Abstract * Foil Index for this file
Given by Geoffrey C. Fox at Kickoff Meeting at NPAC on October 17,1995. Foils prepared October 17,1995
Abstract * Foil Index for this file
| Develop Technologies and demonstrate a set of four applications enhanced by use of innovative Collaborative Interaction and Visualization. |
Point the way to Paradigm shifts in
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i.e. Paradigm shift in both applications and software development for the applications
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| Demonstrate Applications and Approach in JWID and/or similar activities |
This table of Contents
Abstract
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| Geoffrey Fox |
| NPAC |
| Syracuse University |
| 111 College Place |
| Syracuse NY 13244-4100 |
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| Develop Technologies and demonstrate a set of four applications enhanced by use of innovative Collaborative Interaction and Visualization. |
Point the way to Paradigm shifts in
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i.e. Paradigm shift in both applications and software development for the applications
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| Demonstrate Applications and Approach in JWID and/or similar activities |
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Electromagnetic Simulation
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Weather Information System
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Command and Control Information System
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Telemedicine enhanced with Digital Informatics and collaboration as shown to be required by early experiments
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| Develop basic Infrastructure and test 3D Interactive Displays of Physical Phenomena using Electromagnetic Simulation |
| Apply this to a Weather Simulation of local or national interest which is enhanced by overlays on 3D Geographic Information Systems |
| Design a Collaborative Environment with multiple interactive simulations, databases, multimedia information streams using Medical and Command and Control Applications for requirements |
| Integrate Weather as one "Applet" in this Interactive Collaborative Environment |
| Evaluate and Refine technologies |
| Demonstrate Prototype Systems |
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| Virtual Reality and Display Technology connected to high speed networks and computers |
| Compression of audio images and video |
| Network Management |
| Collaboration |
| Geographical Information Systems |
| Multimedia Databases |
| Parallel and Distributed Computing |
The World Wide Web, CORBA and other Industry and Community standards
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| Crisis 2005 -- refined from National Research Council Scenario -- describes civilian crisis and how collaboration services would support |
| Starting hyperlink of Crisis 2005 to technologies |
| Bottom Up -- Expand Electromagnetics --> Weather System --> Full Information System |
| Link with other bottom up projects such as Teachers and Kids Collaborating in Living Textbook |
| Top Down -- Command and Control/Telemedicine rquirements link to and integrate with technology/bottom-up subprojects |
| Use analysis of multiple application areas (also manufacturing(NASA/NRC), Health Care(NSF/NRC) digital libraries(NRC) education(SU/Livingtextbook)) to ensure properly build layered multi-use services on NII/HPCC |
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| The trip to the opera was the high point for the thousands of international visitors to the conference. |
| They were streaming out of the new center which had been built in a decaying downtown area. Here old warehouses were still mixed with the proud new buildings of the economic redevelopment zone. |
| Luke CyberCzar was in charge of the crisis center when the first 911 video dial tones showed the horrifying sight. A gigantic set of explosions rocked a set of old chemical warehouses and fires and fumes of unknown composition ringed the new opera complex. The frightened audience panicked and scattered this way and that into the surrounding alleys. Of course the digital video crews covering the opera immediately switched their cameras to this catastrophe. Just a few seconds after those 911 calls, all the MPEG decoders on the GII were presenting the chaos, damage and injuries live to a world whose cybereyes were trained on Luke. |
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| Injury and Damage implying major field operations with international scope |
| Telemedicine accessing world wide records |
| MPP and distributed cluster Simulations of Chemical fires and Wind blown transport of fumes |
| Remote Command and Control supported by Televirtual Environment |
| Digital Multimedia streams of data from on the spot video |
| Universal common WebTop envirtonment from WebNewton to Supercomputer |
| Adaptive network management including ISDN exploiting advanced compression |
| Cellullar Connections and Electromagnetic simulations to optimize antenna placement for emergency communications |
| Disparate distributed databases searched in real time using metadata |
| 3D Geographical Information Systems with real-time overlays for tactical decisions |
| Training and Education from Maxwell(Electronic Intuition) to Computer Science and Testbeds such as FEMA and JWID |
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| Luke benefits from the natural convenient interface maximizing the effectiveness of the tired harried judgment maker. This build on advanced MOO and VR ideas and tailors the computer interface to the problem at hand. |
| Luke sees a three dimensional GIS (Geographical Information System) when viewing the spatial confusion of the catastrophe; a virtual podium when he briefs cyberworld; a boardroom when defending his actions to angry foreign politicians; a summer wildflower meadow in moments of thought. |
| He shares this virtual environment with Jane who is in charge of tactical operations for the crisis and by his electronic side at all times. |
| They share this televirtual environment with other judgment makers and those facing the crisis in the field. |
