Research Experiences for Undergraduates at the University of Iowa in Experimental Computer Science

James Cremer
Joseph Kearney
Margaret Fleck

Computer Science Department
University of Iowa

CONTACT INFORMATION

James Cremer
Computer Science Department
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242
Phone: (319) 335-0736
Fax : (319) 335-3624
Email: cremer@cs.uiowa.edu
Email: kearney@cs.uiowa.edu
Email: mfleck@cs.uiowa.edu

WWW PAGE

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/reu
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~cremer
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~kearney
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~mfleck

PROGRAM AREA

Virtual Environments

KEYWORDS

Autonomous agents, behavior modeling, driving simulation, interactive simulation, real-time simulation, reactive systems, scenario control, virtual environments.

PROJECT SUMMARY

This project provides undergraduates the opportunity to participate in a variety of computer science research projects, with emphasis on experimental and applied research. The program is organized as an 8 to 10 week intensive summer session. Students are recruited nationally and matched with active faculty members in research areas including: virtual environments, real-time simulation, graphics, computer vision, computational geometry, distributed systems, and artificial intelligence. Substantial effort is placed on recruiting minority students and students from non-research institutions. Our program provides a coherent experience involving close interaction between faculty, graduate students, and REU students. We emphasize hands-on experience with state-of-art software and computing facilities, and work on challenging and important research problems.

The Summer 1997 REU program was completed August 1, 1997. All final project reports completed by the participants are available on the Iowa REU WWW page. The twelve participants this summer included five women and four African American students. About half (depending on how you count) of the students were from schools without large research programs.

Eight of the Summer 1997 students worked with Professors Cremer and Kearney on the Interactive Systems Program project "Behavior Modeling and Scenario Authoring for Virtual Environments". In particular, they worked on development of Hank, a public, open software system for driving simulation that promotes collaboration among researchers and facilitates sharing of data and code. Hank research emphasizes the development of technology supporting applications that use interactive simulation to study human driving behavior. In a project joint with the Iowa Psychology department, Hank will be used in Fall 1997 for virtual bicycling experiments. Children six to ten years old will ride an instrumented (but fixed in place) bicycle in a virtual environment populated with vehicle and pedestrian traffic. The goal of the experiments is to assess child decision-making behavior and safety in traffic. Two REU students developed the instrumented bicycle in conjunction with staff in the Psychology machine shop. Another REU student modeled the fifteen city block area over which the experiments will run, and developed traffic scenarios for the experiments. Other REU projects included: modeling buildings, natural features, and other and other cultural features for the "bike town" environment; implementing facilities for real-time stereo and multiple screen display of Hank scenes; and developing a graphical user-interface for prototyping scenarios.

The remaining four Summer 1997 REU students worked on projects not covered under the Interactive Systems Program. Two worked with Prof. A. Segre on new algorithms for protein folding. And two worked with Prof. M. O'Donnell (visiting from U. Chicago) on digital sound modeling of music.

PROJECT REFERENCES

All project reports completed by Summer 1997 students are available on the Iowa REU WWW page: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/reu.

AREA BACKGROUND

See report for Kearney and Cremer's "Behavior Modeling and Scenario Authoring for Virtual Environments" project.

AREA REFERENCES