Recent News
Spring 2021 ATLAS Student Awards
Graduating in May 2021with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, these graduate and undergraduate students are being recognized for exceptional accomplishments, having demonstrated initiative in their academic and extracurricular activities, completing outstanding research or creative projects, or contributing significantly to the ATLAS community.
Spring 2021 Capstone Projects
CTD Capstone (previously TAM Capstone) is a rigorous, two-semester course sequence required for all Creative Technology & Design majors. Normally taken during the senior year, it involves the completion of a culminating project that goes through multiple rounds of faculty review and iteration. Students develop projects of their own choosing. Typically, students share their work during the spring ATLAS Expo and during class presentations. This year, 27 projects were shared virtually during a marathon 7.5-hour Zoom session attended by families, friends and guest reviewers from around the country. This small collection of project presentations gives a sense of the kind of work students complete in the CTD program.
Kailey Shara wins NVC 14 "Audience Choice Award" for Chembotix
Kailey Shara, ATLAS PhD student and a member of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, won the NVC 14 Audience Choice Award, adding $1,000 to the $11,000 she has raised for her startup, Chembotix, over the last month.
NSF CAREER award supports Danielle Szafir’s data-visualization research
The National Science Foundation has awarded Danielle Szafir a CAREER award to develop tools that rapidly gauge the efficacy of different types of data visualizations.
CTD undergrads win HackCU
CTD undergraduates Mason Moran and Colin Soguero, along with Colin's brother, Luke, a computer science major, won HackCU for their project, ChessLens, an augmented reality application that helps chess players improve their games.
T9Hacks attracts more than 70 percent female participants
More than 70 people attended ATLAS Institute's sixth annual T9Hacks on March 19-21, and more than 70 percent of them identified as female, meeting the organizers' goal of bringing in populations underrepresented in hackathons.
Distinguished Speaker Maddy Maxey on e-textiles
If clothes and textiles are to be digitally enhanced, we have to take the "hard" out of hardware, designing circuitry and components that are indistinguishable from the fabric in which they are embedded. Maddy Maxey is nationally respected for her work in this field. Don't miss her talk: Wednesday, March 24, 5 p.m.
Lighting marks anniversary of Colorado's first known case of COVID-19
To honor and remember the lives lost in the past year, CU Boulder joined the state of Colorado remembrance March 5 with a magenta-colored light display from the tower of the Roser ATLAS building.
ATLAS Distinguished Speaker: Forest Young
How can designers and creative technologists effectively bridge technical and cultural divides in the world? Join the ATLAS community as we welcome Forest Young, global chief creative director of Wolff Olin, to discover answers to this question. Young will also discuss creative opportunities and social impact with user experience, typography, branding and interactive design.
Black, queer and an engineer: Meet LeeLee James, BTU Lab student assistant
LeeLee James, BTU's student assistant, is also the "Twirling Tech Goddess" on YouTube. Her show encourages radical diversity and inclusion by making learning tech more fun, accessible and relatable to people underrepresented in STEM.
Wayne Seltzer, MIT alumnus and ATLAS technologist-in-residence, shares his passion for making
Wayne Seltzer, ATLAS Institute's technologist-in-residence, was featured as one of four MIT alumni who are ‘making’ their mark with a love for building and tinkering. As a maker mentor, Seltzer has worked with many students and the BTU community. One of his most recent projects include a repurposed 1970s jukebox that plays digital recordings of performances by CU Boulder music students.
AR Drum Circle research envisions enjoyable remote jamming experiences despite latency
Long before the pandemic sent people scrambling into isolation, musicians have longed to jam virtually with others across the globe. But online jamming isn’t feasible because of latency, the tiny delay that occurs when data travels from one point to the next. ATLAS researchers and Ericsson Research project collaborators are exploring ways in which remote drumming experiences can be made more enjoyable despite the latency, including drumming with avatars.
Seeding change: MS students' paper on cycles of poverty in rural India accepted by international conference
When three first-year ATLAS students in the Social Impact track of the Creative Technology and Design master’s program learned of the staggering suicide rate of male farmers in rural India and the suffering that ensues for their surviving family members, they wanted to explore effective interventions.
COVID-19 creates new learning opportunities for ATLAS students
The pandemic has created immense challenges for students and instructors. At the same time, the switch to all-online teaching also created some unforeseen opportunities. This fall, the faculty roster for ATLAS included New York City-based creative technologist, David Tracy; extended reality developer David Lobser, also based in New York City; Josh Knowles, a software engineer and interactive artist living in Austin, Texas; and Jeff Branson, who works on an independent project for NASA and teaches from his Middlebury, Vermont home.
Researchers scale up tiny actuator inspired by muscle
ATLAS Assistant Professor Carson Bruns and Professor Franck Vernerey received $477,000 from the National Science Foundation to begin research on a new kind of biocompatible actuator that contracts and relaxes in only one dimension, like muscles.
