Brown University
Fall 2003

Interactive Scientific Visualization

CS 237
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-12
CIT 506

Instructor: David Laidlaw Office: CIT 449 Hours: by appt. Phone: x37647 dhl@cs.brown.edu

TA: Daniel Acevedo Office: CIT 543b Hours: by appt. Phone: x37698 daf@cs.brown.edu

Writing and Rethoric Fellow: William Smith Hours: by appt. Phone: 310-463-7382 cell William_S_Smith@brown.edu

Course Description

In this class we will learn about solving scientific problems using computer graphics and visualization. Students will work in small multi-disciplinary groups to identify scientific problems, propose solutions involving computational modeling and visualization, design and implement the solutions, apply them to the problems, and evaluate their success. Solutions may be, for example, interactive software systems, immersive CAVE applications, or new applications of existing visualization methods.

Aims

At the end of CS237, students will have experience with:

• carrying out an interdisciplinary research project;

• effectively communicating with collaborators in other disciplines;

• expressing their scientific ideas more clearly both in writing and orally.
  

• current visualization literature, open problems, and promising research directions.
  

Objectives and Course Content Overview

The course will be organized around ``funding'' and implementing a small interdisciplinary research project. As references, we'll study some funded grant proposals produced by faculty at Brown and elsewhere. We'll start with a program announcement (PA) or request for proposal (RFP), read the proposal, see the reviews that it received, and look at the work that has resulted from the grant. Some of the proposal authors will guest lecture to describe their proposals, work, and philosophy.

Each member of class will create a short proposal on which they are the principal investigator. The proposals should be multi-disciplinary - so each should have 2 or 3 authors, one of them the principal investigator. The class will review the proposals, emulating the NSF review process, and recommend some of the proposals for ``funding.'' The ``funded'' proposals will then be implemented in small groups. Each group will finish with an extended abstract and presentation describing their accomplishments.

Class time will be used for project related tasks, discussion of literature and open problems, lectures on research directions and tools, and guest lectures from application areas.

During the semester we will also cover several topics motivated by the project topics. Examples might include modeling of medical images, using user studies for evaluation of interfaces or visualization methods, or numerical optimization. Each student will also be responsible for presenting 2-3 papers on topics related to their project.

See the class schedule and list of readings/assignments for more details.

Assessment

• Project success and demo: base for class grade. We will develop criteria for this success during the semester. This will be a group grade.

• Each handin and presentation: can alter your grade by up to 1/2 letter. A late handin will cost 5% of a letter grade off the final course grade for each calendar day it is late. Each student gets three free late days before penalties accrue.

• Failure to meet any Writing and Rhetoric Fellow deadline will cost 1/2 letter off the final course grade.

• Class participation: up to 1/2 letter grade increase.

Readings

Readings will be copied and handed out or made available via the course readings/assignments web page.