PROPOSAL ABSTRACT submitted by NPAC at Syracuse University,
Vanguard Research Inc., John Hopkins Medical School and Maryland
University Computer Science Dept.
Section I. Administrative
(1) BAA number: BAA 97-09
(2) Technical topic areas: "Tools for Sharing Views
and
Prototyping and Evaluating Collaborative Applications"
(3) Proposal title: "Development and Evaluation of
Tools for Web Technology Based Collaboration and Visualization
in Command and Control, Health Care and Training"
(4) Technical point of contact:
Prof. Geoffrey C. Fox
Director Of the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center
Professor of Computer Science and Physics
111 College Place
Syracuse, New York 13244-4100, USA
Tel.: 315-443-2163, Fax: 315-443-1973
http://www.npac.syr.edu Email: gcf@npac.syr.edu
(5) Administrative point of contact:
Matthew E. Clark
Office of Sponsored Programs
113 Bowne Hall
Syracuse NY 13244-4100
Tel: 315-443-9356, Fax: 315-443-9361
Email: clarkme@syr.edu
We will establish the critical features and performance needed in future Web based collaborative environments by assessing prototypes in three significant application areas - Command and Control, Healthcare and Education. These will be implemented in terms of an existing leading edge Web based collaborative system TANGOsim built as part of a Rome Laboratory project CIV. CIV (Collaborative Interaction and Visualization) was co-funded by DARPA. The base capabilities of TANGOsim are one to two years ahead of competitive systems and are being used in a significant C2 application demonstration. TANGOsim already has two key novel features. Firstly it is linked to a Web hosted Oracle database where it can log all transactions of the collaborative sessions and which can be used in asynchronous collaboration as well as our assessment task. Secondly it has generalized the typical session manager of collaborative environments to a full function event driven simulator. This allows TANGOsim to support collaborative linkage of heterogeneous sessions with different views of the same base object. Further it allows one to use both virtual (scripted) and real collaborators which greatly enhances both the assessment process and training for all applications.
The project is led by NPAC at Syracuse University which designed and built TANGOsim with PI Geoffrey Fox; the C2 application is the responsibility of the Vanguard Research Inc.; Healthcare applications will be built by a team from John Hopkins Medical School led by Joel Saltz who has a joint appointment with the Computer Science department at Maryland which will be involved in the performance measurements, quality of service guarantees, and in the assessment tasks. The requested budget is $1100K per year for three years. Cost sharing includes use of education applications of TANGOsim being developed by NPAC to support distance education, which will be included in assessment task. Deliverables include enhancements to TANGOsim to support scalable large scale collaboration, multimedia annotation, support for users with varying degrees of
Internet connectivity and access to platforms with varying computational
capabilities, mobile users and immersive environments. Several
different applications in the three areas will be developed in
terms of TANGOsim and their use will be analyzed in terms of requirements
for performance and functionality of the various multi-use services
available in TANGOsim.
(7) Contractor's type of business: "Other Educational"
Section II. Detailed Proposal Information
A. Innovative claims of the proposed research
B and D. Deliverables and description of the results
F. Cost, schedule, and milestones
Budget: Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Task 1)Enhance and support $350K $250K $200K
TANGOsim and associated services
Task 2)C2 Applications $225K $225K $150K
Task 3)Health Care $150K $150K $100K
Task 4)Distance Education Application $0K $0K $0K
(cost share by Universities)
Task 5)Evaluation $100K $200K $325K
Task 6) Performance Measurements $150K $150K $150K
and Quality of Service Guarantees
Task 7)Integration, Administration $125K $125K $175K
and Demonstrations
Total $1100K $1100K $1100K
Task 1: Enhance and support TANGOsim and associated services
Year 1: Evaluate TANGOsim in terms of application requirements and other collaborative systems. Initial Enhancements (multimedia annotation, assessment tools)
Year 2: Continuing Enhancements (mobile users, scalable service)
Year 3: Continuing Enhancements (immersive environments)
Tasks 2-4)Applications
Year 1: Find requirements and generate initial design of applications in each of 3 areas. Develop first prototype implementations.
