UC SANTA CRUZ RECEIVES $450,000 DONATION OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS SOFTWARE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The Alias (America) Corporation of Los Angeles has donated ten packages of software for state-of-the-art computer graphics to the University of California, Santa Cruz, for use in teaching and research. The donation is valued at $450,000.

The software, named Alias PowerAnimator, will be used in five courses in computer graphics at UCSC. They range from Computer Arts and Graphics, an undergraduate course taken by many students majoring in art, to graduate offerings such as Computer Graphics and Computer Animation.

"Students who have no prior experience with computers can start playing with this software right away," says assistant professor of computer and information sciences Suresh Lodha, who coordinated the donation. "But it also has sophisticated applications for computer-science majors and graduate students."

Lodha and two other graphics specialists--associate professor Jane Wilhelms and assistant professor Alex Pang--plan to use the software in their research as well. Alias PowerAnimator is ideal for making three-dimensional images of complex data, says Lodha, and for creating animated sequences so that researchers may see how the data change with time.

For example, Pang and other UCSC scientists are part of a five- year project to develop new ways of rapidly handling information on weather, ocean conditions, and other aspects of the Monterey Bay environment. The Alias software should help them create powerful images from these data that researchers can easily interpret. Other applications include medical imaging, seismology, and fluid dynamics--such as visualizing the flow of air around an airplane wing.

The gift consists of ten licenses to operate ten packages of Alias PowerAnimator software. Each package, valued at $45,000, includes the base software, an Alias Advanced Animation software option, and an Alias PowerModeling software option.

The software runs on Silicon Graphics workstations at UCSC's Baskin Center for Computer Engineering and Information Sciences.

Editor's note: You may reach Suresh Lodha at (408) 459-3773 or lodha@cse.ucsc.edu.

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