Summary of Foilsets in SC-95 Tutorial

Interactive Web and HPCC Technologies for Distance Education

Monday December 4 San Diego Convention Center

This full day tutorial was presented by Geoffrey Fox, Wojtek Furmanski, Gang Cheng, Marek Podgorny and several students from NPAC at Syracuse University. It covered key enabling NII (World Wide Web) technologies and their application both to large scale distributed computing and distance education. The talk was presented electronically and includes eight classes of material.

Note on presentation: below you will find each foilset used represented by a one line cryptic summary. This has three links -- first to a file containing all abstracts for these foilsets; second to a file containing abstracts and list of titles of foils. Third "blue" link (title of foilset in one liner) leads you to particular online foilset. Note that material is being evolved as our understanding and the Web changes every day.

M8 Interactive Web and HPCC Technologies for Distance Education
G. C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski, and Marek Podgorny, Northeast Parallel
Architectures Center (NPAC), Syracuse University
50% beginner, 30% intermediate, 20% advanced
This tutorial will provide comprehensive coverage of interactive WWW
technologies and their integration with HPCC from the perspective of distance
education. The presenters will outline their vision of the Virtual University
for modern education and discuss interactive WWW, HPCC backends, and
agent-based communication as three critical enabling technologies in this
framework. They will illustrate these concepts with demonstrations of WWW
spaces and courses developed at the University of Syracuse such as KidsWeb,
Science for the 21st Century, Living Textbook, and Computational Science for
the Information Age. They will explain component technologies and
infrastructure such as WebTools, parallel databases, and video and
computational servers. Finally, they will discuss their concept of WebWork
and WebWindows as an emergent, collectively developed integration framework
for the WWW, agents, and HPCC-based Simulations-on-Demand, and they will
present prototype demonstrations of interactive and collaborative modules for
distance education.

List of Foilsets and URL's to foils

1)Application talk on distance education for both university level and K-12 education.

2)Basic Technology Talk Prepared for Supercomputing95

3)Vision talk on the future of the World Wide Web with the emergence of the environment ("operating system") WebWindows

4)Theme talk on distributed metacomputing and software engineering built in terms of World Wide Web Technologies.

This Webwork project is a joint effort between Boston University, Cooperating Systems and NPAC. It represents one new approach to HPDC -- High Performance Distributed Computing.

5)Some applications to world-wide computing, business enterprise systems and the Living School Book skipped in actual presentation except in summary fashion in 2)

6)A section that will be skipped in tutorial on base World Wide Web Technologies

These modules were first given spring 1995 in a course CPS600 (now called CPS616) which is the core course in information track of Syracuse University's Computational Science Program. They are a useful base reference to bring audience upto base level in areas such as PERL CGI etc.

See also David Koester's ATM Tutorial

7)A set of seven advanced core World Wide Web Technology areas

WebTools (major NPAC WebWindows Prototype), Televirtual Environments, Java, VRML, PERL5, Video Server, Web-relational database integration and Web Search Technologies.

Note exact details of demonstrations depend on availability of IWAY ATM link to NPAC during conference. We will be conservative and not assume this availability! In fact only internet connection was available to NPAC but even video on demand was demonstrated using equipment brought with us