About our Outreach Efforts

The Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill hosts approximately 875 visitors each year for various outreach activities. We currently have several programs designed to reach out to students and teachers in public schools, including research demonstrations for visiting school groups, scientist visits to middle and high school science classes, and creation and distribution of educational software for students with disabilities. The department has also played host in recent years to well-attended conferences and collaborative meetings.

Demonstrations for School Groups
Our departmental research demonstrations allow students to experience and learn about virtual environments (EVE), interactive haptic painting (dAb), 3D computer vision, and robotics, among other projects. In addition to school-organized visits, the department also hosts children and adolescents who are involved in Scouting groups, mentoring programs, and science camps, among other educational organizations. For a few years now, we have hosted middle school girls and boys from the IBM-sponsored camps EXITE and IGNITE, where students in the Durham (NC) Public School system learn team skills in a science and technology rich environment.

The department has a particular interest in increasing the number of women in computer science. In addition to the IBM-sponsored EXITE girls camp, we have also partnered with the Women and Mathematics Mentoring Program (WAM) to bring over 400 eighth-grade girls and their mentors to the department for demos and discussion with female faculty members and graduate students. The program’s goal is to encourage these girls to take higher-level math courses in high school and learn about math-related careers.

Enabling Technology Demonstrations
Public school students and teachers have benefited from our enabling technology research for seven years now. Professor Gary Bishop and his enabling technology students have developed a range of educational software tools for children with disabilities. The software is freely distributed on the web, and sometimes via CD, and is designed to combine with inexpensive, off-the-shelf, commodity hardware to help ensure the tools are both accessible and affordable. One such tool, Tar Heel Reader, is rapidly gaining popularity. Tar Heel Reader is a web site designed to help teachers make easy-to-read books for children with disabilities, using the publishing platform Wordpress and Creative Commons images from the photo-sharing Web site, Flickr. So far, more than 11,000 online books have been created and more than 1.4 million books have been read on the site. One of the earliest and most popular programs, Hark the Sound, has had several thousand copies distributed via download and CD.

One such event, Maze Day, has been held for six years now. Maze Day invites blind and visually impaired students in kindergarten through high school, and their parents, guardians and teachers, to the department to experience a wide variety of educational games and tools created just for them. Each year has brought approximately 100-150 students and adults. For students who are often left out of school field trips and activities because they are not members of the sighted community, Maze Day provides a one-of-a-kind day of fun and learning. The department has also held several teacher workshops, both on the UNC campus and at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC. For more information on our enabling technology research, please see wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~gb/wp/research.

Collaborative Outreach
The department has a great interest in outreach collaboration with other UNC departments and other universities. As part of this effort, we participated in a multi-disciplinary festival called Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology (CHAT) in February 2010, which brought together researchers in the sciences and humanities from UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State University and Duke University to explore how digital technology is shaping the arts and humanities. Dr. Greg Welch worked with Associate Professor Francesca Talenti in the UNC Department of Communications Studies, and some staff and students in computer science and communications studies, to create “The Bathysphere: Motion Capture as Art.” The Bathysphere was both an underwater symphony and an interactive game. Other demonstrations were also shown at an open house for the general public held in Sitterson Hall and Brooks Building during the festival. In September 2010, the department will be taking part in the statewide NC Science Festival. - Need to update with numbers of visitors, what kinds of demos were shown, description of the festival, etc. Throughout the year researchers from other universities and other UNC schools and departments also visit the department to view the departmental research demos and participate with our researchers in collaborative research efforts.

Conferences
The department’s outreach efforts also include those designed to bring researchers together to facilitate discussion and collaboration. The Workshop on Edge Computing Using New Commodity Architectures (EDGE), held in 2006, consisted of invited presentations given by renowned researchers, panel discussions on advantages and the trade-off of various architectures and the computing needs of various applications, contributed poster presentations and live research demonstrations, and expanded breaks allowing for extensive discussion. The workshop was chaired by Drs. Dinesh Manocha and Ming Lin, there were approximately 262 researchers in attendance. Also in 2006, the Third International Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization and Transmission (3DPVT 2006): The 3DPVT 2006 conference was a forum for topics that spanned a number of research fields from applied mathematics, computer science and engineering, computer vision, computer graphics, geometric modeling, signal and image processing, bioinformatics and statistics. The UNC conference chair was Dr. Marc Pollefeys and the conference was attended by 230 students and researchers from across the globe. In 2009, the department hosted the IEEE International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC 2009). The conference was chaired by Dr. Montek Singh and there were approximately 60 people who attended from around the world.