3D model looking south down Asheville’s Haywood Street with the Basilica of St. Lawrence (green domed roof) in the foreground.
As the city of Asheville considers how to redevelop sites in its busy and historic downtown, researchers at RENCI at UNC Asheville are assisting them with a tool that models design alternatives in an interactive, three-dimensional environment.
No store-bought tomatoes can compare with sweet, juicy, still-warm-from-the-sun heirloom varieties found at midsummer farmers’ markets.
Foodie pleasures aside, can consuming locally grown fruits and vegetables and locally raised meat lead to better health and help to combat obesity? Does buying food grown neaby help the local economy by keeping family farms viable as North Carolina transitions away tobacco farming? Does ‘buy local’ equate with ‘go green’ because fewer fossil fuels and pesticides are needed to move food from the fields to the dinner table?
Nothing communicates the effects of a natural disaster quite like personal stories: the recounting of an 80-year-old man and his dog who survived Hurricane Hazel by hiding in a freezer; the image of a lone sailor perched atop the wreckage of his ship in the aftermath of the San Ciriaco Hurricane (1899).
Over the past three years, RENCI has evolved into a statewide organization that spans six North Carolina campuses and affiliated institutes and 27 facilities in seven regions across the state.
Registration is now open for the Fifth International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering (CWE2010) to be held at the Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill May 23-27.
Scientists, academics, technologists, architects and engineers from around the world are encouraged to register by March 1 to take advantage of the early bird discount. Students pay an even smaller registration fee and the National Science Foundation will reimburse some expenses for students attending U.S. institutions. For registration details and an online registration form, see http://www.cwe2010.org/registration.html
Participants in CHAT (Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology), a digital arts and humanities festival Feb. 16-20, will take part in interactive projects that explore the impact of technology on our lives.
Performances featuring technology also will be part of CHAT, hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coordinated by its Institute for the Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.
CHAPEL HILL, NC, January 8, 2010—New participants in Carolina Launch Pad will move into office space within the next few weeks as the pre-commercial incubator located at RENCI begins its second year.
CHAPEL HILL, NC–The computer simulations created by Dinesh Manocha, Ming Lin and their graduate students in the UNC Chapel Hill computer science department display data with realism and creativity.
But until recently, their interfaces to the simulations—mouse, Joybox game controller and haptic feedback—were nothing out of the ordinary. That changed when Manocha, Matthew Mason Distinguished Professor of computer science, and Lin, Beverly Long Distinguished Professor of computer science discovered RENCI’s multi-touch visualization table.
Asheville, N.C. – Ever wanted to predict the future? Researchers at UNC Asheville and UNC Charlotte, as part of an ongoing Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) project, are learning how to do just that. Using historical satellite imagery, development trends, population data and population projections, they’ve been able to design an Urban Growth Model that can generate a visual representation of what our landscape may look like in the near future.
Stan Ahalt, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), has been elected to a second term as chair of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC).
