1: Focused Effort Title:Collaborative Portals for Training (and Computational Science)
2: Organization: Florida State University 
3: Thematic Area: HPC Training and DoD User Productivity 
4: PI Name: Prof. Geoffrey Fox 
5: E-Mail: fox@csit.fsu.edu 
6: Telephone: (850) 644-4587 
7: Fax: (850) 644-0098 
8: Statement of Work: 

This focussed effort completes the work of the year 5 FE of this name. We 
intend to finish the new collaborative infrastructure in June 2001 which
has been designed to exploit commercial infrastructure as much as possible.
The current FE develops the infrastructure for both training and computing
portals. We will use it as part of our new "Ubiquitous Access to HPC Resources"
FE as the software infrastructure that will allow palm tops to communicate
with each other and with the servers driving back end computers and large
screen or pervasive flat panel displays. In this FE, we will concentrate on
using the developed technology in training. We propose two near term efforts

1) Taking the new ADL/IMS standards and building the necessary distributed object
standards (XML specifications) that support DoD PET needs and are consistent
with these community standards. The extensions (which are allowed by ADL/IMS)
will support two key features. Firstly the specific type (PowerPoint/Web)
and content (CTA's, HPC technology etc.) used in PET training material.
Secondly we will enhance the specification to support collaborative delivery.
This is a serious omission in current standards and connected with
their incomplete client-server architecture. As explained in my ERDC talk
this September, one should use a three tier model. Hopefully this will
help DoD HPCMO work more closely with DoD ADL and together help advance
their common goals of modular web-based training

2) Integrating cell phone and palm devices into the collaborative training portal.
It is not clear how students could best use palms in training but the natural
framework is to download summary information into PDA's and to enable cell phones
as recipients or initiators of training sessions. This will allow students and even
the teacher to participate in classes from "very" remote places. The PDA summaries
will consist of the modest data parts of a session -- chat rooms and indices of
presentations. All these will be stored as time-stamped events allowing the
palm top summaries to be rigorously linked with the comparably time-stamped
archival sessions. This way students can keep notes on their palm tops and later
reliably upload and link to the full session. We will also allow image thumbnails
to be downloaded as a more visual record of content than the title used in index.
We believe that this new technology will be very important to DoD but only
experimentation can determine the most fruitful areas in which they can be used.
 
9: Deliverables:
    ADL SCORM/IMS Extended Specification for DoD PET Training June 2001
    Cell Phone and Palm Top Access to (Distance) Training September 2001
    Written progress reports in June 2001 
    Presentations for PET Final Review in September 2001
    Final Technical Report in September 2001
  
10: Required Resources: $45,940

Item                    Base        Fringe      Overhead        Total
Geoffrey Fox            3,750       690         2,065           6,505
3 Graduate Students     24,000      144         7,485           31,581
(.5 year) Tuition       3,459                                   3,459
Travel                  3,000                   1,395           4,395
            
TOTAL                                                           45,940