia teaching modules for science education, featuring 3D computer graphics.

In professional outreach as well, coordinated contributions from Center sites can provide unusual breadth and depth of materials. Just recently Center sites sent their ``latest and greatest'' examples of scientific visualization to PI Rich Riesenfeld for his keynote talk ``Visualization: A Modern Scientific Tool'' given to mark the inauguration of the Center for Medical Diagnostic Systems and Visualization in Bremen, Germany.

2.0 K-12 Programs

The Graphics and Visualization Center again ran three summer programs this year, each of which has matured to provide farther-reaching and more effective outreach. The Workshop for Computer Graphics and 3D Geometric Modeling was held at the Brown University site, the Summer Session on Design Professions at the Cornell University site, and the High School Computing Institute at the University of Utah site. By targeting some programs at students and others at teachers, the Center is able not only to attract new students into the field but also to help today's teachers better take advantage of computing technology.

2.1 The Workshop for Computer Graphics and 3D Geometric Modeling

The Workshop for 3D Geometric Modeling, an outreach program designed to help high school teachers master the basics of computer graphics, was held for the third consecutive summer in a row at Brown University. Run by Center Director Andy van Dam, the workshop also included lectures by co-PI John Hughes and Center Outreach Director Anne Morgan Spalter. This year's three-week workshop hosted 29 teachers from local high schools, including six returning mentor teachers. (Mentor teachers have participated in at least one previous summer's workshop and attend meetings during the year to help shape the next year's syllabus.) Several of the mentor teachers run their own in-service workshops during the school year and all conducted presentations and brainstorming sessions on creative ideas for teaching with computer graphics. Mentors and undergraduate TAs also taught new participants how to use professional-level 3D graphics programs generously donated to each participating school by Caligari Corporation (TrueSpace) and Macromedia (Macromodel).

This year's new participants came from a range of disciplines, including math, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, English, media arts, photography and, for the first time, traditional art and design. The inclusion of art teachers and the expansion of lecture material to include aspects of visual communication were hailed as valuable additions which should be repeated next summer.

2.2 The Summer Session on Design Professions

The Computer Graphics unit of the Summer Session on Design Professions at the Center's Cornell site introduces approximately 70 high school students each summer to three-dimensional modeling, rendering, animation, digital photography, and remote design collaboration. This year, in addition to attending lectures, participants used evening sessions to work with undergraduate and graduate student researchers for hands-on experience using advanced workstations, scanners, and color output devices. Particularly popular was a Cyberware 3D scanning device that captures fully detailed 3D models of people's heads in seconds.

During the six-week summer session on architectural design, a number of students also expressed far greater interest in computer-aided design and computer graphics than had been anticipated. These students requested discussion time with Center PI and former Center Director Donald Greenberg at the end of the computer graphics unit to find out how they could continue studying in this area, whether majors or minors were available for studying this discipline at the college level, and how it would affect their intended professional disciplines. (See Plate 5)

A significant number of previous participants have elected to return and enroll as undergraduates in architecture and computer graphics at Cornell, with some even serving as teaching assistants for this summer's students.

2.3 The Utah High School Computing Institute

Formerly the Summer Computing Institute, the Utah High School Institute now includes workshops and meetings throughout the year. In 1995, over 40 Utah high school students, including many from remote rural areas, participated in the five-week summer program, completing projects in scientific visualization and computer-aided design. Topics ranged from the concepts and mathematics of geometric modeling to computer-aided manufacturing to intelligent systems. After learning basic principles, students designed geometric models and made realistically rendered images, using Utah's Alpha_1 experimental testbed research system. They also created rule-based lunar rovers for a competition. This challenge sparked great enthusiasm and over a quarter of the participants stayed up the entire night before the competition to perfect their creations.

A seminar in the ethics of science was also held, with numerous guest speakers from industry and academe. Center principals from the four other STC sites gave lectures via the Center's televideo network, which participants said were high points in the session.

Many of the students will return during the year for additional experiences at the Utah site, including the ever-popular special workshop on morphing.

2.4 UNC Development of Educational Materials

This year and last, the Graphics and Image Lab at UNC helped a museum science exhibit and a popular public television show bring the excitement of computer graphics to the public.

Liquid Vision

Museum staff from Discovery Place, a science and technology museum in Charlotte, NC, came to the lab last spring to learn more about computer graphics and virtual reality. They were preparing for their work with Liquid Vision, a Discovery Place exhibition that ran from May to September. The visitors received hands-on experience with both commercial and experimental systems.

Through Liquid Vision, the visitors applied the skills they had learned. Organized by the Ohio Center of Science and Industry (COSI), Liquid Vision is a 6,000-square-foot interactive science exhibition that explores a broad spectrum of concepts in science and technology, including lasers, holography, and virtual reality. During its three-year tour, Liquid Vision will travel to eight large science and technology centers throughout the U.S.

The New Explorers

Last year, the UNC site was also involved in the preparation of curriculum materials for The New Explorers, a PBS television series that profiles scientists and the work they do. The Center's involvement with the show dates back to 1993, when The New Explorers produced and broadcast ``Through the Looking Glass,'' a program that was shot primarily at UNC and focused on their work in virtual environments. Through the Science Explorers Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and designed to introduce students to careers in science, middle school curriculum materials are then designed to accompany each New Explorers episode. The curriculum materials and videos of the program are distributed to middle schools and regional curriculum centers throughout the U.S.

3.0 Community Outreach

In addition to highly structured and intensive summer programs and workshops, the Center runs shorter events and hands-on tours for various groups including politicians who want to experience virtual reality, senior citizens, professionals from related disciplines, and the interested public. For example, this year the UNC site alone hosted over 1400 tour participants.

