RESEARCH General Education

INFORMATION SHARING
Innovative course to use technologies to study knowledge networks

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

11/1/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Talk about a trip!

Students in a new course next semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will go where few – if any – have ever gone before.

No, their trip has nothing to do with body-traveling à la Star Trek, but it does involve exploration of new space-age realms.

The course is "Visualizing and Navigating Knowledge Networks." Conceived of as "cutting-edge," the course will be team-taught by professors in the department of speech communication (Noshir Contractor), electrical and computer engineering (Narendra Ahuja) and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (Michael Twidale).

Contractor said the idea stemmed from "an interest in using cutting-edge virtual 3-D environments to develop novel ways of visualizing and navigating knowledge networks." Networks include the World Wide Web, where a Web page links to other pages; buddy lists in Instant Messaging systems; and scholarly publishing, where one research paper cites others.

Environments include the CAVE, which is a virtual reality theater; the CUBE, a virtual reality chamber; and "the head-mounted projected display – an augmented reality device," Ahuja said. These facilities all are available at Illinois.

"Illinois is one of only a handful of institutions in the world that has access to these technologies, and hence we are well-positioned to address these issues from a tech standpoint," Contractor said.

Furthermore, Illinois has, he said, "some of the leading scholars who are examining the theoretical and research issues surrounding knowledge networks from the computer science/engineering perspectives, the human-computer interface perspective, and the social network perspective."

According to Contractor, "This one-of-a-kind course attempts to provide undergraduate and graduate students with the relevant expertise across these three areas and the challenge to actually develop prototypes of what these 3-D environments will look like as part of the course."

Contractor said he believes the course, listed in the computer science, electrical and computer engineering, library and information science, and speech communication curricula, is "the first-ever course on our campus that has been co-listed by these four units."

Major topics will include representation, visualization, navigation and utilization of knowledge networks. Students will read about relevant models and approaches from network analysis, human computer interaction and computer graphics. The course Web site is www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/classes/SP03/396-8/.

Student design teams will work on projects involving specific networks and problems and study and evaluate existing visualization environments, including head-mounted displays, large 2-D (wall) displays and the 3-D CAVE. In addition, they will study the available computational tools and software and prototype new tools for visualization and knowledge navigation.