One of the world’s top product designers, the inventor of Rubik’s cube, provides a visionary framework for understanding and approaching design and development for IT systems and products.
The aim of this course is to enhance students’ creativity and problem-solving skills in 3D, and give them a more holistic visual approach to product and system design and development. The creation of new software often requires the collaborative effort of software developers and graphic designers. The more they understand each other the more control the creative team has over their project. Consequently, fostering understanding between these two approaches has a crucial bearing on the overall quality of the software products that result. In order to understand how designers work, IT experts and students should gain theoretical insight into design and also acquire particular graphic skills. Surprising as it may seem in today‘s computerized world, the traditional tools of graphic design (such as pencil and paper) are still widely used in the creative phase. This is essentially because even the most sophisticated graphic software imposes built-in limitations on the expression of new ideas. In practice, most ideas emerge by various methods and by experimenting with different manual tools. A computer is mainly used for the development and refined completion of the ‘product‘. The course includes
Ernő Rubik (born 1944) graduated from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics as an architectural engineer and began postgraduate studies in sculpture and interior architecture. From 1971 to 1975 he worked as an architect and later became a professor at the Budapest College of Applied Arts. He has lived his whole life in Hungary.
He created the Rubik's Cube, a three-dimensional puzzle that became a worldwide sensation in the early 1980s. He founded Rubik Studio, where he designed furniture and games. In 1987 he became full professor at the College of Applied Arts and was appointed president of the Hungarian Engineering Academy. He created the International Rubik Foundation to support talented young engineers and industrial designers.
Becoming an entrepreneur is not for everyone. At the same time, it is important for society as a whole that those students with the right personal characteristics and ambitions for entrepreneurship seriously consider such a career. The objective of this course is to help AIT students prepare for this decision by exposing them to complex case studies of IT Entrepreneurship. Just as importantly, the course equips students with the basic analytical tools to understand and reconstruct entrepreneurial approaches and to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating, launching, financing and managing new technology companies.
Proposed literature:
Moore, Geoffrey: Crossing the Chasm, Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, Harper Business, 2002;
Bojár, Gabor: The Graphisoft Story, Hungarian Perestroika from an Entrepreneur’s Perspective, Translated from Graphi-sztori, HVG, 2005.
Gábor Bojár (born 1949) is one of the very few entrepreneurs of Central-Eastern Europe to have succeeded in global business during the era of state-socialism. He founded Graphisoft, a software development firm, which became one of the top three international software vendors in its field within ten years. Claiming the most prestigious awards of the trade, Graphisoft's leading product, ArchiCAD® is used by hundreds of thousands of architects around the world. Graphisoft was listed on the Frankfurt and the Budapest stock exchange and has been purchased by Nemetscheck Gmbh in 2007. Mr. Bojár remains Chairman of Graphisoft's Board of Directors.
Mr. Bojár is also the founder of Graphisoft Park, a real-estate development that turned an industrial site on the bank of the River Danube into a state-of-the art science park. Mr. Bojár was also an adjunct faculty member of Central European University Business School, lectures internationally, and has published a book exploring the "Graphisoft story" with an analytic perspective.
Mr. Bojár has received numerous national and international awards for scientific and business excellence. He has been named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten most successful entrepreneurs in Central Europe and by Ernst and Young as Entrepreneur of the Year in Hungary. He has also spoken at several prestigious events including the Davos World Economic Forum.
Mr. Bojar obtained his M.S. in physics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
This course addresses user satisfaction in the software industry by focusing developers’ awareness and skills towards making software more “usable”. Software industry analysts estimate that about 90% of the software written, tested, and delivered according to pre-agreed specifications of prospective users is simply not used. This overwhelming inefficiency of the software industry is due to a lack of shared general understanding between software experts and domain experts. They speak different “languages,” and, more importantly, they have different intellectual satisfaction criteria. In fact, experts in some disciplines are intellectually satisfied when they merely succeed in communicating primarily to other experts within their own discipline. In contrast, this course uses practical examples to focus attention on a few key methods for improving software industry efficiency by increasing practical understanding of, and therefore validating the needs and perceptions of, end-users. Emphasis is not on product improvement but rather on understanding the “secrets to success” of usable software design.
Proposed textbook:
Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, New Riders, 2006.
Gyuri Juhász (born 1962) is a senior consultant on usability and software ergonomics. Graduating from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 1986 as an architect, Juhász joined Graphisoft in 1987. As a user interface designer, Juhász participated in the development of Graphisoft's leading product, ArchiCAD, a 3D architectural design and building simulation software. Subsequently, he established a special software design team introducing usability engineering methods to the development process of Graphisoft. In recent years, he has consulted for various organizations in the field of online banking, telecom and remote access and helped them deliver user-friendly systems.
Computer vision is a research area where numerical and statistical methods are used to extract various information from images. Applications include medical imaging, surveillance, vehicle navigation and – the focus of this course – film post-production. Not only will students learn theoretical foundations through focused examples, but also understand how these concepts are put to use in the hands of filmmakers.
During the summer program, students will be introduced to basic 2D/3D computer vision concepts, such as filtering, feature detection and segmentation, and will elaborate on the high level algorithm of 3D camera tracking (also known as structure from motion). To put the theory in context and learn how to apply it, students will become familiar with the standard film post-production pipeline and the role of computer vision-based tools. The curriculum includes a studio visit and remote session at the post-production facility of Colorfront.
Proposed literature:
Richard Szeliski: Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/szeliski/Book/
Gergely Vass (born 1978) is a researcher and developer at Colorfront Ltd., one of Europe's leading digital film post production facilities.
He got involved with 3D computer graphics at the age of 14 and soon became a 3D animator and instructor. As the technical director at the post production studio of the Hungarian Film Laboratories, he worked on the visual effects of several feature films and commercials. Upon receiving his M.Sc. at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics of Budapest University of Technology and Economics, his interest shifted towards research and development in image processing and computer vision. As a member of Colorfront Ltd from 2000, he got involved with motion tracking techniques. Following the acquisition of Colorfont technologies by the leading 3D software company Autodesk, Vass joined Autodesk’s Image Science Team in Montreal, Canada. He developed various tools and algorithms for the world-renowned high-end visual effects product line of Autodesk, including camera tracking, shape tracking, image warping and video stabilizing.
Vass is a regular contributor at Computer Graphics World magazine.
