Browsing by Author "Ebert, David S."

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    An Interdisciplinary Approach to Teaching Computer Animation to Artists and Computer Scientists
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Ebert, David S.; Bailey, Dan; José Carlos Teixeira; Werner Hansmann; Michael B. McGrath
    Animation has always required a close collaboration between artists and scientists, poets and engineers. Current trends in computer animation have made successful and effective teamwork a necessity. To address these issues, we have developed an interdisciplinary computer animation course for artists and scientists that focuses on contemporary issues in computer aninmation. This course emphasizes collaborative teams for practical experience, cross-mixing of student expertise, and group-based education: the students leam from each other, as well as lhe instructors. Student teams produce a professional aninmation that extends the capabilities of a conmmercial animation package to gain experience in and exposure to the state-of-the-art research in computer animation and rendering, the complete animation process, and the artistic and aesthetics of computer animation. We describe our approach to teaching this course, the structure of the course, the results, and lessons learned from our experience with the first offering of this course (Spring 1999).
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    A Visual Analytics Approach to Facilitate Crime Hotspot Analysis
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Neto, José F. de Queiroz; Santos, Emanuele; Vidal, Creto Augusto; Ebert, David S.; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, Tatiana
    Computer-based technology has played a significant role in crime prevention over the past 30 years, especially with the popularization of spatial databases and crime mapping systems. Police departments frequently use hotspot analysis to identify regions that should be a priority in receiving preventive resources. Practitioners and researchers agree that tracking crime over time and identifying its geographic patterns are vital information for planning efficiently. Frequently, police departments have access to systems that are too complicated and excessively technical, leading to modest usage. By working closely together with domain experts from police agencies of two different countries, we identified and characterized five domain tasks inherent to the hotspot analysis problem and developed SHOC, a visualization tool that strives for simplicity and ease of use in helping users to perform all the domain tasks. SHOC is included in a visual analytics system that allows users without technical expertise to annotate, save, and share analyses. We also demonstrate that our system effectively supports the completion of the domain tasks in two different real-world case studies.