Year 2: Complete major applications to be used in assessment process
Year 3: Continue to improve and extend applications
Task 5: Evaluation and Performance Measurement
Year 1: Design evaluation and performance measurement process and initial TANGOsim support tools
Year 2: Initial evaluation of prototype applications - feed lessons into TANGOsim tools and evaluation process
Year 3: Complete analysis of final applications with evaluation
of lessons for collaborative systems
Task 6: Performance Measurements and Quality of Service Guarantees
Year 1: Begin incorporation of performance characterization
tools (computer and Internet) into TANGO. Develop and implement
TANGOsim QOS API to use input from performance tools to modify
resource use of applets.
Year 2: Continue incorporation of performance characterization
tools into TANGO. Use TANGOsim QOS API with performance tools
to demonstrate ability to design applets able to dynamically adjust
their use of resources.
Year 3: Demonstrate quality of service guarantees in context
of targeted applications
Task 7: Integration, Administration, and Demonstrations
Years 1-3: Semi-annual major demonstrations of selected
applications. Integrate applications in terms of common service
needs. Reporting and coordination of subcontractors.
G. Technical rationale; Technical approach and Implementation Plan
This proposal exploits the TANGOsim system which combines collaboration
and Discrete Event Simulation capability in an open modern Web
Technology framework. TANGOsim has in prototype form many of the
key capabilities called for in the first two years of the ICV
DARPA program. Thus we see it as attractive to focus on a program
of Prototyping and Evaluating applications which are built around
TANGOsim which is enhanced in appropriate ways to support the
application requirements and DARPA program goals. We recognize
that TANGOsim should be viewed as an immature rapid prototype
for surely Web technologies will continue to evolve rapidly and
will certainly be quite different and far more powerful two years
from now! We assume that other participants will pursue these
points and aim our proposal at supporting ICV by feeding back
early lessons from using the type of system envisioned by ICV
in three significant application areas. This will help ICV in
terms of performance and functionality tradeoffs and requirements
which should be relevant to most Intelligent Collaboration and
Visualization approaches. We have chosen three quite different
application areas as collaboration takes different forms in different
areas and one must understand similarities and differences so
that as much as possible one can design the collaborative environment
in terms of reusable but customizable services. We will describe
our proposed effort roughly in terms of the seven tasks - basic
TANGOsim and its enhancement, the three application areas, the
evaluation process, network performance and Quality of Service
issues and overall integration.
TANGO is a basic Web collaborative system built around a custom Java Server and using an elegant Netscape LiveConnect approach to integration of applications within the Client and to the Server. TANGO is quite portable as it involves installation of a single plug-in which is mainly written in Java with a small machine specific C layer. TANGO itself is set up as an applet so that it can be dynamically downloaded to a general machine - currently Windows 95/NT and UNIX are supported. TANGO has a well defined API which allows general client applications to send and receive messages and so link their behavior in different instances on different clients. TANGO supports a simple security mechanism, general dynamic master-slave relationship and scalable multimedia support built on Netscape's openDVE/LiveMedia standard with several different audio and video codecs. A key capability of TANGO is that it will support applications written in arbitrary languages including Java C and C++. This allowed us to build a reasonable performance 3D geographical information system (GIS) for the Rome CIV project by replacing an initial VRML version with a very much faster C++ (OpenInventor) system. This is collaboratized so that a 3D fly through on one machine is tracked on the other TANGO clients joining this session. TANGO has a relational database backend (currently Oracle but soon with JDBC, this can be a general system) which supports an archiving system for session replays. TANGOsim is based on the conceptually simple idea of replacing the session manager in TANGO by a general discrete event simulator. TANGO processes events represented as messages from the clients and generates the appropriate multicast to the collaborating members of session. TANGOsim has three essential additions: time is virtualized with in the TANGO limit, virtual time equaling real time; events can also be generated from a built in script ; and messages are all passed through filters which allow dynamic heterogeneous interactions between client applications. This enables a given session to support related but different views for each client which are optimized for the user's needs and the available network and compute resource available. TANGOsim is currently built for a C2 application designed by Vanguard who are participating in this proposal. We have built several relevant support applications - including for C2 specifically, a weather applet as well as 2D and 3D GIS with multiple overlays allowed. These are augmented by generic services including chatboard, collaborative Web search, collaborative Web browser and multimedia mail. All these applications are collaboratized and can be scripted for interpretation by the simulation engine.
