Student Symposium On Interval Computations (SONIC'95)

October 21-22, 1995, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, Texas

To promote computational science education and research at minority institutions in the South and Central United States, the Center for Research on Parallel Computation at Rice University and SC COSMIC (South and Central Computational Science in Minority Institutions Consortium) jointly organized the First SC COSMIC Student Conference on Computational Science. The Student Conference was held on October 21-22, 1995, at the University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, Texas. As part of this conference, a special Symposium ON Interval Computations (SONIC'95) was organized.

This conference was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (grant No. CDA 9522903).

SONIC'95 started with a keynote address by R. Baker Kearfott titled "Introduction to Interval Methods and Software - Why do we use Interval Methods and How do they Work?". Then, the following students presented their talks:

Manoranjan Baral, "Interval-Based Internet Reservation Techniques In Which a Message with a Deadline is Either not Accepted or Delivered by the Deadline".

Leticia S. Chee, "Computing the Value of a Boolean Expression with Interval Inputs is NP-Hard".

German Altgelt, "A Language for Gigabyte Data Processing, and its Use at Sunspot Observatory".

Angelina Cardenas, "A Study on Interval Lagrange Interpolation".

Frank Fernandez, "Internet-Accessed Data Transforms an Approximate Computer Simulation of a Spacecraft into a Verified 3D Model".

Several interval-related talks were also presented at the conference itself.

Extended abstracts of the talks presented at SONIC and at the conference are available at the COSMIC Web site. For hardcopies of the abstracts, please contact Dr. Chenyi Hu, chairman of the Organizing Committee; his email is chu@uh.edu, his mailing address is:

Chenyi Hu
Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences
University of Houston-Downtown
Houston, TX 77002, USA.

Houston is often called the space capital of the world. Every Houstonian knows that after the first men landed on the Moon, their first word was "Houston". No wonder that at the banquet, the main speaker was from NASA: Professor Bowen Loftin, the main NASA specialist on what is called virtual reality, gave a very interesting talk on "Virtual Environments: A New Tool for Training, Education, and Data Visualization", in which he described how virtual reality helps in training astronauts. These training tools do not (yet) use interval techniques, because their current goal is feasibility, not guaranteed results, but since interval computations are actively used in graphics, they may be incorporated at a later stage.

The conference was very well organized. Students from different institutions got to know each other. Students who arrived the day earlier were treated to a tour of Rice University and CRPC facilities. A decision was made to organize such events regularly. The next student conference is scheduled to be held in El Paso in October 1996.

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