Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) is an interdisciplinary area
which draws its intellectual foundations from Computer Science,
Psychology, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Computer Engineering,
and which has application to any use of computers to graphically convey
information to users. Typical applications are computer aided design,
scientific and business data visualization, multimedia,
computer-supported cooperative work, computer-based teaching, image
understanding, medical imaging, and user interface design.
The GVU Center has three missions: education, service, and research.
In our educational role, we teach the principles and methods of computer
graphics, visualization, and usability to members of the academic
community ranging from undergraduate students to graduate students and
faculty. Center members teach dozens of courses and seminars among the
wide offering of relevant courses listed in Section F. A set of
continuing education short courses (Section G) are provided to assist
practitioners to stay abreast of current developments. Our service
mission is carried out through the Scientific Visualization Lab, a joint
undertaking with Information Technology (the campus-wide computer
service), to provide state of the art computer graphics hardware and
software capabilities to the entire Georgia Tech Community. Over 150
faculty, graduate students and staff use the visualization lab's
facilities. Our research, described in Section B, spans the areas of
realistic imagery, computer-supported collaborative work, algorithm
animation, medical imaging, image understanding, scientific data
visualization, animation, user interface software, usability, adaptive
user interfaces, multimedia, stereo graphics, virtual environments, image
quality, and expert systems in graphics and user interfaces. The twenty
faculty and staff who are actively developing the lab's programs are
drawn from Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, Office of
Interdisciplinary Programs, Physics, Mathematics, Information Technology,
and the College of Computing. An active seminar series and brown-bag
lunches brings us together every week to discuss current research topics.
By integrating these three missions together in a single unit, the
Center is developing a highly interactive and collaborative environment
where researchers unfamiliar with computer graphics can come for help in
integrating scientific visualization into their research work, graphics
experts and graduate students can share thier knowledge with one another
and find new and interesting problems on which to work, and students can
learn in a melting pot of closely-related ideas and collaborations
between researchers from multiple disciplines. This
intellectually-stimulating environment, complemented by over 40
workstations and other pieces of equipment and over 3000 square feet of
newly-renovated lab space, provides a paradigm for the use of interactive
computer graphics systems which will be necessary for engineering and
scientific research in the 21st century.
