Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities

Vernon Burton, Ph.D.

Professor of History and Director of the Cyberinstitute

Clemson University

Speaker Bio

Date: Friday, January 20

Time: 2:30 pm

Location: 119 McAdams

Advances in computing have begun to revolutionize humanities research. Advanced data acquisition, data storage and management, user-friendly data mining and visualization technologies, large-scale modeling and simulation, massive text and visual searches with complex relational analysis—these techniques, not possible a few years ago, are now galvanizing the humanities. In this talk Professor Vernon Burton, Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute, discusses some of the ways in which collaborations between humanists and computational scientists have created new forms of understanding and discovery. Burton will also introduce the Clemson CyberInstitute and suggest how cyberinfrastructure and access to high performance computing will have an equally profound impact on humanities research.

High-speed, High-Resolution 3D Geometric Video Scanning and Compression

Song Zhang, Ph.D.

Mechanical Engineering

Iowa State University

Date: Friday, February 3

Time: 2:30 pm

Location: 119 McAdams

High-speed, high-resolution 3D geometric motion capture is becoming increasingly important in both academia and industry, with broad applications including medicine, homeland security, and entertainment.

We have developed an unprecedented 60 Hz rate 3-D imaging system with a digital fringe projection and phase-shifting method, but a hardware bottleneck was met. We are now studying a new method that could potentially eliminate this speed bottleneck.

This talk discusses some of our recent studies: (1)realizing simultaneous 60 Hz 3-D geometric motion capture at more than 300,000 points per frame; (2)achieving kHz rate 3D imaging for capturing extremely rapidly changing scenes; and (3) compressing 3D range videos into 2D videos for superior quality with a very high compression ratio.