Specific Recommendations

• UMBC should continue to support an ITT lab available for faculty use in the Engineering/Computer Science building. This lab should continue to evolve, and grow, in accordance with actual use by faculty.

• Because visualization technology advances so rapidly, there should be at least one person on the ACS staff with responsibility for maintaining expertise on current trends in hardware and software, evaluating available tools, supporting a set of standard software tools, and providing advice to faculty on the best strategy for accomplishing a particular task. Such tools as animation of graphics images and Virtual Reality as a means of exploring complex data sets probably will become commonplace within the next few years. This trend also implies a need for greatly increased availability of low-cost data storage.

• ACS needs to set clear policies for the use of their hardcopy facilities, and advertise their capabilities.