Executive Summary of Results

This project utilizes various devices to help a student learn, practice, and develop multimedia technologies. Students record and process videos, maps, route panoramas, panoramic views, digital images, and visually index the space on the internet for virtual navigation and information retrieval. The resulting contents can be used in remote learning when a space must be explored. The project provides our graduate and senior undergraduate students with an opportunity to explore innovative technologies. Three undergraduate courses have been developed. A website has been created by students to visualize IUPUI campus. Further, the novel techniques have been published in international conferences

Need for the Project

From a few years ago, the Computer Science Department, IUPUI started several new courses such as multimedia system programming, computer vision and image processing, and exploration of applied computing. These courses require collecting visual information and integrating them with other data modalities. The fast development of multimedia, Internet, and data management demands hands-on experiences of our students. Besides reading a textbook and understand underlying principles, students should be able to work on real problems and build a prototype of information system.

This project targets training students to design their approaches, use various imaging devices, practice programming, process data, and generate on-line information systems from the collected data. Students have their individual projects to explore and partial data to process under a general theme, i.e., indexing visual information in a space.

Use of Technology

More than using existing software or materials to visualize the contents of a specific discipline, our students participated in the development of new scheme and technology. By using the digital media devices and computing environment supported by this project, students captured digital media, play them, store data in databases, and display them on the Internet.

We looked into intrinsic nature of visual data and created new types of visual representation to improve space indexing. The space can be as large as a city, campus, facility, museum, lab, shop, historical site, or as small as a machine, human body, and storage space. In particular, students are involved in modeling our IUPUI campus with image media. They were asked to use video cameras, digital cameras, and vehicle borne videos to collect visual data pervasively in the campus. By using the software and high-end graphics computers, they generated panoramic views, route panoramas, scene tunnels, and graphics models from the captured data. They created a website to visualize and index the campus for virtual navigation and guidance.

Instructional Design Plan

Describe how the use of technology used supported your teaching approach:

• What student learning outcomes were expected?
• How did your teaching plan encourage active learning, provide feedback, address respective learning styles, and build collaboration?
• What resources were used? (campus technology support services, etc.)
• Would your project be easily understood and executed by other faculty?

Implementing the multimedia technologies in the courses changes the traditional learning style that students read a textbook, do homework and take examines. The provided real devices and computing environment allow students to create digital media themselves using the knowledge learned in the textbook. Students are expected to actively participate in the design, implementation, testing, and problem solving of the web projects.

In parallel with the lectures, students are assigned with a big project to index and visualize our campus with multimedia. Every student accomplishes a functional module in the system, and handles a part of data using common software. Therefore, students not only learn knowledge but also solve specific problems individually. To build a real system on the Internet, students also collaborate with each other in designing the data format, doing experiment, integrating individual data, and debugging the entire system. They have demonstrated many creative ideas in applying their learned techniques. The grades are assigned based on students’ understanding of the material through test, achievement and creativity in the projects. Students are more responsible in dealing with their coursework than other classes.

Students used lab facility such as PC lab in the School of Science (with Open GL and Java, C++), SL116 Lab in the School of Science (PC with Java development software and high-end graphic cards), Oncourse site for submitting acquired visual data, Department computer server for programming and data transition. Resources purchased with this fund are Sony digital video cameras, Canon digital cameras, GPS sensor and software, Photoshop, Cannon photo stitching software, etc. The multimedia devices and environment can be shared with other faculties. The teaching style can also be adopted in other classes for senior undergraduate students.

Potential to Impact Student Learning

Clearly define how your project improved student learning - include specific examples of how your project:

• Fostered depth of learning
• Supported efforts to improve retention
• Fostered the learning of large numbers of students
• Has broader applications that will affect learning K-12 or community environments?

Through the practices, students worked with real data and got immediate reward in the image displaying and interaction. They were willing to try again to improve the results and challenge new things. Through the process, students realized that working on computer project is a comprehensive process including design, implementation, experiment, testing, problem solving, and creation. It enhanced their understanding of the material in the textbook.

Digital city is an application of Information Technology that combines various information into cyber space for social, commercial and government activities. It uses database, digital media, and Internet to enhance the traditional areas of learning including geography, geology, history, archaeology, heritage preservation, architecture, urban planning, commerce, business, library and art. It can also establish a convenient cyber environment on the Internet for living, working, traveling, and entertainment. We can retrieve text, graph, image, video, and map in the distributed websites. The ability of our students to create such a system will benefit other disciplines for distance learning, and virtual space exploration.

