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Illinois Technology Organization Is Making Broad Impact
Released Oct 3, 2005
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In the room are a half dozen people, several with laptops in front of them, seated around a large table in the midst of a videoconference. On the wall above them is a large screen, subdivided into a series of individual windows. In one window there is a live video feed with a group of people located more than 150 miles away in Champaign, Illinois; in another window there is a group located in northern Virginia, more than 700 miles away.
In an adjoining room, a young researcher is seated at a computer terminal. Behind him is a series of what look like large overlapping glass panels arrayed in a vertical stack. The entire apparatus folds out of a large black box with handles on the outside, a sign that it can be folded and packed for storage or transport. Inside one of the glass panels is a three-dimensional image of a human skull; beside the image is a black manipulator arm that when activated as a virtual “scalpel” allows a user to “slice” the skull to reveal its interior.
In yet another room, a series of large video screens occupies an entire wall from floor to ceiling, creating a continuous mass of square-shaped panels. In each large panel are screen shots and video feeds, allowing many users to view large amounts of data from many different locations and multiple sources.
Any one of these rooms or systems by itself is not an uncommon sight in offices, labs, or classrooms around the country and the world. What is unusual about this place—the Technology Research, Education, and Commercialization Center (TRECC) located in West Chicago, Illinois—is that all of these systems and more are located in a single integrated facility that is at once a showcase for the technology of information exchange as well as a place for research and business. TRECC is a multidisciplinary organization that has its virtual fingers in many pots—it is a program of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by the Office of Naval Research (Dr. Ralph Wachter, Code 311, program manager), and administered by the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
On August 29-30, TRECC, along with its sister organization the National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (also funded by ONR and associated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications), conducted a joint program review at their Arlington, Va., offices, the Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education, Science, and Software. The majority of the projects profiled focus on data management and cyber-security, and nearly all of them bring together a mix of professionals, academics, and students to accomplish tasks as varied as creating realistic games to train network administrators or building an “extensible brain” to manage information overload.
Central to TRECC’s unique facility in West Chicago is its 26-processor high performance computing cluster that allows anyone from researchers working on cyber-security projects to high school physics students studying engineering to have access to a supercomputer. In addition, there also is a 16-processor graphics cluster that powers a 15-panel tiled display that allows either a single enormous window or multiple smaller windows viewed simultaneously. There are similar capabilities at the Arlington-based Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education, Science, and Software facility.
One project to come out of TRECC takes advantage of this technology to reach out to the community. The Educators’ Knowledge Center is a program offered free to K-12 educators in the state of Illinois. Established in September 2004, the Educators’ Knowledge Center gives teachers, administrators, and other school officials a virtual meeting place that combines videoconferencing, chat, and the ability to post documents or presentation slides all at the same time in the same “room.” To jump start the project, 125 web cameras were distributed to schools around the state. In less than a year of operation, the Educators’ Knowledge Center has garnered 450 registered users and now has hundreds of visits each month.
Nancy Komlanc, director of education and training for TRECC, believes there is an opportunity to use this videoconferencing tool for things other than just getting educators in touch with each other. She would like to see the technology of the Educators’ Knowledge Center used on board Navy ships, for communication between ships or even within a ship.
“The Educator’s Knowledge Center has proved to be a very successful large scale test-bed for ultimately creating a ‘Naval Knowledge Center,’” said Komlanc. “All the tools within the Knowledge Center encourage communication and collaboration. Videoconferencing is just one technology that has limitless applications for naval personnel.”
An example of the successful transfer of technology with the help of TRECC and the University of Illinois is RiverGlass, a start-up software company that specializes in data mining and analysis. A powerful set of tools collects data from multiple and disparate sources—from web-based information to stand-alone archives and databases to internal documents—and then processes the information using a complex series of algorithms tailored to the information needs of the client. The result is automatic data analysis, a kind of virtual intelligence analyst that literally works while you sleep.
The products of this system, for instance, could include alerting law enforcement agencies to potential terrorist threats by linking such wide-ranging sources as newspaper archives, prison and immigration records, and even employment data. Using this information, RiverGlass’ “StreamCatcher” can create a matrix of connections that might suggest possible suspects for investigation.
In another example of cross-over value, like many of the projects funded or nurtured by TRECC, such technology could easily be applied to the world of pure research, providing a powerful tool for scientists to search for data that might otherwise go undiscovered.
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This article originally appeared in the September 2, 2005 issue of OrigiNatoR, the newsletter of the (Office of Naval Research.)
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