We expect that both TANGOsim and other research and commercial
systems will evolve over the next few months and will carefully
evaluate TANGOsim both viewed as a basic Web collaboration system
and in terms of requirements of the application areas. We will
add multimedia annotation where we have limited experience in
education (the course CPS615 taught by Fox this fall semester
includes annotated audio clips recorded in real time). We will
also add initial tools to support the assessment process where
we build on HPCC performance measurement systems such as Illinois's
Pablo. Both of these enhancements will make use of the backend
database where we can expect a typical tracking of the evolving
Web standards with the Java Database Connection (JDBC) replacing
our current Oracle WoW system. This application and base technology
driven enhancement will continue but in the spirit of this proposal,
we will reduce the level of effort in base TANGOsim in out years
and focus more on applications and assessment. Enhancement areas
we expect to need include support for mobile users, scalable service
and immersive environments. The latter will build on our existing
3D GIS and track the several ongoing web experiments in this area
- especially those in VRML 2 arena. Currently TANGOsim has a single
central Java server and we can naturally exploit the Java Server
efforts such as Jigsaw and Jeeves to replace this by a distributed
set of collaborating servers. We will retain a sequential model
for the event driven simulator as parallel versions of this have
several very difficult issues.
We have identified a special task(6) on performance measurement/monitoring and associated quality of service. These issues will be essential in using TANGOsim for all application areas and need special attention which will be led by the Maryland group. They have developed special methods of monitoring network performance which separate latency and bandwidth and recognize their intrinsic variability and are based on a study of 45 Web hosts accessed from four distinct sites. We will study application level adaptivity using special TANGOsim QOS API's which are fed from the computer and network performance characterization tools which will developed from the Maryland research. Particularly interesting are the applications using images (2D and 3D GIS), audio and video where our applications are designed to be able to use general codecs. In ref. 6 of sec III, we show how the best wavelet compression level changes according to available client CPU and network bandwidth available. We will build into TANGO, the ability to aggressively cache information and also to migrate services (as in a digital server for instance) to improve performance.
The C2 application will extend our work from Rome Laboratory and
will focus on the mix of simulation and collaboration needed by
C2 developers who wish to rapid prototype and evaluate the capability
of the resultant system. Fox was a member of a recent DARPA sponsored
National Council Study of Computing and Communication for Crisis
Management and it would attractive to enhance our current application
in the civilian area as many C2 problems actually mix both military
and civilian authorities and there is a critical need for better
software tools to be used by FEMA and other state and local teams.
The Web technology approach of TANGOsim is very appropriate for
crisis management as it is inherently broadly deployable and has
flexible support spanning low end and high end devices.
In health care, we intend at least two distinct applications.
One will focus on a typical training scenario which will naturally
use collaboration and simulation capabilities of TANGOsim. This
involves experts, residents in training, observers and sets of
test cases such as pathology images. The experts discuss cases
and guide others with remarks aimed at clarifying the decision
making process. In the second example, we consider team health
care which will use involve both spontaneous collaboration and
the asynchronous case represented by later expert consultants.
We understand that the traditional view of Telemedicine as video
conferencing with exchange of medical data is limited and adhere
to Warner's view of it as "Interventional Informatics"
with a complex collaborative information rich environment typical
of C2. Annotation will be very important in this application as
it will allow initial participants such as the nurses and primary
care physician to summarize sessions for later use by the specialists.
