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Technologies for the 21st Century
HuCS Supplement |
 
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GALAXY conversational system
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Vice President Al Gore speaking to the DARPA-supported GALAXY conversational
system during an April 26, 1996 visit to the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
This research will lead to the development of conversational systems that can
interact with users by employing speech recognition and language understanding to
solve everyday problems.
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Climate Visualization system (CLIMVIS)
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The Climate Visualization system CLIMVIS is an interactive tool for browsing
visual displays of numeric data available on-line at NOAA's National Climatic
Data center (NCDC) in Asheville, NC. The user steps through the data and graphing
feature selection process to browse the displayed data, as illustrated to the
right. Systems like CLIMVIS will make it easier for people to manage and use
highly complex databases, and for intelligent "information agents" to
analyze the data and present the results effectively.
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Intelligent Room
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An "Intelligent Room" allows people to move within its space speaking
and gesturing as they normally do. Outfitted with special eyeglasses, they can
view personalized informational displays enabling them to command a vast array of
computational and communication resources. The occupants will be able to
concentrate on solving problems, such as planning distributed and collaborative
activities. They will also be able to rehearse their actions in trauma care,
crisis management, and rapid response deployment. Supported by DARPA, the
Intelligent Room is a part of the Human-Computer Interaction project at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab, which explores advanced human-computer interaction
and collaboration technologies.
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The Internet and VRML
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One view of a virtual city created using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language
(VRML) by a team from UCSD and SDSC that is investigating the effects of visual
cues in psychotherapy using the Internet and VRML. Potential applications include
treating acrophobia (fear of heights) and other phobias. Patients might view this
same street by looking down from the top floors of its skyscrapers.
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Chesapeake Bay virtual environment
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The NSF-funded Chesapeake Bay virtual environment is a a research tool combining
the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) software, the Vis5D scientific
visualization package, and the Vanilla Sound Server in order to place modeled
sonic data in an interactive navigable virtual environment. It will incorporate
runtime computational steering, interactive visualization, data sonification, and
wide area information dissemination to enable geographically distributed users to
interact multi-modally in real time across a high speed network. A
university-based research oceanographer running a numerical simulation on a
remote supercomputer at one institution can be observed by researchers at other
institutions. As the technology improves, all researchers should be able to steer
the simulated environment, maximizing its effectiveness. The CAVE's three-wall
and ceiling environment provides an optimal environment for this type of
research.
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Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL)
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Supported by DARPA and NSF, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the
University of Illinois at Chicago allows researchers to use the latest in
computer graphics and interactive technology to explore data in highly immersive,
interactive environments. EVL provides an infrastructure for computer scientists
to collect, maintain, develop, distribute, and evaluate virtual environment tools
and techniques for scientific computing. These include computer-based models,
simulations, data libraries, programming libraries, and user interfaces. The
libraries and user interfaces encompass visual, auditory, tactile, and
motion-based information displays. The Multi Mega Book in the CAVE was designed
to create an immersive experience of being in different centuries and in
different worlds. Here, the viewer has arrived in a composite Renaissance Italian
city.
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Simulated human movement
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Scientists can estimate the forces of the body's muscles by simulating human
movement on supercomputers. NASA-funded researchers at the University of
Texas-Austin have combined control theory and mathematical modeling to determine
musculoskeletal forces during different activities. These graphical models of
jumping and walking incorporate joint angles from videotaped human subjects. Each
muscle, with its connecting tendons, is represented by a three-element skeletal
entity, appearing in series. A three-dimensional simulation of the jumping
figure, the first of its kind, consumes 800 CPU hours on an IBM SP2.
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HuCS technologies in
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HuCS technologies assist in diagnosing emphysema and lung cancer. Modern 3-D
radiologic techniques, particularly computed tomography (CT) and magnetic
resonance (MR) imaging, acquire more data than are routinely displayed in
diagnostic images, such as in this 3-D image of a section of a lung from the
Cornell University Medical College. A potentially cancerous nodule, highlighted
in bright green, is easily distinguished from the adjacent vessels. Image
analysis used in conjunction with representative patient databases will be an
integral part of future clinical analysis, diagnosis, and decision support
systems. NLM promotes the use of these technologies in health care.
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Biology Workbench |
Developed by the Computational Biology Group at the NCSA (University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign), the Biology Workbench is a collaborative software tool that
allows researchers and physicians to access information needed to find cures for
diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, and AIDS. The Workbench enables a user with a
browser to efficiently access, extract, and process data from remote databases.
From the Biology Workbench home page (partially illustrated at the right),
researchers can input a protein sequence into the Web-based software and locate
the 3-D representation of the requested molecule. What once would have taken a
molecular biologist weeks or months to find is now a simple task that takes only
minutes.
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