On February 28th Rite Aid Corporation hosted a reception in Annapolis for Maryland State Legislators to formally announce their gift of $100,000 to endow scholarships for UMBC Computer Science students. Rite Aid has recently committed to moving their corporate operations center to Baltimore County and is interested in building a strong partnership with UMBC, especially in the information technologies.

Five Computer Science students, along with CSEE Professors Joel Morris and Tim Finin, attended the reception to demonstrate some of the work they and fellow UMBC students and faculty are doing. The students were Priya Ramakrishnan (Sophomore), Eric Schmitt (Senior), Charles Shelton (Sophomore), Justin Sun (Senior) and Amen Zwa (Graduate).

The students gave the legislators and Rite Aid executives demonstrations of information retrieval on the World-wide Web, showed information systems they developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and demonstrated a variety of graphical visualization techniques on an SGI workstation. The legislators found particularly intriguing a system developed by CSEE Professor David Ebert which used special "3D goggles" to present realistic three-dimensional visualizations of scientific data.