The goal of many of this year's short programs and talks has been exposing minority or disadvantaged students and female students to the field of computer graphics and its career possibilities. PI Al Barr participated in the Third Annual Computer and Computation Sciences Program for Minority Use, held at Caltech, and students toured the Graphics Laboratory facilities a tour afterward. This year's program theme was ``Computers: The Machines, Science, People and Careers.''

The Center presented briefings for the Utah Science Teachers Association and the Utah Science Center, special tours for high school MESA clubs (Minority Engineering Student Association), and tours for Girl Scout Groups.

The Center also hosted five Saturdays of The Saturday Academy, a program sponsored by Equity 2000, a partnership of the College Board and six school districts nation-wide, including Providence, RI. The Saturday Academy in Providence engages primarily minority and economically-disadvantaged students in hands-on mathematics activities in university and college environments.

In June 1994, Center co-PI Elaine Cohen gave an invited talk at the Women in Computing conference in Washington (supported in part by NSF) that included discussion of the exciting career possibilities in the research area of computer-aided design and manufacturing.

Finally, participants in Women in Mathematics, a mentorship program that pairs 8th grade girls with math-oriented professionals, gained exposure to math and science professionals and research environments during a tour of UNC's virtual reality lab.

4.0 Professional Outreach

The Center has a great variety of professional visitors, contacts, consultants, and consultees. In addition we organize visits, special programs, and open house sessions for industrial corporations.

For example, as part of professional outreach the Utah site ran satellite downlinks to several research briefings with groups visiting the Utah site. Visits within the last 10 months included Sun, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox. The Center's Utah site also briefed Micron Technologies Corp on the Center's televideo system and its unique educational possibilities. Further, when the Solid Modeling '95 conference held its meeting in Salt Lake City, the Center held lab briefings for all conference attendees.

4.1 The Vannevar Bush Symposium

The Center was proud to organize and help sponsor a symposium in honor of the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's famous article, ``As We May Think.'' The ideas set forth in this seminal article (first published in 1945 Atlantic Monthly and soon after reprinted in Life magazine) have greatly influenced the course of subsequent technology -- not through the realization of Bush's Memex, a microfilm-based machine design that presaged today's revolutionary hypertext technologies, but through the people Bush inspired and the distance they carried his vision.

Some of the most noted carriers of Bush's vision spoke at the conference, including Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Bob Kahn, Tim Berners-Lee, Michael Lesk, Nicholas Negroponte, Raj Reddy, Lee Sproull, Alan Kay, and Douglas Adams. The talks covered a range of issues including Bush's and Engelbart's influence, technical breakthroughs in work with text, image, and sound, and social issues related to hypertext technology. Speakers uniformly stressed the necessity of integrating management and social strategies with the use of technologies that change the way we think, work, and communicate with each other.

Slide presentation and materials supplied by the presenters are available on-line at http://www.brown.edu.stc/research/graphics/information/vannevar_bush.html. Links to each speaker's Web page can be found at http://www.brown.edu.stc/research/graphics/people/lsh/bush. The Center plans to support efforts to place MPEG-compressed video of the symposium talks on-line.

The symposium was organized and chaired by Center Director Andy van Dam and hosted at MIT by the Chair of EE & CS, Paul Penfield, Jr. In addition to the Center, sponsors included the National Science Foundation, Apple Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Brown University, and MIT.

4.2 1994 STC Meetings

The Center's Cornell site hosted the fall, 1994 meetings of all 24 NSF Science and Technology Centers, including separate programs for Directors, Managers, and Education Coordinators. Regular meeting agendas were supplemented with special presentations on emerging video and network technology by Cornell PI and then Center Director, Dr. Donald P. Greenberg. The value of the Center's televideo link to its other four sites was demonstrated as a communications infrastructure, as a platform for multi-university education, and as a tool for remote access to specialized research facilities, including the Pixel-Planes 5 graphics supercomputer at the Center's University of North Carolina site.

During special sessions to all three groups on networks and communications, the developers of Cornell's CU-SeeMe demonstrated that software as a low-cost, Internet-based videoconferencing application. Joseph Hardin and Brian Golden of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign also presented current WWW technology and led discussions on future directions for the World-Wide Web. A hands-on workshop allowed interested participants to construct home pages using the resources of the Center's Cornell site.

4.3 The STC Program WWW Home Pages

The Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization initiated a program-wide STC home page with links to all other STC home pages in February of 1994. This resource gives NSF a single link to the STC program and facilitates communication among STC's as well. At the latest STC meetings in Washington, the Center offered to expand these pages to include links to other shared STC-related resources.

4.4 Outreach Images

In addition to research publications, we have contributed extensive outreach images to the community through video, slide, and film publications, as well as special exhibits at SIGGRAPH. These slide sets and film publications are used in teaching and research throughout the world. The Center was represented in the 1995 SIGGRAPH Technical Slide Set, Art Show, and Video Review. In addition, the cover image from the 1995 SIGGRAPH Proceedings and the 1995 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics was provided by the Center.

4.5 Participation in Advisory Groups

Center PI Richard Riesenfeld serves on the External Advisory Committee for the Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, and the Advisory Board for the Center for Complex Systems and Visualization, University of Bremen, Germany.

Center PI Henry Fuchs serves on the Technical Advisory Board of the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics in Providence, RI.

Center Director Andries van Dam serves on the Technical Advisory Board of Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA, the Technical Advisory Board of the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics in Providence, RI, and the Technical Advisory Board of Object Power in Cambridge, MA. He is also the Chief Scientist of Electronic Books Technology, Inc., also in Providence, RI.

Center PI Al Barr serves on the Advisory Board for the NSF's Engineering Research Centers (ERC) Program.

Last Modified: 09:51am EST, March 26, 1996