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Networked Computing for the 21st Century
Human centered Systems |
 
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HuCS technologies
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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:
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Digital Libraries Phase 2
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Building on the successful interagency Digital Libraries initiative, the new Digital Libraries Phase II initiative will begin in FY 1998. It is a joint effort of NSF, DARPA, NASA, NLM, the Library of Congress (LoC), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in partnership with the National Archives and Records Administration and the Smithsonian Institution. The new initiative will place a greater emphasis on the human and societal dimensions of digital libraries, including research in electronic information life cycles; digital interoperability; integration of information, computing, and communication technologies with human needs; and new types of content and collections. Since digital libraries can serve as intellectual infrastructure, this initiative will stimulate the partnerships necessary for creating next generation operational systems in such areas as education, engineering and design, Earth and space sciences, biosciences, geography, economics, and the arts and humanities. It will address the entire digital libraries life cycle from information creation, access, and use, to archiving and preservation. The goal of the initiative is to provide leadership in fundamental research, to advance the usability of globally distributed, networked information resources, and encourage a focus on innovative applications. Digital Libraries Phase II plans to:
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Computer and Information Science and Engineering
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HuCS R&D programs in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate focus on improving the fundamental understanding of computing and information processing by enhancing the training of scientists and engineers. Special attention is given to the computing and communications technologies -- including software -- employed to manage these processes and to select areas of application. CISE FY 1998 HuCS R&D focuses on human-centered systems and knowledge networks. |
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Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) and Knowledge Networking (KN)
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As a result of technological advances in computing power and connectivity, there are now unprecedented opportunities for providing rapid and efficient access to enormous amounts of knowledge and information; for studying vastly more complex systems than was hitherto possible; and for advancing in fundamental ways our understanding of learning and intelligence in living and engineered systems. NSF's Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) theme is an NSF-wide effort to realize these opportunities. KDI's Knowledge Networking (KN) research will help facilitate the evolution from today's distributed information access environment to new technical and human capabilities for interactive knowledge creation and use. Through this evolution, interdisciplinary communities can be joined in sharing data and building knowledge to address complex problems that have been explored strictly within traditional disciplinary boundaries. |
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Finding and tracking information
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NSF-supported research at Columbia University focuses on developing technologies to help people find and track the information they need to keep current in their jobs and lives. The Columbia Digital News System provides up-to-the-minute briefings on news of interest, linking users into an integrated collection of related multimedia documents. Depending on the user's profile or query, events can be tracked over time, and a summary of the most recent, breaking developments, including a representative set of images or videos, can be generated automatically. A user can follow up with multimedia queries to obtain more details and further information. |
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Active visualization
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NSF-supported active visualization R&D is being undertaken at New York University. Human vision is an active process involving four principal eye movements: saccades -- rapid shifts in the fovea, a small depression at the back of the retina that forms the point of sharpest vision; pursuit movements; vestibular (entrance) systems; and vergence (borders). Biological vision uses "foveated images" in which the resolution is higher at the fovea than at the periphery. To compensate for the loss of peripheral vision in images, active visualization technology allows the user interactive control of several parameters of vision, including rapid saccades and adjustable resolution. Active visualization techniques attempt to present images that match some of these eye motions. Active visualization is particularly suitable for thin-wire communication of images. Since foveated images require a much smaller bandwidth for transmission, they are ideal for distributed computing, collaborative computing, and client-server applications over the Internet. |
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Speech technologies
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Business Week magazine (February 12, 1998) highlighted the increasing importance of leading-edge speech technologies in computing. Continuing DARPA- and NIST-supported research has made significant contributions to this field, which is a HuCS R&D focus area. For example, the DARPA-supported Jupiter effort, cited in the Business Week article, is an experimental system that allows individuals to dial an 800 number to obtain weather information on 500 cities around the world. Jupiter will respond to spoken requests for weather information and answer these queries in its own voice in real time. DARPA's Speech Recognition Technology Integration effort will provide an information navigation and exploration toolkit that can provide military decision makers with rapid access to multisource, multimedia information. In FY 1998, DARPA-led researchers will design, develop, integrate, and demonstrate key Human Computer Interaction (HCI), speech recognition, "News on Demand" (demonstrated at Netamorphosis), and video paragraphing technologies with various applications. Additionally, they will create a full command vocabulary for