12375394
The Alexandria digital earth prototype
This note summarizes the system development activities of the Alexandr ia Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) Project.5 ADEPT and the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) are, respectively, the research and operational components of the Alexandria Digital Library Project. The goal of ADEPT is to build a distributed digital library (DL) of personalized collections of geospatially referenced information. This DL is characterized by: (1) services for building, searching, and using personalized collections; (2) collections of georeferenced multimedia information, including dynamic simulation models of spatially distributed processes; and (3) user interfaces employing the concept of a “Digital Earth”. Important near-term objectives for ADEPT are to build prototype collections that support undergraduate learning in physical, human, and cultural geography and related disciplines, and then to evaluate whether using such resources helps students learn to reason scientifically. Collections and services developed by ADEPT researchers will migrate to ADL as they mature.
7260476
Visual Explorations for the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype
The Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype project addresses issues of access, browsing, delivery and understanding of georeferenced library items. Two visualization approaches that address these issues in different ways are under development: interfaces between some existing digital earth systems and the digital library, and spatial but nongeoreferenced information spaces. Both the abstract spatial and georeferenced projects are being evaluated for their educational potential in classroom and lectures, in labs and as tools for students to use on their own.
15703762
Armi: a High Level Communication Library for Stapl
ARMI is a communication library that provides a framework for expressing fine-grain parallelism and mapping it to a particular machine using shared-memory and message passing library calls. The library is an advanced implementation of the RMI protocol and handles low-level details such as scheduling incoming communication and aggregating outgoing communication to coarsen parallelism. These details can be tuned for different platforms to allow user codes to achieve the highest performance possible without manual modification. ARMI is used by STAPL, our generic parallel library, to provide a portable, user transparent communication layer. We present the basic design as well as the mechanisms used in the current Pthreads/OpenMP, MPI implementations and/or a combination thereof. Performance comparisons between ARMI and explicit use of Pthreads or MPI are given on a variety of machines, including an HP-V2200, Origin 3800, IBM Regatta and IBM RS/6000 SP cluster.
35525617
Eye movements and pupil dilation during event perception
Human observers segment ongoing activities into events that are reliable across observers [Newtson and Engquist 1976]. Segments can be small ("fine") or large ("coarse") with clusters of fine-grained segments relating hierarchically to coarse segments. Segmentation behaviour occurs even without instruction indicated by neural activity in the Medial Temporal complex (MT+)and Frontal Eye Field (FEF). Similar activation is observed during active segmentation [Zacks et al. 2001]. These two brain regions are known to be active during the processing of visual motion (MT+) and guiding saccadic eye movements (FEF). This, along with behavioural evidence [Zacks 2004], indicates that visual motion may play an important role in identifying events.
12515579
Supporting serendipitous integration in mobile computing environments
Abstract In the richly networked world of the near future, mobile computing users will be confronted with an ever-expanding array of devices and services accessible in their environments. In such a world, we cannot expect to have available to us specific applications that allow us to accomplish every conceivable combination of devices that we may wish. Instead, we believe that many of our interactions with the network will be characterized by the use of “general purpose” tools that allow us to discover, use, and integrate multiple devices around us. This paper lays out the case for why we believe that so-called “serendipitous integration” is a necessary fact that we will face in mobile computing, and explores a number of design experiments into supporting end user configuration and control of networked environments through general purpose tools. We present an iterative design approach to creating such tools and their user interfaces, discuss our observations about the challenges of designing for such a world, and then explore a number of tools that take differing design approaches to overcoming these challenges. We conclude with a set of reflections on the user experience issues that we believe are inherent in dealing with ad hoc mobile computing in richly networked environments.
9064289
Automatic Pattern Embedding in Protein Structure Models
This article describes an implementation of a set of rules for automatically embedding a minimal functional sequence pattern in a structural hidden Markov model. The final product is a library of wide ranging fold models with encoded information about the functional families.
29526990
The orbital browser: composing ubicomp services using only rotation and selection
Most ubiquitous computing environments are designed as collections of highly distributed and heterogeneous services. In this paper we describe a user interface, the Orbital Browser, which reduces the complexity of ubicomp service composition to two simple end-user operations: rotation and selection. We discuss the design requirements imposed by service composition and how we addressed them with our system.