| Whether supported by supercomputer or hand held personal assistant, all access the same WebTop environment with a full range of collaboration and productivity tools whose capability adjusts to the available compute and communication resource. |
| In this way the GII enables the best adaptive linking of "come-as-you-are" computational, communication and personnel resources. |
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| The judgment support environment was developed by the government to support military, law enforcement and civilian crisis needs. |
| Although these applications are critical to the nation there is not a large enough market to expect an industry to develop on its own. |
| However proper attention to well chosen standards, allows the crisis management application to build on top of NII services designed for larger areas such as digital libraries, electronic commerce, manufacturing and health care. |
| The thriving middleware industry supplies the necessary integration technologies including agents, wrappers and graphical scripting environments. |
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SGI Onyx SMP
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ATM cluster
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ISDN connectivity
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VR displays
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Simulation on Demand for Tactical Decision Support
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Project to Demonstrate:
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Identify Suitable Weather Simulation Code
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Use of NPAC/Rome-Lab GIS Project
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Interfaces to Visualisation Module
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| NPAC and SRC, ARPA and EMCC Funded, Computational Electromagnetics on MPPs |
| SRC ParaMoM - Large-scale Industrial Application, MoM-based CEM package for modeling Radar Cross Section of Full-Scale Aerospace Vehicles |
| NPAC/CRPC - State-of-the-art Parallel Algorithms, Linear Algebra Software (ScaLAPACK), and Architectures |
| Portable Parallel Implementation on Multiple MPPs and Cluster Architectures - IBM SP2, Intel Paragon, CM5 and PVM Workstation Clusters |
| Good Speedup,Scalability,Portability Achieved |
| A simple AVS-based visualization prototype system developed |
| More Information - http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcheng/CEM/home.html |
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| Cooperation with SUNY Health Science Center (Dr. Robert Corona, neuropathologist, Director of Telemedicine and Medical Informatics) |
RL "Collaboratory and Telecommunication Experiments" project, progress in medical area:
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| Videoconferencing (Communique with Digital Video Everywhere environment) |
| Application of volume visualization methods integrated with medical collaboratory system (David Warner, Nason Fellow in "Interventional Informatics") |
| Virtual reality and its integration with WWW (VRML, WebSpace,...); real-time communication between people in the VR; visualizing people and their behavior |
Patient Record Database
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Image Visualization, Image Processing, 3D reconstruction
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Utilization of ongoing medicine activities on NYNET
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| Virtual Reality -- Build on Rome Laboratory and Dave Warner locally as well Argonne/UIC(DeFanti EVL) nationally |
| Compression critical for delivering quality digital video and audio which are essential in both "talking heads" and multimedia information systems (text-indexed video databases) |
| Network Management uses Rome Laboratory and NYNEX sponsored work -- ensures adaptive reliable networks with high Quality of Service |
| Collaboration -- currently digital video (InSoft, Proshare, SGI InPerson) is outside Web. It must as in Argonne Webspace/Labspace project be integrated with Web as this has other critical services |
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| Geographical Information Systems store and display (in 3D) spatially labelled data -- complementary to Web Browsers and relational databases for non spatial data |
| Multimedia databases are linked to the Web and delivered indexing of associated text and synchronized audio and video streams delivered to clients |
| World Wide Web supports general productivity tools(WebTools and WebFoil), Clustered Computing and Software Engineering environment(WebWork) as well as workflow(WebFlow) and databases -- Java and VRML critical developments |
| High Performance Computers supply simulation, visualization and large database server support. They are linked by ATM networks and we use same software on MPP's as on clustered heterogeneous machines (metacomputing) |
| CORBA and The World Wide Web are illustrative of pervasive standards to be used in next generation software |
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| Focussed effort at providing robust, usable, supported and well documented software to meet all NPAC's needs. |
Practical Integration Within NPAC:
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| Supports the transport of large images and animation (video) with high resolution |
Eliminates redundant or less critical information
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| Decreases the time and cost of transmission and storage requirements |
Investigation of several image compression technologies
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| Power of wavelet-based methods - high quality, fast encoding / decoding, solid mathematical background |
| Wavelet compression is represented by the weighted sum of basis functions together with quantization and coding |
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Software available
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Implementation of 2D still image wavelet compressor
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Investigation of various video compression technologies
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| Wavelet-based implementation of hierarchical motion compensation and 3D subband coding already reported in the literature |
