Bill Ribarsky has been named to the Steering Committee of the DHS Center of Excellence for Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure, and Emergency Management (DIEM). He will oversee efforts in Advanced Information Systems. Ribarsky and his colleagues Aidong Lu and Zachary Wartell will lead research in applying visualization and visual analysis to hurricane wind and rain fields, storm surge on coastal terrain, and the resilience of urban infrastructures in coastal cities.

Jing Xiao is one of several distinguished authors from around the world to be honored for their work on the "Springer Handbook of Robotics". Shortly after publication, the book received two American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in the Engineering and Technology Category and the Award for Excellence in the overall Physical Sciences and Mathematics Category. “This was a herculean effort by major robotics researchers from around the world,” said Xiao. “It’s truly an honor to have been associated with this project.” The handbook was the best selling Springer title in engineering in 2008; it brings a widespread and well-structured compilation of classic and emerging application areas of robotics.

Automatically-generated Convex Region Decomposition for Real-time Spatial Agent Navigation in Virtual Worlds by Hunter Hale, Michael Youngblood, and Priyesh Dixit won the 2008 AiGameDev.com Award for most influential publication. The award statement says, “The winning paper takes navigation mesh generation up to the next level, being able to automatically generate it for any given level space.”

Computer Science saw a surge of nearly 19% in Fall, 2008 undergraduate enrollment from last year. This is after a few years where enrollment was flat. The enrollment increase reflects the realization by students and their parents that Computer Science is a field with high salaries and good job prospects and, in fact, it is less susceptible to economic downturn than other fields. The surge is also due to the increased visibility of the Computer Science Department and recognition of the quality of its programs.

Professor Zbigniew Ras has won the 2009 Harshimi de Silva Graduate Mentor Award. The de Silva Award is given annually by the UNCC Graduate School to the faculty member who is judged to have the most outstanding commitment to students, research and scholarly inquiry. It is a richly deserved honor for Prof. Ras and provides a standard for the CS Department faculty in their student mentorship and research leadership.

Robert Kosara’s group wins two awards at IEEE VisWeek

Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara won Honorable Mention (the second highest award) at the IEEE InfoVis Conference for their paper, “The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors”. Also, Alex Godwin, Kosara’s student, won Best Poster for his submission, “Visual Data Mining of Unevenly-Spaced Event Sequences”.

On October 1, Chancellor Holden Thorpe (left) of UNC Chapel Hill and Chancellor Phil Dubois (right) of UNC Charlotte visited the Charlotte Visualization Center. They visited the Renaissance Situation Room, which is part of the VisCenter and a new facility of RENCI@UNCC (administered under the auspices of the UNCC Urban Institute in collaboration with the VisCenter and CAGIS), to view presentations and demos about collaborative RENCI projects in urban modeling and analysis. Prominent among these projects are visual analytics applications and novel display and interaction methods. The Chancellors came away impressed with all they saw and with the collaborations underway not only at UNCC but between the Charlotte and Chapel Hill campuses.