Here we expect the TANGO backend database to be critical in allowing
a flexible hierarchical view of a multimedia session
We believe that collaboration systems such as TANGOsim will be
critical in distant education. Up to now we have successfully
used the Web in many educational projects including Syracuse's
use of the Internet to offer an International Certificate in Computational
Science to Harbin in Northern China. This used Web technology
(a replicated Web server) to disseminate information but just
electronic mail for collaboration. On the other hand, K-12 students
on our ATM network report collaboration (using simple non Web
SGI and Apple tools) as the most exciting opportunity. TANGO and
Habanero typify the opportunity to add Web based collaborative
component to the rather well understood Web dissemination technologies
in education. Naturally this collaboration involves teachers,
students and parents(observers) in both synchronous and asynchronous
modes. We currently intend experiments using TANGOsim at K-12,
Undergraduate and graduate (continuing education) levels. There
are clear needs for perhaps 20-100 fully interactive students
and many more observers. The whole future of Universities and
Schools could depend on the success or failures of experiments
such as these! Thus it will be very important to understand the
functionality and performance requirements for TANGOsim that will
lead to good learning environments. Note DoD has many schools
as well as major training needs for which these applications are
directly relevant. However no funding is called for in this proposal
except for the comparative assessment activity.
The assessment process itself will need new tools and a good visual
collaborative environment. We will log selected sessions fully
in the database. Further basic message traffic and application
use will generate event logs in the Pablo SDDF format. We already
have a good set of Java applets to visualize such data which we
built for performance monitoring of HPCC applications. We will
extend these with analysis tools to summarize key performance
bottlenecks. We will use standard assessment techniques with Tango
requesting users to fill in forms after each session and suitably
harassing ongoing users who do not regularly do this! We expect
that an important deliverable from the contract will be a study
as to successful approaches to evaluation of both the appropriateness
of computer driven collaboration and the necessary services. For
instance in education, does one need (digital talking heads) video
conferencing or will good audio suffice?
The final task includes general integration but also presentation
of demonstrations of the technology on a regular basis. Our good
linkage to NSF and DoD ATM networks should allow these to have
broad participation. We will use the scripting capability of TANGOsim
to prepare tutorials for all applications demonstrating the key
services and how they were used. This will both aid the understanding
of the general value of this technology but also of evaluation
conclusions.
H. Comparison with other ongoing research
We believe that TANGOsim is competitive with or ahead of all comparable Web collaboration schemes. For instance comparing to the earlier Habanero from NCSA, TANGOsim is purely applet based and so downloadable from any client; has a built in discrete event simulator; comes with session logging to an attached web-linked database. In addition, TANGOsim already supports different, task specific views of the same basic infrastructure and has built-in mechanisms for secure access. TANGOsim also supports applications written in any language including C C++ and Java. The use of C++ allows us to package a fast 3D Geographical Information System enhancing basic VRML version. There are several non Web technology based collaborative systems which are more robust and functional than TANGOsim in certain capabilities. However we built TANGOsim out of open Web subsystems because only this will give the rich range of services required for future Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization environments.
Our team has already built many Web technology applications in
the chosen three areas and in particular TANGOsim was built to
support a Web environment for rapid prototyping of C2 applications
and already has been demonstrated with an interesting if not fully
developed C2 application. Our team contains experts in the chosen
areas - C2, education and Healthcare -- who are invited to the
major conferences and maintain their leading edge position.
I. List of key personnel and concise summary of their qualifications.
1. Geoffrey Charles Fox.
Fox is Director of NPAC and Professor of Computer Science
and Physics and an internationally recognized expert in the use
of parallel architectures and the development of concurrent algorithms.
He has published 300 papers and 3 books. He led a major project
to develop first prototype high performance Fortran (Fortran90D)
compilers with language independent runtime. He has always emphasized
the role of applications in driving and validating technology.
This is illustrated by his recent book "Parallel Computing
Works" which describes the use of HPCC technologies in 50
significant application examples. Fox directs InfoMall, which
is focused on accelerating the introduction of high speed communications
and parallel computing into New York State industry and developing
the corresponding software and systems industry. Much of this
activity is centered on NYNET with ISDN and ATM connectivity throughout
the state including schools where Fox is leading developments
of new K-12 applications that exploit Web technology. With Rome
Laboratory CIV project, NPAC has developed the Web based command
and control application indicating how this COTS technology can
be effectively used in DoD applications.
2. Joel Saltz
Joel Saltz is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Maryland, College Park, and Associate Professor of Pathology
at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He is director of the High Performance
Systems Software Laboratory, and of the Center for Computer Science
in Medicine. Saltz leads a research group that is dedicated to
developing applications driven systems software. He has published
over 100 papers in a variety of areas in systems software including
tools and compilers for distributed and parallel machines, databases,
and the use of performance monitoring and program migration to
optimize performance of distributed Internet based programs. His
applications work includes the development of performance optimization
and ontology generation methods to facilitate medical database
interoperability. He is also developing Web based software to
support multimedia computerized medical records along with software
to support clinical conferencing.
