The Kahlert School of Computing is a school within the College of Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.
School of Computing The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science. The school has major research funding that supports initiatives in:
Animation Computer architecture and VLSI Computer graphics Computer security and information privacy Computer information systems Human-computer interaction Image analysis Natural language processing Networks, embedded systems, and operating systems Program analysis Robotics Data management and analysis Scientific visualization and data visualization The School of Computing has made important contributions to computer graphics and computer animation. These contributions include:
Gouraud shading Phong reflection model Phong shading rendering equation Utah teapot
History Computing research at the University of Utah started in 1965 when former university president James Fletcher recruited Berkeley professor David C. Evans to return to his home state to establish a computer science division within the electrical engineering department. Evans graduated from the University of Utah in 1953 with a Ph.D. in physics. Before returning to Utah, Evans developed computing systems, first at Bendix as project manager of the commercially successful G-15 computer and follow-on G-20 (1955-1962). While at Berkeley from 1962-1965, Evans and G-15 architect Harry Huskey initiated Project Genie, which led to innovations such as the Scientific Data Systems 940 time-sharing operating system. Upon his return to the University of Utah, Evans wanted to cultivate a culture of creativity. He hired faculty with diverse experiences and backgrounds and encouraged interactive use of computing for a variety of creative pursuits. Evans was immediately awarded a large ARPA grant from Robert William Taylor, then director of the ARPA IPTO office, to create a center of excellence in computer graphics. Evans believed that small, interactive computers should be developed to augment human creativity, and he planned to use the ARPA award to pursue this line of research. Leveraging the multimillion-dollar funding from ARPA, Evans was able to harness the absolute state-of-the-art in equipment needed to advance this area. The University of Utah was one of the original four nodes of ARPANET, the world's first packet-switched network and embryo of the current worldwide Internet. In late 1969, the U's computer graphics department was linked into the node at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California to complete the initial four-node network. This computer science division at Utah became its own department in 1973.
ARPANET Efforts in networking and storage at the University of Utah were spurred by Evans' role in establishing a new computer science division in 1965. Bolstered by a large contract from ARPA, each of the four original nodes interfaced with different computers to explore interoperability issues: a PDP-10 (University of Utah), an SDS Sigma 7 (University of California, Los Angeles), an SDS 940 (Stanford Research Institute) and an IBM 360 (University of California, Santa Barbara). Evans and graduate student Steve Carr came from Berkeley to lead early efforts in ARPANET research at University of Utah. Carr participated in the first Network Working Group meeting in 1968, chaired by Elmer Shapiro from SRI, and also attended by Steve Crocker, Jeff Rulifson, and Ron Stoughton. With UCLA researchers, Carr designed the initial Host-to-Host Communication Protocol for the Arpanet(1970). Taylor was credited with initiating the ARPANET project as director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1966-1969). The architecture of the ARPANET and the use of a separate Interface Message Processor (IMP) was hatched in 1967 by Wesley A. Clark of Washington University while in a rental car with Taylor and Evans. Taylor worked with Evans at University of Utah in 1970, before heading to California to launch legendary computer science laboratory Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which later employed several Utah graduates, including Alan Kay, John Warnock, Martin Newell, Patrick Baudelaire, and Frank Crow. Taylor and Larry Roberts prepared and signed the networking program plan for ARPA funding in 1968. An RFP for procurement of 4 IMPs was released after the program plan was approved by the Director of ARPA. Larry Roberts and Barry Wessler (and other contractors) reviewed the proposals and selected BBN Technologies as the winner. Barry Wessler remained at ARPA managing the IMP implementation and first installations at UCLA, SRI, UCSB and Utah. In 1970 Barry Wessler left ARPA and became a Utah graduate student under Evans until he received his Ph.D. in 1973.
Computer Graphics at Utah During the era of Evans and Sutherland, graduates of the Utah program made seminal contributions to rendering, shading, animation, visualization and virtual reality (notably the work of John Warnock in 1969, Henri Gouraud in 1971, Donald Vickers in 1972, Phong in 1973, Ed Catmull and Fred Parke in 1974, Henry Fuchs and Martin Newell in 1975, Frank Crow in 1976, Jim Blinn in 1978, Jim Kajiya in 1979, and many others). Additional graphics faculty hired during this time included computer artist Ron Resch (1970-1979) and Rich Riesenfeld, an expert in computer-aided geometric design (1972–present).
Early Graphics and Visualization Images In 1968, the equipment needed to produce an image representation was significant: a mainframe Univac performed the computations to produce the image, it sent its result to a PDP-8, which through analog output lines sent the image to a Tektronix oscilloscope to draw lines. A camera then recorded the image, without the image ever being displayed on a screen. Color images required several photos, each with a different colored filter. John Warnock, who received his Ph.D. in 1969, developed the first scientific visualizations using this approach. After Utah, Warnock moved to Evans and Sutherland, Xerox PARC, and then co-founded Adobe in 1982.
Utah Teapot
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