Top10-2022

Electronic musician, flutist and researcher Grace Leslie believes that music touches something deep in the human brain—a hardwired need, perhaps, to sit around a fire or in a concert arena and feel connected to the people around us. Humans have been making music for longer than we’ve lived in cities and grown crops. “In most cultures, it’s used to draw people together,” says Leslie.

Robots help build cars, fly planes, fight wars and provide healthcare; they play a role in countless industries, but for the most part, they don't work in chemistry labs. A team of CU Boulder scientists plans to change that.

The ATLAS Institute is delighted to welcome Anthony Pinter to the CU Boulder faculty this fall as a teaching assistant professor. He teaches courses on web development, computational thinking and programming, focusing on how data represents us, our lives and the worlds around us. His research focuses on understanding the...

Graduating in May 2022 with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, these graduate and undergraduate students listed are 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.

First students built the instrumentation. Then they attached it to a high-altitude weather balloon that took it to an altitude of 101,000 feet. Thanks to the geolocation technology they had incorporated, they were then able to locate the instrumentation 120 miles away in Eastern Colorado.

After rebounding from a major flood with vibrant new leadership and a new toolbox of performance technologies, the ATLAS Institute’s B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance now offers more varied and interesting opportunities to artists, engineers, creative technologists and performers than ever before.

For the second year running, Creative Technology and Design students won first place at the largest university hackathon in the Rocky Mountain region, HackCU, held this year March 5-6 on the CU Boulder campus. Another student, whose two majors include CTD and computer science, took second place this year as the sole member of his team.

A group of six artists and technologists connected to the ATLAS community contributed to BLDG 61’s Maker Made 2022, which runs through March 28 at the Boulder Public Library. Zack Weaver, who played a key role in establishing the ATLAS BTU Lab and the show’s curator, says the inspiration for Maker Made goes back to his days at Carnegie Mellon with ATLAS Director Mark Gross.

Normally virtual surfaces cannot be felt because they aren't there. But at Reality Labs Research at Meta, (previously known as Facebook), ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu is researching soft, wearable devices–such as wristbands, rings or gloves –that could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.

T9Hacks kicks off this year at an in-person event on February 18 at 4:30 p.m. at the ATLAS Institute. The seventh-annual hackathon promotes interest in creative technologies, coding, design and making among college women, nonbinary individuals and other groups that are underrepresented in technical fields.