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Professors (back row) Timothy Henry, Jean-Yves Herve and Ron Hutt with students Elizete Fernandes, Angel Castro, Katie Wry and Clift Manzanillo. |
URI’s new 3-D group helps students visualize careers
Imagine you’re sitting in T.F. Green airport when a plane crashes into the terminal. Or picture yourself in URI’s Ryan Center watching a basketball game and there’s a bomb scare. How would you get out safely?
Two members of a new URI partnership are working to help provide the answers. This summer URI student Elizete Fernandes, who is studying computer engineering, and Rhode Island School of Design student Katie Wray, who focuses on industrial design, are just two members of a new, innovative team that puts researchers’ ideas into visual form using 3-dimensional modeling, video analysis, and animation.
The team, called the 3-D Group for Interactive Visualization, is one of three new partnerships at URI this summer that were given seed money through the President’s Partnership Program. The program was established in 1995 and was designed to increase interdisciplinary efforts in areas of research critical to society.
Like the other eight partnerships, the 3-D group is composed of a team of faculty members and undergraduate and graduate students. In this case, the core group of faculty and students come from computer science and art disciplines. But because those disciplines provide visual information, the group brings valuable conceptual information to a wide range of current URI research projects. While still in its infancy, the group, steered by Jean-Yves Hervé and Timothy Henry from the Department of Computer Science and Statistics and Ron Hutt from the Department of Art, has a three-year plan to balance complex projects with relatively simple ones to lay a strong foundation of expertise.
Students who show aptitude are asked to become part of the team. Once trained, these students become the local experts and teach other students. “That expertise will become the core as we build our enterprise and expand our offerings to other projects, both inside and outside the university,” says Henry.
Fernandes, the computer engineering student, finds the experience stimulating. She’s helping to develop a computerized approach to simulate pedestrian behavior in emergency evacuation and non-emergency scenarios. Fernandes finds she likes working in a team. “I’m learning how to go about organizing a big project, where to start, and how to work in groups. It’s exciting.”
Next year, the group plans 3-D reconstruction and visualization of the silkworm during the cocooning phase.
By Jan Wenzel
