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