There has been no change in the Center's organizational structure since the last annual report. We have modified the organizational chart presented last year to clarify the reporting structure but actual Center operations remain unchanged.
Brook Conner, who served as the Center's Acting Assistant Director through most of the year and was instrumental in the formation of the Center's telecollaboration project and in shaping the 1995/96 Center-wide Graduate Televideo seminar, left the Center in mid-October. The Assistant Director position is currently unfilled, and the search for an appropriate replacement will begin soon.
Due to retirement or the press of other commitments, several members of our External Advisory Board resigned during this past year. We discussed the selection of new members with the remaining Board members and also requested suggestions from NSF. We are pleased to announce two recent additions to our External Advisory Board: Professors Evelyn Hu and Roscoe Giles. Both new members have distinguished scientific backgrounds and bring valuable technical leadership experience to the Board. Dr. Hu is Director of one of the first-round NSF STCs, the Center for Quantized Electronic Structures (QUEST). Dr. Giles is Deputy Director of the Center for Computational Science at Boston University and Co-Director of Boston University's NSF-sponsored MARINER project.
Our outreach efforts also continue with gratifying results. The three highly effective and ongoing high school programs at Brown, Cornell, and Utah are complemented by other ongoing efforts across the entire K-12 spectrum and beyond. Increasingly, all sites are producing interactive Web content, particularly Java applets, that can be used not only at the high school level but also by college students and professionals. We believe this form of outreach provides the maximum amplification for our efforts. We continue to have a significant presence at SIGGRAPH and collectively account for almost a third of the papers to be presented at next spring's Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics , which I chair. The Center once again had a booth at the IEEE Visualization Conference (Vis 96). Although we no longer have a representative on the VRML Architecture Group (VAG) we continue to be involved in this developing standard for 3D Interactive Graphics on the Web. We will join the soon-to-be-launched VRML Consortium and I expect to serve on its Board of Directors.
Of particular significance this past year is the broadening and deepening of the Center through the acquisition of outstanding new faculty who have all started working on Center collaborations. Caltech acquired Jim Arvo from Cornell and Peter Schroeder from Princeton as well as assistant graphics lab director David Breen from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. Peter Shirley, previously a faculty member at Indiana University and then a visiting faculty member at Cornell, and Chuck Hanson from Los Alamos Laboratory joined the University of Utah. The STC has surely played and important role in significantly building the graphics programs a Caltech and Utah where they have successfully attracted such top-notch young talent. We have also broadened the Center's External Advisory Board by adding Professor Evelyn Hu, Director of QUEST (the STC for Quantized Electronic Structures) and Roscoe Giles, Deputy Director of Boston University's Center for Computational Science.
We are very pleased with NSF's continuing support of our Center, particularly in an era of decreasing funding for long-term foundational science, and are continuing our effort to attract other sources of funding to augment NSF support. While we have not as yet been able to attract DARPA funding beyond what Utah and UNC were receiving outside of the Center, we are attracting some new industrial funding, for example support for 3D user interface work from Alias / Wavefront and Autodesk.
It is exciting to see the Center continue to make excellent progress toward its long-term foundational goals while at the same time broadening its efforts and embracing new challenges.