CSCI2370: Interdisciplinary Scientific Visualization (fall 2018)
Syllabus

Class Meetings

The class will meet:

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Course Description

In this class we will learn about solving scientific problems using computer graphics and visualization. We will learn how to do interdisciplinary scientific visualization research, from soup to nuts, in one semester. Projects will involve the solution of scientific problems using computer graphics, modeling, and visualization. Working in small groups, students will identify scientific problems, propose solutions involving computational modeling and visualization, evaluate the proposals, design and implement the solutions, apply them to the problems, evaluate their success, and report on results. Example projects might include interactive software systems, immersive virtual reality cave applications, quantitative analysis tools, or new applications of existing visualizations methods. For this year in particular, the focus will be on applications in the new virtual reality cave. Aims

At the end of CSCI2370, students will have experience with:

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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 virtual reality visualizations. Each student will also be responsible for presenting 2-3 papers on topics related to their project.

Over 14 weeks, students will spend 3 hours per week in class (42 hours total). Outside of class, project related work is expected to take approximately 105 hours over the course of the semester, while other activities such as reading and reviewing papers and proposals is expected to take approximately 35 hours. The breakdown of out-of­class hours per week will vary during the semester we expect that students will spend more time on reading papers and proposals at the beginning of the semester and more time on project­related work towards the end of the semester. All project­related activities are designed to train students to have experience with Aims 1 ­ 3, and we expect students to learn more about research proposal writing as well as current visualization literature and open problems from reading papers and proposals.

See the calendar for more details.

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Assessment

The course grade is weighted as follows:

A late handin will cost 1/3 of a letter grade off the final course grade for each calendar day it is late. Each student gets five free late days before penalties accrue.

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Readings

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

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