Funds to support activities in Human centered Systems for FY 1997 total $249 million, compared to the FY 1996 Estimated budget of $188 million, an increase of 32%.
Major activities are reflected in DARPA programs in Intelligent Systems, where the intent is to develop modular human language technologies to support 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 will support the development of tools and techniques to enable the rapid construction of information fusion, aggregation, and summarization software. DARPA will extend and evaluate large-scale statistical modeling, machine learning, and knowledge representation methods for spoken and written language understanding and develop hub formalization that will infuse existing programming languages with new advances in formal methods. They will continue the experimental evaluation of design technology for high performance computational prototyping of systems.
NSF, NASA, and DARPA will continue the Digital Library projects. This research seeks to develop real-time image understanding algorithms for use in image registration, target recognition, and autonomous navigation for ground level and overhead reconnaissance and surveillance and to implement initial tools and toolkits for development and evaluation of highly interactive, agent and dialogue-based human computer interactions.
The NASA IITA program, which includes some HuCS activities, will be completed in FY 1997. NASA, working collaboratively with other Federal agencies whose primary focus is HuCS, will continue to invest in the area of Human centered Systems using expertise from its Information Technology center of Excellence. These investments will be through some of NASA's more traditional efforts such as computational aerosciences.
NSF will increase support for research in information-based learning technologies with the potential to transform education at all levels in the 21st century and form a new enabler for the integration of research and education. NSF will initiate the multi-agency program STIMULATE (Speech, Text, Image, and MULtimedia Advanced Technology Effort) in order to understand multimodal human communication and apply it to computer technology.
NIH will continue its Telemedicine and Visible Human programs and develop and test a graphical user interface for an existing medical imaging system. NLM will begin projects for the full object identification of the Visible Human data sets. NCRR will define the requirements to establish and evaluate two or three collaboratory testbeds (possibly with NSF and DARPA as partners).
DOE will provide a prototype integrated, distributed multimedia scientific visualization environment for HPCC researchers by integrating existing collaborative tools into a virtual Laboratory Framework.
NIST will support projects on models, architectures, conformance testing and collaboratory technology supporting manufacturing integration, information metrology, and improvement in the accessibility of standard reference data and algorithms for scientists, educators, the workforce and the public.
ED's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation will continue funding of 15 continuing and one new Rehabilitation Engineering Research centers (RERCs). These centers support programs designed to conduct research, demonstration, and training activities. RERCs focus on issues dealing with rehabilitation technology, including rehabilitation engineering and assistive technology devices and services.
AHCPR supports research into the barriers to a successful installation of comprehensive health information systems, emphasizing the speed, cost, and human factors that affect success--to accelerate the transfer of computer-based information technology. They will evaluate the medical effectiveness and economic impact (cost benefits) of automated clinical decision support systems in diverse health care settings.
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