NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19

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Newsgroups: sci.comp-aided Path: sparky!uunet!caen!mtu.edu!mtu.edu!burnett From: burnett@mtu.edu (Margaret Burnett) Subject: TUTORIALS: automated graphics, virtual reality, visual languages Message-ID: <1992Aug29.163500.16428@mtu.edu> Keywords: tutorials Sender: news@mtu.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: sunray.cs.mtu.edu Organization: Michigan Technological University Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 16:35:00 GMT Lines: 344 VL '92 Tutorials at the 1992 IEEE Computer Society International Workshop on Visual Languages September 15, 1992 University of Washington Seattle, Washington Four professional tutorials covering automated design of graphics, virtual reality, and visual programming languages will be offered at the University of Washington, Seattle, on September 15, 1992: 1: "Visual Programming Environments and Graphical Interfaces: Where We Are Now, Where We're Headed" E. Glinert, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 2: "Lessons Learned in VPLs: An In-Depth Look at Form-Based Programming Languages " A. Ambler, Univ. of Kansas, & M. Burnett, Michigan Tech. Univ. 3: "Automating the Design of Effective Graphics" S. Feiner, Columbia Univ., J. Mackinlay, Xerox PARC, & J. Marks, DEC. 4: "Virtual Reality and Experiential Computation" W. Bricken, University of Washington Although these tutorials form a part of the IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages, interested researchers, professionals, and graduate students are invited to register for either one or two tutorials without registering for the full workshop. Details of the tutorials and registration procedure are given below. Tutorials run from 9:00 to 12:00, and from 2:00 to 5:00, with refreshments provided about mid-way through each one. Also, all tutorial attendees are invited to attend the reception that evening at 8:00. ....................................................................... VL '92 Tutorials Program at the 1992 IEEE Computer Society International Workshop on Visual Languages ....................................................................... September 15, 1992 University of Washington Seattle, Washington Visual languages are finding increasingly widespread application in human/computer interfaces for programming, learning, design, medical diagnosis, communication, robotics, and scientific research. In addition, today visual languages are expanding in dimension to embrace the technologies of virtual reality, multimedia, and pen-based computing, to name just a few. The Tutorials Program preceding the annual IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages serves the following purposes: * providing in-depth presentations of some of the problems, solutions, future directions, and lessons learned by well-known visual language researchers * providing an understanding of related technologies by well-known researchers in this area * familiarizing those new to the area of visual languages with the essential background and concepts needed to understand the technical papers to be presented during the conference The Tutorials will be held September 15 at the University of Washington, the day before the beginning of the three-day Workshop September 16-18. ....................................................................... TRACK I: Visual Programming Languages This track is comprised of a mini-set of two tutorials, each of which acts as a complement to the other. Attendees can benefit from taking either alone, or both. No prior knowledge of visual programming languages is required for either. ........................... TUTORIAL 1: Visual Programming Environments and Graphical Interfaces: Where We Are Now, Where We're Headed Ephraim Glinert, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Tuesday, September 15 It is now universally accepted that graphics should play a central role in the human-computer interface alongside text. But what role? "Visual programming" refers to the use of graphics to define or to help define programs. It would be premature to claim that visual environments hold the key to the solution of the programmer's problems. Nevertheless, the past decade has witnessed the accumulation of an impressive body of evidence that the visual approach may be one step in the right direction. It is important that researchers and software engineers be aware of the underlying concepts in this new field, and the work which has been done to date, both the successes and the failures, so that they will be able to enhance the systems they develop through the appropriate incorporation of visual elements. Attendees should come away with an appreciation of the concepts underlying the design and implementation of visual systems, where the visual approach has proven successful in the past, what the unresolved issues are at present and why, where current research in the field is headed, and where future applications may lie. The presentation is intended for researchers interested in visual programming and its implications for other fields, for software engineers and managers involved in the design, implementation, and utilization of programming environments, and for casual programmers interested in how graphics can aid software development. Although no prior knowledge of the field is required, attendees should have programming experience at the level of an upper-class undergraduate science or engineering major. Ephraim P. Glinert is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Together with his graduate students, he has designed and implemented a variety of visual environments, including the Pict, SunPict, PC-Tiles and C2 (for procedural programming), Novis (for parallel/distributed programming), and a Large Font Virtual Terminal Interface and graphics library for Oocade (a CAD system for VLSI design). He has lectured widely both in the U.S. and abroad, organized/ presented tutorials at numerous conferences, and is the editor of a two-volume tutorial on visual programming environments (IEEE CS Press, 1990). He is currently Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group for Computers and the Physically Handicapped. ........................... TUTORIAL 2: Lessons Learned in VPLs: An In-Depth Look at Form-Based Programming Languages Allen Ambler, University of Kansas Margaret Burnett, Michigan Technological Univ. 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m., Tuesday, September 15 Consider a form whose entries are expressions which produce numeric, textual, graphical, or even animated values. Modern form-based visual languages include not only innovative refinements in traditionally strong arenas for form-based programming such as numerical and matrix problems, but also such surprising areas as user-interfaces, graphics, animation, image-processing, user-defined types, and event-handling. This tutorial presents an in-depth look at modern form-based visual programming, focusing on design issues, lessons learned, and future directions. An understanding of the fundamentals of programming languages is assumed. No prior knowledge of visual programming is necessary. Topics will include: * Examples of visual programming languages which use this approach to solve a variety of problems. * Behind form-based languages: ensuring that solutions exist, evaluation strategies, representation issues. * Advanced form-based programming: abstraction, layered visibility, generality, graphics, event programming. Allen L. Ambler is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kansas. He