More than 100 volunteers and attendees participated in an OU Open House event comprised of a series of tours around campus, hosted by the Data Institute for Societal Challenges (DISC) on Oct. 20. The Open House was an optional tour held in conjunction with the IEEE Vis conference held Oct. 17-21 in Oklahoma City. The conference convened more than 1,300 in-person and virtual attendees from around the world – researchers and practitioners from universities, government and industry to exchange recent findings on the design and use of visualization tools and to discuss theory, methods and applications of visualization and visual analytics.
The OU Open House allowed participants to meet and interact with OU’s faculty, students and staff, learn more about DISC’s ongoing projects, and tour the National Weather Center and Bizzell Memorial Library. While at DISC, attendees learned about various ongoing projects through digital demonstrations and posters.
The visit to the National Weather Center began in the atrium space, home to the Weather Wall, Science on a Sphere and the Twister movie exhibit. Participants then had the opportunity to see mobile Doppler radars and mobile Mesonet trucks in the NWC vehicle bay. National Weather Center and College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences Outreach Coordinator Kaitlin Niles shared information on the origins of the building and the science behind the present vehicles.
During the visit to the Bizzell Memorial Library, History of Science Collections Curator Kerry Magruder, Ph.D., provided a custom tour of the premier research collection. Some of the treasures he shared with the groups were three of the rarest editions authored by Galileo, one of the rarest works by Kepler, and the first reports of observations with a microscope, among many others.
