You will have noticed that we have now completed 10 issues! Thanks to all those who contributed. Chris Whitaker retired from the Chairmanship of the IUSC Information Graphics Working Party during August, and we express our gratitude and appreciation to him for all his work over the past 4 years. Under his chairmanship, the IGWP has made a number of significant contributions to graphics initiatives for Universities, Polytechnics and the Research Councils. These include:
His place will be taken by Dr Steve Morgan and we wish him well for the future. In addition to chairing the IGWP, Steve will be representing the IGWP on AGOCG.
As usual, articles are always welcome - preferably by email to the undersigned. Also if anyone has any news, topics for discussion, or issues to raise, please let me know.
I hope that by now you are all the proud owners of the UNIRAS Training Materials and that you are finding them useful. Please let me have any comments on how you are using them and where additions and improvements could be made.
The other area of training materials that we have been looking at are graphics standards. At the time of writing sets are well under way for:
Each contains a document on the subject, some OHP masters and some notes for the lecturer.
Other areas which I hope to report on soon are CGI and X-windows.
An order form will be sent out to CHEST contacts, but if you want to ensure you get one please contact me directly.
During the next few months I will be starting to get a few new things moving. In the area of software we are beginning to look at PHIGS implementations and also software for visualisation. If you have any experience or views in these areas please contact me.
On the hardware side we will be looking at scanners and projection systems. Again experiences and wish lists would be of interest.
Finally, I would like to thank Chris Whitaker for all his work as Chairman of the IUSC Information Graphics Working Party. Chris has put a lot of effort into getting the UNIRAS deal off the ground. He has certainly made his mark! Thanks Chris for all your work.
AGOCG invited and, at its June meeting, discussed a paper by the authors on Visualization. The paper identified deficiencies in the field at present:
ACOCG asked a small group including the authors to work on the proposals which we hope will bear fruit soon.
ACOCG also suggested that the initial part of that paper would be suitable for publication in the newsletter and, with minor alterations, that now follows.
With the term Visualization being indiscriminately applied to anything that is either colourful, complex or animated, we feel it is essential to provide some definition of the way in which the term is being used in this paper and thus the scope of any AGOCG involvement. Let us start with some aspects that do not, of themselves, constitute visualization:
On the positive side, it appears to us that the term does relate to any use of graphics that increases understanding of a system, rather than just the presentation of results. At a recent SERC workshop on visualization at Daresbury, one of the authors proposed the following distinction:
There is still an active literature about what constitutes a visualization system. It seems clear that it is distinct from a graphics system, in a number of ways:
There are several complicating factors, reflecting that visualization is an emerging field:
From all these considerations, we believe that a complete visualization system comes from the integration of the following components:
The fourth international conference on computer graphics organized by Yugraph (the Computer Graphics Chapter of ETAN - the Yugoslavian national society for computing, electrical and electronic engineering and communications), the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the University of Zagreb in cooperation with the Faculty of Technical Sciences of the University of Maribor, was held at the Dubrovnik Palace Hotel, Dubrovnik, from 20 June to 22 June. The Yugraph conferences were founded by the late Professor Stanko Turk (University of Zagreb, and member of the EUROGRAPHICS Executive Committee until his death in January 1989), and it was a fitting tribute to the father of computer graphics in Yugoslavia that this first conference since his death was very well attended and had a strong technical programme.
The conference was preceded by two days of tutorials. Four tutorials were given: Graphics Standards and PHIGS (D.A. Duce and F.R.A. Hopgood), Geometric Modelling (J. Zagajac), Advanced Computer Graphics (N. Guid), CIM, Flexible Manufacturing Systems and Computer Graphics (A. Jezernik).
The conference proper started on 20 June, with an introduction from Professor Budin of the University of Zagreb, chairman of the conference. He paid tribute to the late Professor Turk and thanked the Organization Chairman, Vlado Suznjevic, for his excellent work, sentiments that were echoed by all present.
Bob Hopgood gave the opening presentation on the topic of Super Workstations in which he spoke of the history of modem workstations and reported experiences at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) of the usage of Super Workstations such as the Stellar/Ardent machines (now Stardent) in engineering applications. One of the main areas of CAD work at RAL is CAD for electromagnet design and predictions were made as to the computing power that will be available in workstations by 1995 and the classes of design problem that will then become tractable.
David Duce gave the second presentation in the opening session on applications of Formal Methods in Computer Graphics, illustrating the state-of-the-art with extracts from the work of Fiume at Toronto, his group at RAL and joint work with CW!, and concluding with some remarks on recently published work by Onodera and Kawai in Tokyo.
After the opening session, the conference split into two parallel sessions of submitted papers and presentations by leading suppliers of CAD and computer graphics in Yugoslavia.
The submitted papers covered a wide range of technical areas from computer graphics algorithms and fundamentals to applications in engineering. The conference had a strong engineering flavour and there were many interesting presentations on new applications of traditional techniques. There were also several papers on geographical information systems. The importance of such systems is beginning to be recognized and the subject is starting to receive serious attention in Yugoslavia.
It was also pleasing to see a session on computer graphics and computer vision which included papers on selecting optimal viewing directions for polyhedral object scenes and a series of papers on a human face recognition system.
Professor Colin Besant of Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, gave an invited paper on Design to Manufacture with the Emphasis on Flexibility in Manufacture, in which he spoke of work in progress at Imperial College in the CIM area under the Esprit II programme and joint work between Imperial College and a small company in Yugoslavia. He emphasized the importance of the human in manufacturing systems and the need to develop an approach to manufacturing in which the strengths of the human operator are exploited. The flexible manufacturing cell and control system developed by Imperial and the Yugoslavian company, is one example of such a system, in which the operator's role is in planning and scheduling work. He stressed the need for a strong educational system to produce engineers with the right skills to exploit such a human-based approach.
Delegates received two nicely produced volumes of proceedings on arrival, containing the submitted and invited papers. These are published as issues 1 and 2 of volume 31 of Automatika, the journal of ETAN (available from Automatika, P.P. 123,41000 Zagreb, Yugoslavia).
Professor Budin chaired the closing session. Mr Zagajac gave a summary of the conference. 88 participants from 10 countries attended the conference, 72 from Yugoslavia. 57 papers were presented, 41 of which were from Yugoslavia. These figures are very positive and augur well for the future of computer graphics in Yugoslavia.
Bob Hopgood, Leo Budin and David Duce were the judges for the Stanko Turk A ward for the best paper of the conference. Bob Hopgood presented the award. The jury excluded papers from the Programme Committee and the small number of papers not presented at the conference. Four criteria were used to judge the papers: originality, content, clarity and presentation. The overall quality was high and it was difficult to arrive at a shortlist of seven for the Award. The judges were unanimous in choosing the paper Direct Manipulation of 3D Objects with a 2D Input Device by J.G.M.M. van Emmerik (University of Delft, The Netherlands) as the recipient of the Stanko Turk Award. Professor Budin presented the Award.
Maarten van Emmerick commented warmly on Professor Turk, whom he remembered as an ambassador for computer science in Yugoslavia. He then asked the conference to remember Professor Turk in a moment of silence; a spontaneous and moving gesture in memory of a true gentleman.
Professor Budin then announced that Yugraph'92 would also be held in Dubrovnik and hoped to welcome all present back to Dubrovnik in two years time. Hope to see you there!
