Outreach

Single-Dish Summer School

The Arecibo database system and the overall project will be highlighted at the Single-Dish Summer School to be held at the Arecibo Observatory in July, 2005. Participants in the summer school include undergraduate and graduate students from all over the US .

CURIE Academy

Project participants Steve Marschner and Kavita Bala have taken responsibility for the student project that will form the core of this summer's CURIE Academy . CURIE Academy is a one-week residential program for high school girls who excel in math and science to explore Engineering, a field that has low participation rates by women traditionally. CURIE directly addresses the pipeline issue faced by Engineering schools and the engineering profession by exciting high school girls about the study of Engineering.

Over the course of the weeklong project, each group of students will create a realistic, 3D model of an architectural site using image-based modeling, a popular computer graphics technology that is used to create computer models of scenes ranging from archaelogical sites to movie sets. The students will begin by photographing a landmark building on the Cornell campus from many different vantage points. Using image-based modeling software they will define the rough shapes of the buildings, refine them into dimensionally accurate models, and map textures onto the model surfaces to create a greater sense of realism. Once the models are created, the students can virtually walk around the site and make animations showing the site from new vantage points.

In the course of the project, students will be introduced through lectures and through hands-on experience to important concepts in computer graphics: modeling, texturing and rendering. At the end of the project they will have a detailed 3D computer model of a complex site.