Wavelet video compressor
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| Focus: transport over low bandwidth ISDN network (BRI 2B + D = 144 Kbps) |
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Results of "Collaboratory and Telecommunication Experiments" project; contract No C-4-2803, 22 Aug 1994 - 21 August 1995
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| Evaluation of Argonne project - 3D virtual environment based on the MOO paradigm (virtual laboratories) |
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| NPACBoard is a WWW based forum/bulletin board developed, written and support by NPAC. |
| Based on CGI Perl scripts that create HTML pages and forms for processing the received Email messages. |
Key Features:
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| - Simple user interface and navigation |
| - Email text automatically formatted into HTML pages |
| - Support for WWW hypertext links, images and forms |
| - Complete on-line help |
| - Ability to age and remove old messages |
| - Password protection of individual discussion groups |
| - Automated installation procedure |
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| We use Landsat Satellite 30 meter horizontal resolution data for 2D images of New York State |
Digital Line Graphs are overlaid on map to show:
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| LULC (Land Use Land Cover) codes are overlaid on map |
Weather Extensions
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| This uses same 30 meter Landsat images combined with Digital Elevation Model (DEM) at 100 meter (horizontal) resolution |
| This has applications not only to education (Living Schoolbook) but also to business and scientific visualization -- for instance ....... ! |
| Enjoy a high altitude fly-by (virtual field trip for kids) of your city, state, country or Mars (courtesy of JPL) |
| Analyse your business competition by showing the relation between population density and the location of competing businesses and their profits |
| Animation of weather formations -- such as thunderstorms and lake effect snow -- on realistic background |
| Demonstrate the effect of geographical features on weather and ocean current |
| Analyse the relationship between pollution and population density |
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| Goal: Enable dynamic data, scene contents and object behavior, and dynamic object interaction to support GIS |
| Current VRML: flat files storage |
Disadvantages:
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| Proposed extension: |
| Use of an object-oriented database system to store |
| VRML data |
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| (*) extended semantics: objects modeled as world objects rather than as a set of polygons; composite objects possible; |
| (*) objects have generic VRML descriptions; |
| (*) boundaries of the world perceived by a user are not correlated with the way this world is described in the database; |
| (*) world descriptions distributable; |
| (*) objects behavior stored as scripting language; |
| (*) database model not coupled to current VRML definition |
| Advantages of Object-Oriented Model |
| (+) ability to select only the relevant information; |
| (+) multiple world views; |
| (+) incremental world delivery to the browser; |
| (+) world objects dynamic; |
| (+) ability to introduce users to the world; |
| (+) ability to support multiversioning |
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| No changes to the server side. All functionality provided by the database system |
Client side: the browser needs to be able to
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| Communication: not crucial for the proposed model |
| Proposed implementation: |
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| Video acquisition infrastructure for digitization and compression of the video material is operational |
| Video on demand environment has been installed. The environment includes a number of video server platforms and network infrastructure using switched ethernet and ATM delivery trunk. |
| Living Schoolbook application testbed is operational. |
| Client-server video on demand architectures have been implemented on a number of platforms. Streaming, real time video delivery has been implemented and integrated with Web front ends. |
| Video indexing via closed-caption free texts search is ongoing. |
| Integration with commercial Video for Windows technology is ongoing. |
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| Implementation of the new IP protocol dedicated to video delivery. Applications of the emerging RSVP and RTP protocols. |
| Variable bit rate to constant bit rate conversion: theoretical framework completed, ongoing implementation. |
| Simulation framework for realistic video server architectures has been set up and is being used to simulate and study different architectures and to assess their impact on the video server performance and functionality |
| Use of the wavelet compression technology for video delivery. |
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| Web as a generic networking interface to access information systems built on RDBMS technology |
| RDBMS as a powerful backend data engine to manage and manipulate information entities |
| Web + RDBMS provides maximum information sharing,global user access and multimedia based GUI towards a truly collaborative information environment |
Current status
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| More Information - http://kayak.npac.syr.edu:1963 |
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| A Collaborative Information Environment for USENET Newsgroups and Mailing List |
| Service-oriented information systems using Web server and Parallel Database Technology |
| Data Mining in USENET Newsgroups and Mailing List Archives - User Search Pattern, News-on-Demand, Server Utilization Statistics, etc. |
Web Search System for Web Space on Remote/Global Web Servers
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| Full-Index Search System for Video-on-demand Server |
| Integration of VRML and Object-Oriented Database Systems |
| Integration of Java and RDBMS |