Technologies for the 21st Century HuCS

	HuCS technologies Knowledge repositories Collaboratories Regional Technology in Education Consortia Enabling multi-modal human-system interactions Virtual environments Simulation of complex situations in planning and management Telemedicine Clinical decision support systems The Visible Human Project SIMA: System Integration for Manufacturing Applications
HuCS technologies	HuCS R&D leads to increased accessibility and usability of computing systems and communications networks. Scientists, engineers, educators, students, the workforce, and the general public are all potential beneficiaries of HuCS technologies, which include: "Knowledge repositories" and "information agents" for managing, analyzing, and presenting massive amounts of multimedia and multi-source information "Collaboratories" that provide access to knowledge repositories and facilitate knowledge sharing, group authorship, and control of remote instruments Systems that enable multi-modal human-system interactions including speech, touch, and gesture recognition and synthesis Virtual reality environments and their application to scientific research, health care, manufacturing, and training HuCS activities for FY 1998 will focus on collaboration among Federal departments and agencies, the university community, and U.S. industry. Specific activities are detailed below.
Knowledge repositories	Knowledge repositories are huge electronic databases with multimedia content (text, voice, images, and video), residing on distributed heterogeneous computing systems that use different database management software. There is a critical need for applications that will make it easier for people to manage these complex databases, as well as for intelligent "information agents" that will help them analyze the data and present the results effectively.    DARPA's major areas of HuCS technical emphasis are intelligent systems, software development, manufacturing automation and design engineering (MADE), Text Video Speech (TVS) technology focusing on emerging language understanding technology, and resource organization to obtain logistical information on demand.   DARPA's intelligent systems and software project develops new information processing technology that will lead to innovative software and intelligent systems capabilities. Advances in projects such as the high performance knowledge base library will enable information systems to accomplish decision-making tasks more effectively in stressful, time sensitive situations and will help create efficient software to support computer-intensive defense systems.   DARPA supports research in modular human-computer interaction technologies, that will provide easy, low-cost, rapid technology transfer and application development for document understanding, machine translation, and speech understanding. In the intelligent integration of information area, DARPA researchers will develop tools and techniques to enable the rapid construction of information fusion, aggregation, and summarization software to filter, access, and integrate information from hundreds of heterogeneous distributed data sources. In the TVS area, researchers will develop initial prototypes for multi-language text extraction and audio transcription using the performance of human operators as a baseline.   NSF's Knowledge Networking projects focus on a new generation of interconnected networks and associated database and collaborative technologies, with an emphasis on learning and intelligent systems and new approaches to computation.
Collaboratories	Collaboratories -- virtual laboratories that permit geographically separated researchers to work together and to use identical remote resources -- build upon breakthrough technologies employed in creating knowledge repositories and information agents. Collaboratories also require new technologies for creating multimedia information. An example is DARPA's Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization effort, which includes middleware for advanced collaboration across very large distributed systems, as well as software for controlling remote instruments, enabling geographically dispersed researchers to access expensive research resources from their desktops.   DOE is building a scalable, standards-based software infrastructure to support collaborative environments, employing advanced ATM capabilities to provide interagency collaborative environments and to support leading-edge applications. This software infrastructure is being tested in two national collaboratory pilot programs -- the Diesel Combustion Collaboratory and the Materials MicroCharacterization Collaboratory.
Regional Technologies in Education Consortia	The Department of Education's (ED) Regional Technology in Education Consortia (RTEC) assist state and local education agencies with developing comprehensive educational technology plans, drawing upon existing resources, and anticipating future technological needs and innovations. In FY 1998, the RTECs will also focus on making the most valuable technology resources more easily accessible to educators through a variety of means, including the Internet and telecommunications technologies.