More than taking pictures, our key idea is to map scenes to routes and spots, in order to establish a complete scene registration and archive of the campus with a small amount of data. We developed a new technique called route panorama, in addition to the existing panoramic viewing technique. It is very effective in the transmission and visualization of remote sites and areas. Our students have learned data transmission, user interface construction, and multimedia data indexing. They took 650 digital pictures in the campus, hours of video in the IUPUI festival and events, and scanned 34 streets on both sides in the campus. These data are input to the computer for segmentation, processing, indexing, and are integrated in JAVA based website.

By changing the learning style, students with strong motivation enjoyed the creative process. Attendance was also improved. On the other hand, things are not going smoothly as a well-set exercise when students work on a real project for the first time. In order to solve the problem, they have to put their constant effort without giving up halfway, and try every possible approach to make the system run. Our project provides an opportunity for students to tackle real problems.

The developed techniques and software in this project also impact to many disciplines for students learning. For example, a completely registered excavation site or ancient town in a website will convey richer information than text does to history and archaeology students. Architecture and urban planning students can easily compare scenes recorded in the digital media with city blue prints in their designing or planning process. Geography students can link image database to their maps in GIS (geographic information system) to do information retrieval. Electronics engineering students will have a chance to build new PDA systems that combine GPS and visual data for navigation. With captured visual data and software, students in the school of informatics will be able to built virtual malls, digital museums, entertainment parks, and create virtual art spaces on the Internet for their training.

Assessment Plan

Briefly explain the effectiveness of your assessment plan:

• What measure of assessment was used?
• How did your approach obtain measures of performance?
• Did you feel your measurement was accurate and effective?

Although the measurement of effectiveness of the project does not appear in numerical digits, the qualitative improvements of the active learning are obvious. One measure of the assessment is the students’ achievements. This project proved that students have grasped the material completely and developed skills to deal with real applications. In the past two years, students constructed a complete IUPUI visual indexing system on the Internet. Although their collected data are not perfect and have quality diversity, the system is significant and contains many novel ideas. The established website animating traversing scenes in JAVA is at
http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/IUPUI/ as shown in next figure.

More than 30 students have participated in this project. Some talent students even co-authored papers published later in top scientific journals. They further participated with demonstrations in campus open house and regional conferences. The technical details of the project are summarized in
http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/digitalcity.html

Another measure of assessment comes from the evaluation received in students job searching. With the experiences in learning and development of multimedia information system, many students are welcomed by companies and were easy to find their jobs. Many students will be able to pick up a real application easily after their graduation. I have been as references of many students who were active in their learning and creative works.

The students developed software can be used in other areas such as museum, library, medical science, history, geography that contains visible information in spaces.

Plan for Colleague Development

Describe your role and activities as a mentor:

• What mentoring activities were implemented to assist colleagues?
• How did you help to develop colleague's instructional technology skills?
• How do you think your contributions to the Knowledge Base will help colleagues planning similar projects?
• Is your project approach potentially applicable to other contexts or disciplines?
• What tips would you offer?

I have talked to colleagues in the department to share the details of the course management such as how to use devices, how to set subprojects, how to assign cooperative work, and what students will gain in such environment, etc. The multimedia devices and computing environment shared in other related courses are digital cameras, video cameras, panoramic devices, image and video input devices, mass storage devices, and VR display. This also helps colleagues to apply technologies in other senior undergraduate courses. Now, the computer science department has several courses that involve major projects and experiments. This helps students gain hands-on experiences and get ready to start up their own applications. I have also demonstrated the idea and website to the Indiana Museum of Art, School of Informatics, and Indiana I-light symposium.

The developed software by our student group can be provided to various schools in IUPUI, particularly to students in the media department of the School of Informatics. Using the software package and the manual, the visual indexing system with the same structure can be created from different data set.

Final Comments on Project Results

• Do you think you met the goals of your project?
• What, if anything,would you do differently?
• Did you have any unexpected outcomes? (positive or negative)
• Would you recommend this teaching approach to colleagues?
• What other comments or suggestions would you offer to complete this report?

I believe we have achieved our goal. With the sufficient devices, computing environment and real data, students have got much deep understanding on the contents as compared with the traditional learning style purely based on textbook reading. The outcomes from the students really encouraged me to develop interesting and fruitful classes.

A negative lessen learned through the project is as follow. For students who want to spend less time to receive a grade due to their personal reasons (e.g., working or having heavy course load), our learning approach increases extra burden for them. Particularly, a small obstacle in the process may prevent their success in the entire project, and they do not have enough time to ask small questions and get helps from instructors or classmates.

Finally, we want to thank SBC Ameritech for providing this great support to our course development and computing environment.

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Last updated: 18 May, 2007

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