U.S. Atlantic Command operations and deliver a speech-enabled version of the Joint Readiness Automated Management System for use in the command center. The Space and Naval Warfare center is supporting research in the Command center of the Future (CCOF). In FY 1998, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and DARPA speech engines capable of running in server mode will be installed onto either the Command center's systems or other reachable systems. The core speech technologies comprising the speech kernel include automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, speaker identification and authentication, and natural language understanding. Collaboration among contributing DARPA researchers via integration and testing in the CCOF's speech environment will provide a feedback loop, preparing systems for installation aboard the USS Coronado, part of the sea-based Battle Lab Initiative. (The USS Coronado is an information warfare command ship, where an entire war can be planned, monitored, and directed.) One of the goals of this R&D is a consistent, integrated, and standardized speech applications programming interface (API) that can be made available to developers to encourage software reuse and to leverage both COTS and DARPA technologies. |
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Health care data
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NLM's computer-based Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) was established to achieve rapid access to the Library's vast store of biomedical and health-related information. Through worldwide communications networks, MEDLARS search services are available online to individuals and institutions, and the system is accessed more than 18,000 times a day. To make searching easier and to provide a user-friendly way to use MEDLARS, NLM developed Internet Grateful Med and PubMed, free services accessed via standard Web browsers. The availability of Internet Grateful Med has resulted in an upsurge of usage by health professionals as well as the general public. In FY 1998 NLM will continue developing and deploying new capabilities for automatic source selection and for retrieving and sorting information from multiple databases. With the large and rapidly growing number of computerized database resources and services offering bibliographic, full text, and factual data via the Internet, the user must deal with structured retrieval languages that differ from one database service to the next. NLM's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) compensates for the dissimilarity in the ways related information is classified in different automated systems. Intelligent-agent-mediated gateways provide users with a single point of access to information and free the user from having to know the peculiarities of the various information sources. Under continuing development and refinement in FY 1998 and FY 1999, the UMLS is functioning as an electronic Rosetta Stone, making the thicket of medical classifications invisible to the user and enabling retrieval of related biomedical information from many sources. |
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NCRR activities in collaboratories and virtual reality
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NCRR-supported research resource centers can provide remote control of complex scientific instruments such as a 400 kilovolt (kv) electron microscope and a sophisticated nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system. In FY 1998, NCRR will grant up to four awards to establish, demonstrate, and evaluate collaboratory testbeds to interact with these resources. The goal is to demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of conducting research by interactively linking people, instruments, databases, and sophisticated software. In FY 1998, NCRR is supporting two resource centers that apply virtual reality/environments to enhance the capabilities of instruments such as the Nanomanipulator (described in the 1998 Supplement to the President's Budget) to enable visual and tactile interaction with large biomedical molecules such as proteins (Protein Interactive Theater) and to create controllable virtual environments for brain cognition research. Plans include establishing a resource center that will employ virtual and augmented reality for additional brain research and guided surgery. 
An investigator, with a head-mounted display and a force-feedback
manipulator controlling the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM)
probe, explores the surface of a sample of material using NANOSCAPE, a
virtual-reality interface for controlling an atomic force microscope and
for observing its output as a three-dimensional image in real time. The
image projected on the wall shows what the investigator sees and changes
as his head position and orientation change. The region of the surface
shown is 25 Angstroms on a side. The investigator can change the
viewpoint, "feel" the contours of the surface, and control the
microscope as it modifies the surface.
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The Visible Human Project
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In FY 1998 and FY 1999, NLM is continuing to develop and evaluate a 55 gigabyte digital image library of male and female anatomy. Full use and understanding of the anatomical structures depicted in such a library requires the integration of high performance computing and communications technologies with technologies used in medical imaging systems, including CT and MR imaging. (Illustrated below.) Combining this library with efficient rendering algorithms will provide new educational tools for researchers, healthcare providers, students, and the general public. NLM is working with academia and industry to encourage the development of interoperable methods for representing and communicating such electronic images. More than 900 non-financial license agreements to access these data sets have been signed by governmental, commercial, and academic organizations. Applications using the data sets include multimedia materials for all levels of education; virtual reality programs including surgical simulators; and modeling applications such as surgical and radiation treatment planning, radiation absorption, ergometrics, and crash testing. Scientists and engineers using advanced software to develop and produce manufactured goods face obstacles that prevent seamless communication and interpretation of information among manufacturing applications as well as between people and the applications themselves. HuCS R&D at NIST focuses on developing and testing information interfaces for manufacturing applications and on the application of HuCS technologies in support of these efforts. 
