==course no. 1 ===

Introduction to Scientific Visualization Tools and Techniques

course level: beginning / full
day offered: Monday

Chair(s): Dr. Chuck Hansen - Los Alamos National Lab.

==Lecturer(s)=== 
Tom Elvins
San Diego Supercomputing Center

Larry Gelberg
AVS, Inc.

Chuck Hansen
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mike Krogh
National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Gregory Nielson
Arizona State University

Lloyd Treinish
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

==Course Description===
This course provides an introductory overview to the field of scientific 
visualization.  Rather than describe whiz-bang visualization systems which 
might not be available to the attendees; the course will be tailored toward 
useful information by approaching the subject from a data domain point of 
view.  The course will look at color, data models and different classes of 
data; 2D fields, 3D fields, fields on unstructured grids, multivariate 
data sets, thereby providing the fundamental concepts followed by specific 
tools and techniques for visualizing those data domains.  Actual tools and 
techniques for visualizing a variety of scientific data sets will not only be 
presented but also provided as part of the course notes.  This course will 
provide exposure to tools and techniques across a wide variety of platforms 
and software packages.

==Who Should Attend=== 
The intended student is anyone starting to do visualization, anyone assigned 
to research methods of visualization, or anyone interested in learning more 
data aspects of the visualization process.  It will be useful to those who are 
looking for solutions to their particular visualization problems but do not 
have sufficient knowledge of the field to guide them.  Scientists, computer 
graphics programmers, managers and even software salespersons will all 
benefit from this course.

===Recommended Background (Prerequisites)=== 
We anticipate that the typical attendee will have had little exposure to 
current scientific visualization tools and techniques.  Attendee should be 
familiar with scientific data sets and fundamental mathematics and some 
previous introduction to computer graphics would be quite useful.

==Course Objectives=== 
The objective to this course is to provide a working knowledge of the 
concepts, techniques and currently available tools for scientific visualization.  
The attendees can expect to gain not only an overall view of the field of 
scientific visualization but also specific methods for solving scientific 
visualization problems.  Attendees will walk away with a clear idea of what 
procedures are followed when creating images from scientific data.

==Chair Biography===
Chuck Hansen is a project leader for visualization in the Advanced 
Computing Laboratory (ACL) at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  He is 
responsible for the scientific visualization environment for the DOE high 
Performance Computing and Communication Center at the ACL.  He has 
extensive experience in the field of scientific visualization particularly as it 
applies to very large scale computational environments.

Dr. Hansen received his BS from Memphis State University in 1981.  He
received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah in 1987.  
He was a Bourse de Chateaubriand PostDoc Fellow at INRIA, Rocquencourt 
France, in 1987 and 1988.  He was a visiting faculty member at the 
University of Utah prior to joining the LANL technical staff.  In addition to 
this duties at LANL, he serves as an adjunct faculty member at the 
University of New Mexico and New Mexico Tech.  His research interests 
include scientific visualization, 3D shape representation and geometry, and
computer vision.  Dr. Hansen has organized and participated in short courses 
on computer graphics and scientific visualization.