has led the visual programming languages design group at the University of Kansas in the design and implementation of the visual programming languages Forms, Forms/2, Forms/3, and PT, and is currently working on a visual programming approach to scientific visualization. His research interests include visual programming languages, programming language design, programming paradigms, and scientific visualization. Margaret M. Burnett is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Michigan Technological University. Burnett received her Ph.D. with honors from the University of Kansas in 1991. In her dissertation, Dr. Burnett developed approaches to several subproblems associated with using visual programming languages for realistic programming. Her research interests include visual programming languages, programming languages and paradigms, object-oriented programming, and functional programming languages. ........................... TRACK II: Advanced Technologies In this track, alternative technologies with potential importance in the design of future visual languages will be explored. ........................... TUTORIAL 3: Automating the Design of Effective Graphics Steven Feiner, Columbia University Jock Mackinlay, Xerox PARC Joe Marks, Digital Equipment Corporation 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Tuesday, September 15 The notion of a linguistically articulate computer system -- one that can compose natural-language utterances to communicate information to a user -- is the ultimate goal of research in natural-language generation. This tutorial will survey the complementary notion of a graphically articulate computer system -- one that can design effective graphics automatically. We will provide a broad overview of existing research on graphically articulate systems, introducing major themes and techniques in the automated and semi-automated design of graphics. Three case studies will describe selected 2D and 3D research systems. We will conclude with a discussion of possible near-term commercial applications. Steven Feiner is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. Prof. Feiner's research interests include computer graphics, knowledge-based picture generation, animation, user interfaces, virtual worlds, visual languages, hypermedia, and visualization. He is coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Addison-Wesley, 1990), and is on the editorial boards of Electronic Publishing and ACM Transactions on Information Systems. In 1991 he received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. Jock Mackinlay received a Ph.D. in 1986 from Stanford University Computer Science Department for a dissertation on the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information. He then joined Xerox PARC and is a member of the User Interface Research group. He has extended his dissertation to the design of user interfaces and input devices, and has published on 3D animated user interfaces. He has been on the program committees of both SIGGRAPH and CHI, was program chair of UIST '91, and has lectured on Documentation Graphics in SIGGRAPH and CHI courses. Joe Marks joined the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Laboratory after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1991. Prior to his graduate studies, he was employed at BBN Laboratories and at Wang Laboratories. His research interests include computer graphics, artificial intelligence, intelligent user interfaces, automated cartography, automated modeling for 3D graphics, and molecular structure prediction. In addition to his research activities, he has taught several semester-long courses at Harvard College and Harvard Extension School. ........................... TUTORIAL 4: Virtual Reality and Experiential Computation William Bricken, University of Washington 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m., Tuesday, September 15 Virtual reality is a computer generated, multi-dimensional, inclusive environment which can be accepted by a participant as cognitively valid. VR provides the opportunity for experiential computation, for direct participation in formal systems. We'll discuss participatory systems with natural semantics (architectural databases, terrain models, physical simulation) and systems with abstract structure (logic, algebra). The tutorial will cover the essential characteristics of VR: the philosophy and mathematics of inclusion, natural interaction as opposed to symbolic mediation, multisensory display, multi-dimensional environments, and the sense of presence. The focus will be on the software infrastructure and tools for maintaining virtual environments, including: the Virtual Environment Operating System (VEOS), entity management, objects, spaces, and abstractions, the Wand, the Virtual Body, multiple participants and inconsistency maintenance, editing and interaction techniques, and design of virtual worlds. Applications to be discussed include world building by high school students, design and maintenance of aircraft, teleconferencing and cooperative work, and experiential mathematics. The tutorial will close with consideration of the issues and implications of VR for participants and for social institutions. William Bricken is the Principal Scientist at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington, where he is designing and implementing the Virtual Environment Operating System and the interactive tools of the VR environment. His prior positions include Director of the Autodesk Research Lab, which developed the Cyberspace CAD application of virtual reality, and Principal Scientist at ADS, where he pioneered high-performance inference engines, visual programming systems, and instructable interfaces. Dr. Bricken holds a multidisciplinary PhD in Research Methodology, Education, Computer Science, and Psychology from Stanford, and degrees in Statistics (MS Stanford), Education (DipEd, Monash Australia), and Social Psychology (BA, UCLA). He is the developer of Boundary Mathematics, a reworking of the foundations of mathematics using spatial representations, which provides experiential interaction with formal systems, spatial parallelism, void-based computation, and a family of visual languages. ....................................................................... VL '92 Tutorials Program Registration Form ....................................................................... Tutorials: IEEE members $115 per tutorial Non members $145 per tutorial Check desired tutorials: Tutorial 1 ____ Tutorial 2 ____ Tutorial 3 ____ Tutorial 4 ____ Total registration amount: _________ Check here if already registered for the Workshop: ____ Name __________________________________________ Affiliation __________________________________________ Address __________________________________________ __________________________________________ Phone _______________ IEEE Member # ___________ E-Mail __________________________________________ Fill out the above registration form and mail with check or major credit card (no American Express) authorization to: VL'92 c/o Kay Beck Dept. of CSE -- FR-35 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 Credit card company________________________________ Card number______________________________________ Expiration date____________________________________ Signature________________________________________ Further Information ---------------------- For further information about the tutorials program or the entire workshop, contact Kay Beck, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 at 206/685-3796 or by email at (kbeck@cs.washington.edu).