Section through Visible Human Male -- head; including cerebellum,
cerebral cortex, brainstem, nasal passages (from Head data subset)
Section through Visible Human Male -- thorax, including heart (with
muscular left ventricle), lungs, spinal column, major vessels,
musculature (from Thorax data subset)
Section through Visible Human Male -- abdomen, including large and small
intestines, spinal column, musculature, subcutaneous fat (from Abdomen
data subset)
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Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications (SIMA)
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In projects such as the Process Specification Language, NIST researchers work with collaborators from around the world to develop a unified process representation scheme. This will enable improved communication of manufacturing process information among different systems. As part of this effort, NIST is using Internet collaboration technologies that enable remote researchers to participate in virtual discussions and round table events. NIST's Virtual Environments and Visualization for Manufacturing project is leveraging existing standards developments, such as VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), to enable the integration of VRML environments from multiple application sources. A number of VRML exporters have been developed, one of which has recently been incorporated into a commercial product. Other NIST efforts are making scientific and engineering data available via the Internet in support of engineering and manufacturing applications. The NIST Chemistry WebBook brings evaluated data directly to a scientist's desktop, simplifying the job of finding reliable property data for thousands of chemicals. The Engineering Statistics Handbook, being undertaken jointly by NIST and SEMATECH, will provide an Internet-accessible means for engineers to classify statistical problems, identify statistical solution methods, and be linked to software that can be used to execute those methods and analyze the results. 
NIST-supported research developed this visual glossary of landmarks of
the head. The 3-D face is overlaid with markers identifying
anthropometric landmarks. By moving the cursor over the markers, the
name of the landmark appears.
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National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR)
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NIDRR also supports ABLEDATA, a database on assistive technology devices for individuals with disabilities, and the National Rehabilitation Information center that maintains REHABDATA, a rehabilitation bibliography database. |
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Regional Technology in Education Consortia (RTEC)
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The ED RTECs provide state and local education agencies with technical assistance in developing comprehensive educational technology plans, drawing upon existing resources and anticipating future technological needs and innovations. In FY 1998, the RTECs will continue to provide assistance in integrating technology with teaching and learning, including the acquisition, maintenance, and effective use of new technologies. The RTECs will also focus on making the most valuable resources on technology more accessible to educators through a variety of sources including the Internet and telecommunications technologies. A new focus will be assisting schools in making the best use of Internet technologies. |
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Regional educational laboratories
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ED's regional laboratories assist educators and policy makers in implementing effective school reform strategies. A major focus of the laboratories is to improve access to the research and resources of the labs. The labs will work with the Educational Resources Information center (ERIC) and the RTECs to develop a strategy for providing access to decentralized full-text online materials, using a search engine that would include resources from all labs and other Department-funded institutions. Specific labs will continue to provide telecommunications services for outlying areas without modern technology; a vast network for teachers to share ideas and lessons and increase technological literacy; and tools to train teachers in effective uses of technology, and to model exemplary teaching and learning through video and CD-ROM. |
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Virtual reality
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The ability to record and play back collaborative experiences will be critical to the future development of teleimmersion environments. The Voyager media server developed at Argonne National Lab enables researchers to experiment with scalable, multistream, multimedia recording and playback. Future extensions will enable the capture and playback of virtual reality-based teleimmersive experiences. ManyWorlds, also developed at Argonne, is a scalable prototype system for constructing shared virtual reality environments. It provides the communications and sharing services needed to build large-scale teleimmersion systems that can be shared among multiple users and locations, and is being used as an experimental vehicle for exploring human performance issues in teleimmersion. ManyWorlds provides an environment that allows users to collaborate on data exploration, interactive steering of computational simulations, cooperative model construction, and access to remote instruments. |
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Electronic Notebook project |
Electronic notebooks are beginning to be used by scientists in collaboratories to share ideas, data, experiments, and research programs. The goal of DOE's Electronic Notebook Project is to design a modular, extensible architecture for a notebook that is easy to use, secure, cross platform, and interoperable. DOE's electronic notebook is required to be a legally binding record that can be maintained in archives for as long as 25 years. This notebook will share components for input and display of sketches, text, equations, images, graphs, and other data types as well as provide tools for authentication, notarization, and other services. |
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