Undergraduate EducationSince the Center's inception in 1991, nearly two hundred undergraduates have worked in the Center's labs, more than a third of whom were supported with Center funds. Undergraduate researchers are an important part of the Center's modus operandi and most of the Center sites have included undergraduate researchers as authors on papers The Center's cross-disciplinary outlook is evidenced in a number of undergraduate courses and projects that reflect interdisciplinary Center-related research areas or bring important ideas and concepts from computer graphics into other fields such as education and business. For example, the Center Director, Andries van Dam leads a popular seminar each year on educational software in which undergraduates work with local middle-school and high-school teachers to develop software filling immediate classroom needs. Center undergraduates are now creating a Web site based on this course that makes its many useful software projects available to teachers world-wide ( http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs092/). PI Donald Greenberg has taught interdisciplinary undergraduate courses at Cornell in art, architectural structures, digital photography, and emerging technologies and applications, and students from many departments use Cornell's Center lab facilities for projects relating to Center work. At the Caltech site, new faculy members James Arvo and Peter Schroder have teamed up with a Caltech colleague in CNS and Electrical engineering who specializes in vision to teach a new course called 3D Photography, a lecture/laboratory course on using computer vision and graphics techniques to "scan" a 3D object and create a 3D representation of it suitable for manipulation, processing and transmission over the Web. The Center is working to place more educational resources on the Web. In 1995, co-PI John Hughes worked with an undergraduate to develop a suite of Java applets on color theory for use in a computer graphics course taught by the Center Director. When the applets became stable they were put on the Web at http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/graphics/projects/igi/spectrum/ and submitted to a Sun Microsystems Java programming contest (in which they won third prize). These applets have attracted considerable interest outside the Center. Several sites participate in university-run programs that identify potential minority students with academic promise and provide internships and other forms of support. As part of the investigation into problems of gender and minority representation, Center members have attended and given talks at professional forums concerned with gender and minority issues: co-PI Elaine Cohen gave a lecture at the June 1994 Conference on Women in Computing, entitled, "From Mathematics to Manufacturing"; PI Al Barr participated in the Third Annual Computer and Computation Sciences Program for Minority Use in March 1995 giving a presentation and tour of his lab to minority youths interested in the connection between computer graphics and the entertainment industry; and the Outreach Director chaired a panel at the Women's Caucus for Art national convention in February of 1996 on "Women Computer Artists as Ambassadors: the Culture of Art and the Culture of Science." |
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