Enabling multi-modal human-system interactions	Today's graphical user interfaces are well-suited to trained, unimpaired users accessing desktop computers with a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. As inexpensive computing power becomes increasingly available to less technically-oriented users, tomorrow's sophisticated systems will require interfaces accessible both to experts and novice or infrequent users regardless of physical ability, education, or culture. Additionally, people who cannot see will require enhanced Braille interfaces, and people who are unable to type will require the latest eye-tracking technologies. HuCS R&D will explore speech recognition and synthesis technologies, as well as computers operated by facial expression, touch, and gesture. Such projects include a DARPA-funded NIST study to develop methods for evaluating and testing the image quality effects of optical character recognition (OCR). Funded as a joint project of NSF and ED's National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research, the Web Accessibility Initiative will work to ensure that the evolution of the Web removes, rather than reinforces, accessibility barriers.   Human-centered application development environments will allow users to tailor services and applications to meet individual needs. "More than Screen Deep," a wide-ranging 1996 study supported by NSF, suggests that such research also directly supports the general movement toward "nomadic" (access anytime, anywhere) computing. HuCS research includes interfaces to support computing systems embedded in wireless hand-held and wrist-mounted devices and in household appliances.   The Speech, Text, Image, and MULtimedia Advanced Technology Effort (STIMULATE) will fund university researchers investigating human communication and seeking to improve our interaction with computers. NSF, NSA, and DARPA are involved in this interagency effort, whose projects will include a filter for TV, radio, and newspaper accounts that provides the user with a quick synopsis; a computerized translation program; and a "humanoid" computer that will understand human communication, including facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Virtual environments	FY 1998 virtual environments R&D will address immersion in simulated environments, advanced modeling technologies, and group collaborations in virtual spaces. Virtual environments are interactive, computer-generated multi-dimensional "worlds" designed to allow the user's view of the environment to change in real time in response to user control. Such control creates kinesthetic depth perception in which a user can interactively alter a virtual world by directly manipulating virtual objects in a virtual environment. Intelligent real-time response and multi-dimensional sensory information embodied in virtual environments can facilitate explorations involving complex science, medicine, and manufacturing tasks.   Expert systems that aid in designing virtual environments will be needed to construct and model complex environments for specialized tasks. Portable, wearable, augmented reality systems will enhance human performance in tasks such as maintaining military or civilian equipment in the field. These systems will demand extremely accurate tracking and methods to align virtual environments closely with the real world and will require high quality visual, force, and touch displays.   HuCS virtual environment R&D is needed to develop new knowledge presentation and collaboratory technologies. For example, high-quality sensory information, derived from sight, sound, and touch, is generated by computing systems and delivered to users by special interface devices developed by DARPA and NSF. These devices give users the sensation that they are interacting with the virtual environment just as they would interact with the real world. At the same time, these tools provide "intelligence amplification" to expand the user's decision-making capabilities.
Simulation of complex situations in planning and management	Battlefield management and planning, emergency management, multi-government interactions, and industrial competition and collaboration are other Federal applications that require HuCS technologies. In each of these areas, human centered systems can provide an information-rich overview of complex situations involving many participants. HuCS technologies can be used to simulate these applications for training and evaluation and to use real-time input to monitor actual situations for situation awareness and decision making. These applications also require special authoring tools for creating and maintaining simulations and the ability to partition a simulation into a hierarchy of detail. In product manufacturing, for example, these technologies can support the total life cycle of a manufactured product, resulting in improved design, development, testing, manufacturing, training and use, and maintenance and repair.
Telemedicine	Telemedicine allows patients and health care practitioners to be in different locations during consultation, diagnosis, and treatment. In these activities, images and data from diverse medical instruments (for example, MRI, CAT-scans, and sonograms) will be integrated and displayed in a 3-D environment. For example, such pioneering 3-D techniques are being used to diagnose emphysema and lung cancer at the Cornell Theory center, as illustrated in the "HuCS Supplement".
Clinical decision suport systems	Transforming patient data into consistently useful and accessible information and knowledge is a challenge confronting health care providers today. The current clinical environment will need to converge with scientific research to achieve more precise diagnosis, better treatment plans, and more effective disease prevention.   Partnering with VA and NIH, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research's (AHCPR) HuCS research focuses on developing applications for computer-based patient record and clinical decision support systems for health care providers. Its objective is to evaluate the use of computers and networks in order to improve health care outcomes, medical effectiveness, quality, and cost. Research topics will include object technology to facilitate transferring data from legacy systems, voice and speech recognition, remote monitoring of homebound chronically ill and disabled populations by health professionals, multimedia electronic mail for consultations among clinicians in local and regional networks, and intelligent dictionaries and networks to enable more effective communication among clinicians. Security, privacy, and integrity of health care data will be managed in regional repositories that will use key technology to register and certify users.
The Visible Human Project	In the Visible Human project, NLM continues to build and evaluate digital image libraries of anatomical structures of the human body. Using and understanding the biological structures depicted in such libraries will exploit the integration of advanced computer and communications technologies with medical imaging systems to render anatomic data into photorealistic images that are easily manipulated by students, researchers, and health care providers.
SIMA: System Integration for Manufacturing Applications	HuCS R&D is part of NIST's System Integration for Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) program that works with industry and academic researchers on projects such as the Manufacturing Collaboratory and Operator Interfaces for Distributed and Virtual Manufacturing. Research areas include information interfaces, collaborative technologies, remote operation, and virtual manufacturing. NIST collaborates with industry and standards bodies in supporting the development, specification, validation, and deployment of solutions for interoperability among advanced manufacturing systems applications.