3. Marek Podgorny
Marek Podgorny is Research Director of NPAC at Syracuse University
and teaches in Syracuse's new Internet Systems Continuing Education
program. He has established his research record as a theoretical
and computational physicist with over 60 publications in this
field. He joined NPAC in 1991 and led there a number of projects,
including implementation of NYNET, one of the first operational
wide-area ATM networks, parallel database evaluation and integration
project, and video-on-demand project. Currently, Podgorny is a
technical lead of the CIV project sponsored by Rome Laboratory.
The CIV project developed TANGO and TANGOsim and now it applies
this technology for telemedicine, C2, and education. In the video
on demand project, Podgorny designed, developed and implemented
a complete digital video storage, retrieval, and delivery system
sup porting text-based indexing. Podgorny's fields of expertise
include high performance and multimedia networking, relational
and multimedia databases, digital video storage and transport
systems, collaboratory systems, advanced Web technology, and large-scale
system integration.
J. Discussion of proposer's previous accomplishments and work
1)NPAC brings expertise in general Web technologies and as exemplified by TANGOsim, novel approaches to collaborative environments. The latter work is funded through the "Collaborative Interaction and Visualization" project (CIV) of Rome Laboratory to which Vanguard is a subcontractor. Important related expertise and novel technology was also developed in a two year Video on Demand project for Rome which was just completed. NPAC has extensive expertise on ATM and other modern networking and was recently awarded a vBNS connection by NSF which will link to NYNET - an ATM network linking Rome, NPAC and Cornell as well as local Schools. DARPA's Defense Sciences Office recently selected "The Grok-Box" for initial start up funding as part of BAA 96-24. This is based NPAC's work with the "Institute of Interventional Informatics" on new Web based interfaces to maximize perceptualization for both disabled and unimpaired users. NPAC has focused on the development of new approaches to education and is funded by the State of New York, the University, and NSF in this area. We are currently studying the integration of TANGO into existing Web education resources where previously we had used conventional collaboration technology such as SGI's Inperson. NPAC's practical emphasis is illustrated by Carrier Corporation whose web site features their product line stored in an Oracle database and queried through the Web; NPAC developed this capability and hosts this site as part of its InfoMall State funded technology transfer activity.
2)John Hopkins has a world famous medical school and Joel Saltz has started there a significant Informatics activity. This is based on novel datamining ideas (Maryland has developed these as part of several projects with the Earth and Space Science part of NASA) on the distributed database formed by migrating existing systems to Web linked Oracle. Maryland also brings recent expertise in adaptive approaches to optimizing application level system performance by a combination of program migration, caching and carefully interpreted monitoring. Maryland also has a recent vBNS award from NSF.
3)Vanguard Research Inc.(VRI) is a small business in Fairfax,
Virginia specializing in C3I and automated systems and technologies.
Its major customers included USSTRATCOM for computer system development,
Ballistic Missile Organization (BMDO) where VRI is the primary
SETA support for BM/C3 and as SETA to the National Test Facility
where VRI is intimately involved in the major Air Force initiatives
in C3I, Open Systems and distributed simulation. VRI is the ongoing
subcontractor to NPAC for the Rome Laboratory CIV project described
above where VRI is responsible for the C2 application.
Section III. Additional information -- References
Subcontractor Addresses:
Professor Joel Saltz:
1)Computer Science Department
A.V. Williams Building
University of Maryland
College Park Maryland 20742
email: saltz@cs.umd.edu Phone: 301-405-2729
and 2)Department of Pathology
The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
600 North Wolfe Street
Baltimore, MD 21287
Phone: 410-614-5220
John F. Kantak
Senior Vice President
Vanguard Research Inc.
10400 Eaton Place
Suite 450
Fairfax VA 22030
Email: jkantak@vriffx.com Phone 703-934-6300: Fax 703-273-9398
References: