January 1997
- David Ebert David
S. Ebert spoke on "Procedural
Techniques for Realistic Computer Graphics" and signed the book
Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach.(AP
Professional) at Computer Literacy Bookstore in Virginia on January
11, 1997.
- David
S. Ebert has been selected as Late Breaking Hot Topics Co-Chair
for IEEE
Visualization '97, October 1997.
- Aaron Roberts (NASA), David Ebert , M. Goldstein (NASA),
Lloyd Treinish (IBM), and Dan Spicer (NASA) received a grant of
$541,300 from the NASA AISRP program for a 3 year project entitled
"Desktop Sterescopic Visualization and Analysis of Multi-Dimensional
Data Sets."
-
Tim Finin, James Mayfield and Russell Turner have received an award of
$160K over 30 months as part of a DARPA-sponsored research project
aimed at creating an environment for better software engineering. The
project -- EVOLVER: A Capability Package Supporting Evolutionary Views
of Lifecycle Versions Elements and Rationales -- is led by Lockheed
Martin Tactical Defense Systems and also includes WPL Laboratories and
Knowledge Evolution Inc. (KEI).
December 1996
November 1996
October 1996
- Ebert, D., Shaw, C., Zwa, A., and Starr, C.
"Two-handed Interactive Stereoscopic Visualization,"
presented at IEEE Visualization '96 October 31, 1996.
- Ebert, D., Shaw, C., Zwa, A., Miller, E., and Roberts, D. A.
Minimally-immersive Volumetric Information
Visualization," presented at IEEE
Information
Visualization '96 October 28, 1996.
- Ph.D. student Mike Grasso
has received a phase II small business innovation research grant
award from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will provide
$750K over the next two to three years to complete a speech-driven
animal drug toxcology system. Data entry has become the bottleneck of
many scientific applications designed to collect and manage
information related to experimental studies. In animal drug toxicology
studies, this is true because of the many hands-busy and eyes-busy
constraints during animal handling, necropsy, and microscopic
exams. The objective of this study is to design a voice-driven
computer system to support the hands-free and eyes-free collection of
data related to animal drug toxicology studies. This type of
automation at the source of data collection could be used to greatly
reduce the data validation costs associated with bringing new drugs to
market.
- Tim Finin, Panelist, "Technologies and Tools", The First
Annual Conference on Leveraging
Cyberspace, October 8 and 9, 1996, XEROX Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), Palo Alto, California.
September 1996
- Tim Finin, panelist "When an agent gets here, what can it
do?", Dartmouth
Workshop on Transportable Agents, September 27-28, 1996. Dartmouth
College, Hanover NH.
- Ethan L. Miller,
"Towards
Scalable Benchmarks for Mass Storage Systems,"
Fifth NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Conference on Mass
Storage Systems and Technologies, College Park, MD, September 1996.
- Timothy J. Gibson
and Ethan L. Miller
"The Case
for Personal Computers as Workstations," to appear in
the Computer Measurement Group Conference, San Diego, CA, December, 1996.
- Ethan L. Miller
and Randy H. Katz,
"RAMA:
An Easy-To-Use, High-Performance Parallel File System,"
to appear in Parallel Computing.
- Tulay Adali presented the
paper ``Channel equalization using partial
likelihood estimation and recurrent canonical piecewise-linear neural
network,'' co-authored by
Xiao Liu
at the 1996 European Conf. on Signal Processing, Trieste, Italy,
10-13 September, 1996.
- Tulay Adali presented the
paper ``Radiation dose optimization in computed radiography
by shape analysis and wavelet analysis,'' co-authored by
Jason Xuan,
Yue Wang, and Eliot Siegel, at the 1996 European Conf. on Signal Processing,
Trieste, Italy, 10-13 September, 1996.
July 1996
- David S. Ebert has been
selected as Sketches Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 97, 3-8 August 1997,Los Angeles, California.
- David S. Ebert,
Chris D. Shaw, Amen Zwa , and Cindy Starr, "Two-handed Interactive Stereoscopic Visualization," to appear in Proceedings IEEE Visualization '96, October 1996.
- David S. Ebert will teach (and chair)
SIGGRAPH 96 Course 10: Procedural Modeling and Animation Techniques,
Monday August 5, 1996, New Orleans, LA with John Hart, Ken Musgrave, Ken Perlin, Karl Sims, and Brian Wyvill.
June 1996
- Ethan Miller presented
the talk "RAMA: An Easy-to-Use Scalable High Performance Parallel
File System" at Sandia National
Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM.
- David S. Ebert,
Chris D. Shaw,
Amen Zwa,
Ethan L. Miller, and D. Aaron
Roberts, "Minimally-immersive Interactive Volumetric Information Visualization," to appear in Proceedings IEEE Information Visualization '96, October 1996.
- David S. Ebert has been
selected as Late Breaking Hot Topics Chair for IEEE Visualization '96, October 1996.
- Tulay Adali presented
the tutorial on statistics and neural networks at the National
Polytechical Institute of France in Toulouse, June 20, 1996.
- Tulay Adali presented
two papers, one on equalization by canonical piecewise
linear networks and one on partial likelihood, both co-authored by
Xiao Liu
at the Bayona Workshop in Bayona-Vigo, Spain, June 24-26, 1996.
May 1996
- David S. Ebert presented
the talk "Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization" at
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.
- David S. Ebert presented
the talk "Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization" at
Clemson University, Clemson, S.C.
- At the IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP)
in Atlanta, Georgia, 6-10 May 1996,
Tulay Adali
presented the paper ``Partial likelihood estimation for
real-time signal processing,'' co-authored by
Xiao Liu
and M. K. Sonmez,
Yue Wang presented the paper, ``Efficient learning of finite normal
mixtures for image quantification,'' co-authored by Tulay Adali, and
Jason Xuan
presented the paper ``Information geometry of maximum
partial likelihood estimation for estimation for channel equalization,''
co-authored by Tulay Adali
and Xiao Liu.
The papers appeared in the conference proceedings.
- Jason Xuan
presented the invited paper, ``Task-specific segmentation
for remote sensing images,'' co-authored by
Tulay Adali at the International
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium in Lincoln, Nebraska, May 1996,
and co-chaired the image segmentation session.
April 1996
March 1996
- David S. Ebert presented
"Realistic Interactive Information Visualization," at the Advanced Information
Processing and Analysis (AIPA96) Symposium Proceedings, March 26-28, 1996.
- On March 21,Enrico Gobbetti was
invited at Microsoft Research
in Seattle to give a talk on "Building Integrated Environments for the Visual
Construction of 3D Animation".
- Russell Turner,
Enrico Gobbetti,
Ian Soboroff Head-Tracked Stereo Viewing with Two-Handed 3D Interaction for Animated Character Construction. To appear in Proc. EUROGRAPHICS, Futuroscope, France, August 1996.
- Enrico Gobbetti,
Andrea O. Leone
Virtual Sardinia: a Large-Scale Hypermedia Regional Information System. To appear in Proc. Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, Paris, France, May 1996.
- On March 8,
Alan T. Sherman
hosted a visit by Professor
Mark Glickman (inventor
of the Glicko chess rating system),
who gave a seminar
talk
on chess rating systems.
February 1996
- David S. Ebert presented
"Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization," at the ONR
Workshop on Volume Visualization, Phoenix, AZ, February 14-16, 1996.
- Enrico Gobbetti,
Russell Turner
Exploring Annotated 3D Environments on the World-Wide Web. To appear in
Mayfield J, Nicholas C (Eds) Advances in Hypertext, Springer Verlag,
Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.
- Rite Aid to endow scholarships for UMBC
Computer Science Students
- Donald McKay, Jon Pastor, Rbon McEntire and Tim Finin, An architecture for
information agents, in "Advanced Planning Technology",
(ed. Tate,A.), The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA., USA, May 1996, ISBN
0-929280-98-0.
- Alan T. Sherman
organized a Cryptography Workshop ``Applying crypography to electronic
commerce'' at the 1996
ACM Computer Science Conference (February 17, 1996, Philadelphia).
January 1996
- Enrico Gobbetti
and Charles Nicholas
developed a new special topics course
691j:
Object-Oriented Technology, which in spring 1996 is focusing on the
construction of correct, reusable, and efficient software through a
systematic application of design by contract.
- Alan T. Sherman
developed a new special topics course
691g:
Internet Security, which in spring 1996
is focusing on applying cryptography in electronic commerce.
- As an experiment in distance education,
Alan T. Sherman
continues to orchestrate the
Master
Preparation chess course,
which is made avilable to people throughout the world via the internet.
Lectures by Grandmaster Ilya G. Smirin are broadcast over the MBone
multicast digital video system, course materials are made available
through the WWW, discussions and announcements take place via email, and
weekly internet office hours are held every Friday afternoon
on the Internet Chess Club using a graphical chess interface.
December 1995
- Enrico Gobbetti,
Andrea O. Leone, Alberto Marini.
Virtual Sardinia: a Hypermedia Fly-through with Real Data.
In Binaghi E, Brivio PA, Rampini A (Eds)
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Soft Computing in Remote
Sensing Data Analysis, Milan, Italy. World Scientific, Singapore: 253-260.
- Jean-Francis Balaguer,
Enrico Gobbetti
I3D: A High Speed 3D Web Browser.
Proceedings First Annual Symposium on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language
(VRML'95), San Diego, CA, USA.
- The UMBC Chess Team
placed fourth at the
1995 Pan-American
Intercollegiate Championship ,
held December 26-29, in New York City. The team finished ahead
of Havard, Chicago, Upenn, and many other strong schools.
Alan T. Sherman
is Faculty Advisor of the UMBC Chess Club.
Story.
- Yun Peng
has presented a paper entitled "Relaxing Backpropagation Networks as
Associative Memories" at IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks,
Perth, Australia, Nov. 27 - Dec. 1, 1995. The paper is co-authored by
Yun Peng, Zonglin Zhou, and Erik McLenney.
- Tim Finin and James Mayfield have organized a
two day workshop on
Intelligent Information Agents held at the Omni Inner Harbor
Hotel, in Baltimore, Maryland in Decmber 1 and 2. UMBC authors were
well represented by four papers:
- Dr. Russell
Turner and Dr. Charles
Nicholas have organized a workshop on New Paradigms in
Information Visualization and Manipulation in Baltimore on
December 2. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the ACM
Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'95), November
28 - December 2, 1995. It will provide a forum for presentation and
discussion of new ideas and techniques for accessing, visualizing and
manipulating information. UMBC CSEE Professor David Ebert will present
November 1995
- A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ON THE INTERNET -
College Chess Club Offers Lessons With New Technologies, describes
how UMBC is using Internet technology to offer a special course on
master preparation in chess from Grandmaster Ilya Smirin, a UMBC
sophomore majoring in computer science.
-
Personal Web Search Application Developed , Newsbytes News
Network story, November 13, 1995, By Martyn Williams.
- A number of UMBC CSEE faculty members have played a leading
role in organizing the 1995 ACM Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management (CIKM'95), lead by Dr. Charles Nicholas who
is serving as the general chair of the conference. CIKM provides an
international forum for presentation and discussion of research on
information and knowledge management, as well as recent advances on
data and knowledge bases. The 1995 conference will be held at the Omni
Inner Harbor Hotel, in Baltimore, Maryland from November 29 through
December 2.
-
UMBC checkmates MIT.
- Professor James Mayfield and undergraduate CSEE major Justin
Sun presented their paper Searching the
World-Wide Web Using Signature Files at the AAAI '95 Fall
Symposium Artificial
Intelligence Applications in Knowledge Navigation and
Retrieval held in Cambridge, November 10-12, 1995.
- PhD student R. Scott Cost served as a session respondant at
the AAAI '95 Fall Symposium on Rational Agents held in
Cambridge, November 10-12, 1995.
- Yannis K. Labrou, a PhD student in CSEE, was invited to give a
one hour talk at the Intelligent Agents Workshop held as part of CASCON'95
on November 8th in Toronto, Canada. CASCON'95 is the fifth annual
conference sponsored by the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. It
provides a forum in which government, academia and industry can
discuss the technical challenges that face the software industry and
be exposed to important new ideas and technologies in a workshop
setting. Labrou will talk about his dissertation research done in the
CSEE Laboratory
for Advanced Information Technology.
- Tim Finin is giving an invited talk on November 7th at the Tools with Artificial
Intelligence Conference entitled "Agent
Communication Languages".
October 1995
- Tim Finin is serving on the program committee of the "Third
International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and
Languages" (ATAL-96), to be held in Budapest during August, 1996.
- The 6th
Maryland Workshop on Very High Speed Networks will be held
Oct. 30-31 on the UMBC campus.
- On Saturday, October 21 (11:30am -4:00pm) UMBC Image-Processing
Day will feature a lecture, luncheon, and laboratory open houses.
This special one-day event is being held with the cooperation of the
MIT Club of Washington.
- Tim Finin is giving an invited talks at the University of
North Carolina Charlotte on October 31 and on October 16 at the Naval
Research Laboratory as part of a seminar series run by the Navy Center
for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence. Finin will talk on
KQML and the Knowledge Sharing Approach to Building Intelligent
Information Agents.
September 1995
- The UMBC Laboratory
for Advanced Information Technology (LAIT) has been established as
an interdisciplinary research group focused on advanced database and
knowledge-based systems, intelligent agents, text and natural language
processing, intelligent interfaces, information retrieval and
hypertext systems, machine learning, and artificial life. Application
areas include electronic commerce, healthcare information systems and
electronic publishing. It includes faculty and students from the
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering as well as
the Information Systems Department and Department of Geography.
- Ray Cromwell a
UMBC undergraduate majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics has
discovered a serious new flaw in a number of world-wide web browsers,
including the popular Netscape and Mosaic programs. This has raised
new concerns for the privacy and safety of information on the global
computer network. Cromwell discovered that the popular Netscape
Navigator program and several other web browsers contains a "buffer
overflow" bug which allows arbitrary commands to be executed on the
client computer (the one running Navigator) given knowledge of the
client's machine language. MORE.
- Dr. Teresa Przytycka (przytyck@cs.umbc.edu) has
joined the CSEE Department as a visiting scholar for the 1995-96
academic year. Dr. Przytycka is currently on the faculty of Odense
University, Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the University of British Columbia in 1990 where she did fundamental
work on algorithms for parallel computation. Her current research
interests include computational biology, graph theory and the design
and analysis of parallel, distributed, and sequential algorithms.
- National Research Council Ranks Research Programs -- UMBC
Computer Science Program Noted for dramatic improvement. MORE.
- Tim Finin is serving on the advisory board of PAAM96 - The First
International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application
of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology. Monday 22nd
April - Tuesday 23rd April 1996, London, UK.
August 1995
- Professor Ethan L.
Miller is serving on the program committee of the
1996 Workshop
on I/O in Parallel and Distributed Systems, part of the
Federated
Computing Research Conference to be held in May, 1996.
- Professor
David S. Ebert is serving on the courses committee for the
ACM
SIGGRAPH '96 conference to be held August 4-9, 1996 at the Ernest
N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.
- Professor
David S. Ebert is serving as Demonstrations Co-Chair for the
IEEE Visualization '95
conference conference to be held October 29 - November 3, 1995
at the Atlanta Airport Hilton and Towers, Atlanta, Georgia.
- Professor
David S. Ebert chaired a course on
"Procedural Modeling, Texturing, and Animation Techniques," at
the ACM SIGGRAPH '95
conference on August 11, 1995 in Los Angeles, CA.
- On August 26, Professor Alan T. Sherman chaired
a technical session on cryptanalysis at the Crypto 95 conference at
the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Professor Alan T. Sherman
and Bradley C. Kuszmaul (MIT) had their paper
``*Socrates 2.0 beats Grandmaster Sagalchik'' accepted for publication
by the International Computer Chess Association Journal .
- Professor Marvin
B. Cooper Chess Collection to the UMBC Albin O. Kuhn
Library. This private collection, which comprises over one hundred
chess books and over two hundred magazine issues, will be a useful
resource for the UMBC Chess Club and
for all chess players of Maryland.
Cooper Collection Book List.
- James Mayfield, Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin. Evaluation of
KQML as an Agent Communication Language, IJCAI-95 Workshop on
Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, Montreal, Quebec, 19-20
August 1995.
- Deepinder Sidhu is organizing the 6th Maryland
Workshop on Very High Speed Networks, Aug 21-22, BaltiMORE. .
-
Professor Alan
T. Sherman (with the help of Professors Tim Finin, David Ebert,
and Russell Turner) is organizing an Image-Processing
Day at UMBC for Saturday, October 21, 1995. This special one-day
event, which is being held with the cooperation of the MIT Club of
Washington, will feature a lecture, luncheon, and laboratory open
houses.
July 1995
- Tim Finin gave an invited talk on Intelligent Information
Agents at a Navy sponsored symposium on Technologies
Applicable to Human-Machine Interface Needs for the 21st Century.
- James Mayfield, Marty Hall and Tim Finin have a paper accepted
to appear in IEEE Expert entitled "Using Automatic Memoization
as a Software Engineering Tool in Real-World AI Systems".
- Tim Finin was selected to be an Associate Chair of the 1996
AAAI Symposium Series.
June 1995
- Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield, KQML as an
agent communication language, invited chapter in Jeff Bradshaw
(Ed.), ``Software Agents'', MIT Press, Cambridge, to appear, (1995).
May 1995
April 1995
-
David Ebert and the IRC helped the NASA Space Data and Computing
Division produce a publicity video for use by the Global Learning and
Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program, a worldwide
network of students, teachers, and scientists working together to
study and understand the global environment. MORE
-
Russell Turner
was awarded a three year grant of $135K from the National
Science Foundation CAREER program for a project entitled
"An Object-Oriented 3D Interaction Toolkit for Virtual
Environment Research".
March 1995
- Live web event: Man vs. Machine Chess Match -- Friday March 24
from 10:00am to 4:00pm EST. MORE.
- Professor James
Sasaki was awarded a three year grant of $80K from the National
Science Foundation for a project entitled "An Imperative
Mixed-Constructive Type Theory for Program Verification".
MORE.
- Professor Howard
Motteler received a one year grant of $20K from NASA for a project
entitled "Information Content in Atmospheric Retrievals and
Radiative Transfer Calculations".
- Professor
Alan T. Sherman is building a connection with IBM's
Distributed Computing Security Research Group at the T. J. Watson
Research Center in White Plains, New York. Sherman has arranged for
UMBC undergraduate Ray Cromwell to work at IBM over the summer
on a project applying cryptography to electronic banking.
- On March 7, 1995, Dr. Matt Franklin (ATT Bell Labs) presented
a research seminar on how to apply cryptography in electronic
commerce. Franklin described his new method for carrying out a
sealed-bid auction electronically. Professor Alan T. Sherman hosted
the event. Abstract
- Professors Richard
Chang, Ethan Miller, Alan Sherman, Yelena
Yesha, and Yaacov Yesha were appointed to the University of Maryland Institute
for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).
MORE.
- Professors Richard
Chang and Alan
T. Sherman received a $5,328 grant from the National Security
Agency, under the Mathematical Sciences Program, for the 12th Maryland
Theoretical Computer Science Day, to be held March 24, 1995, at
UMBC. This one-day conference will feature distinguished talks on
quantum computing, integer factoring, approximation algorithms, and
massively parallel search. As a special side event, International
Grandmaster Gennady Sagalchik will play one slow chess game against a
512 processor CM-5 Supercomputer running the MIT *Socrates chess
program.
- Professor
Alan T. Sherman is serving on the Program Committee for
the Crypto 95 conference, to be held in August 1995
at the University of California Santa Barbara.
- Dr. Zonglin Zhou
joins the CS Department as a visiting scholar. MORE..
-
Russell Turner
received a one-year DRIF award for a project to develop
"A Virtual Human Sculpture System".
February 1995
- David Ebert was
awarded a grant from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for $34,273
for a project entitled "Interactive Stereo Volume Visualization
for Space Physics Data" .
- UMBC team
selected to compete in IEEE National Programming Contest
- Undergraduate Dedrick Henry was selected as a Ronald E. McNair
Scholar for 1995, under the mentorship of James Mayfield. Previous
winners of this scholarship from the Computer Science Department are
Justin Sun and Pris
Walther.
- Richard Chang.
"On Finding the Number of Graph Automorphisms" has been accepted
for presentation at the
10th Structure in Complexity Theory Conference,
June 1995. William I. Gasarch (University of Maryland College Park)
and Jacobo Toran (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya) are co-authors.
- James Mayfield,
Marty Hall and Tim Finin.
Dr. Yun Peng has
received an Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) award of
$4625 for 1995 from the Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems
Division of NSF. This award will be used to support undergraduates to
work with Dr. Peng on his project "Neural
Network Method for Causal Networks".
- Dr. Alan Sherman
will serve as the Director of the Computer Science Graduate
Program effective February 6, 1995. Dr. Charles Nicholas has decided
to step down as Graduate Director in order to concentrate on his
research program and to manage the large number of grants that he has
recently received.
- Dr. Alan Sherman
was promoted to the rank of shodan (first-degree black belt) in
the Japanese martial art of Tomiki Aikido, as certified by the Japan
Aikido Association. Sherman has assisted instructors in the UMBC
winter-session course PHED-129/WMST-099: Women's Self-Defense.
- Yelena
Yesha received a grant of over $500K over four years to support
her work with the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information
Sciences (CESDIS).
January 1995
- Sam Lomonaco gave a one hour invited
talk at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Short Course on Knots
and Physics at the annual meeting of the AMS held in San Francisco,
California in January, 1995. The title of his talk was The Modern
Legacies of Thomson's Atomic Vortex Theory in Classical
Electrodynamics and a paper on this will appear as a chapter in an
AMS book entitled: Knots and Physics in the AMS Series on
Applied Mathematics
- Sam Lomonaco has been awarded an
Army Reseach Lab (ARL) grant of $15,000 for work research in
cryptography.
- Russell Turner
LEMAN: A System for Constructing and Animating Layered Elastic
Characters to appear in the proceedings of Computer Graphics
International '95, June 1995.
- Ethan Miller and Randy Katz,
"
RAMA: Easy Access to a High-Bandwidth Massively Parallel File
System," USENIX - Winter 1995, New
Orleans, LA (January 1995).
- Alan T. Sherman
received a $20,000 grant from the Abell Foundation to promote
chess in Baltimore City Schools; the money will be used to pay for the
tuition of Grandmaster Ilya Smirin, who will join UMBC as an
undergraduate computer science major in fall 1995. Recently, Sherman
placed first in the faculty category in the Open individual tournament
at the 1994 Pan-American Intercollegiate Chess Championships, held
December 27-30, in Providence, Rhode Island. The top UMBC chess team,
which Sherman advises, tied for fifth place with Harvard, Chicago, and
Toronto in the team competition. PICTURE
- Yelena Yesha is co-program chair of "ADL'95 -- A Forum on
Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries" to be held
Monday-Friday, May 15-19, 1995, McClean, VA. Tim Finin is also a
member of the program committee.
December 1994
- Dr. Yelena
Yesha has been appointed as the Director of the The Center of Excellence
in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS). CESDIS was
developed jointly by NASA, Universities Space Research Association
(USRA) and the University of Maryland in 1988 to focus on the design
of advanced computing techniques and data systems to support NASA
space and Earth science research programs. The CESDIS mission is to
increase the connection between computer science and engineering
research programs at colleges and universities and NASA groups working
with computer applications in Earth and space sciences. CESDIS also
focuses attention on the computer science issues involved in
accessing, processing, and analyzing data from space observing
systems; and collaborates with NASA space and Earth scientists in
research related to NASA's needs.
- James Mayfield,
Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, Desiderata for Agent Communication
Languages , accepted for presentation at the 1995 AAAI Spring
Symposium on Information Gathering in Distributed Environments, March
1995.
- Charles Nicholas and Richard Wiklund were awarded a MIPS grant
in the amount of $50k for their project entitled "Fourth Mesa Internet
Publishing Engine".
- Tim Finin organized and James Mayfield served on
the program committee of the Intelligent Information
Agents Workshop held in conjunction with CIKM'94 on Friday,
December 2, 1994 at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.
- Charles Nicholas and James Mayfield served on
the Organizing Committee of the Intelligent Hypertext Workshop
held in conjunction with CIKM'94 on Friday, December 2, 1994 at
the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg,
Maryland, USA.
- Alan T. Sherman has become one of the Editors for the journal
Cryptologia, which publishes articles on all aspects of
Cryptology---especially ciphers and their analyses.
- David M. Lazoff and Alan T. Sherman had a paper accepted for
publication in SIAM Review . The paper gives an exact
formula for the expected wire length between two randomly chosen
terminals on a VLSI chip, a problem whose exact solution had eluded
many mathematicians.
November 1994
- Tim Finin, Richard Fritzson, Don McKay and Robin McEntire, "The KQML
Information and Knowledge Exchange Protocol", Proceedings of the Third
International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
(CIKM-94), Gaithersburg, MD, November 1994.
- Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, "A semantics
approach for KQML -- a general purpose communication language for
software agents". Proceedings of the Third International
Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM-94),
Gaithersburg, MD, November 1994.
- On November 4, Thomas R. Cain delivered a joint paper with
Alan T. Sherman at the 2nd Annual ACM Conference on Computer and
Communications Security, held in Fairfax Virgina. The title of the
talk was ``How to Break Gifford's Cipher.'' Earlier this year,
Sherman presented the research at the MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science and at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill.
- Several members of the Department helped to organize the Third International Conference
on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'94) held November
29 - Dec 2, 1994 at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. Yelena Yesha served as
co-general chair, and Tim Finin, Charles Nicholas and James Mayfield
were on the program committee.
- Deepinder Sidhu, computer science, has received an IBM Department
Grant of $10,000 to support research in the Maryland Center for
Telecommunications Research.
October 1994
- A grant from NASA/USRA for Research on Unitree Mass
Storage System was awarded to support the PhD. dissertation
research of Odysseas Pentakalos. Tim Finin is the Principal
investigator. The award will total $60K over two years.
- David Ebert presented and co-authored the paper "Volume
Rendering Methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics Visualization" at
the IEEE Visualization'94 conference in Washington, D.C. October
17-21, 1994. Co-authors were Roni Yagel, James Scott, and Yair
Kurzion.
September 1994
- David Ebert was awarded a grant from NSF entitled RIA:
Realistic Interactive Visualization for Computational Fluid
Dynamics, Grant number CCR-9409243, Amount: $61,168, Duration:
September 1, 1994 - August 31, 1997.
- David Ebert edited and co-authored the book Texturing and
Modeling: A Procedural Approach, published by AP Professional in
September, 1994. The other book authors are F. Kenton Musgrave,
Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steven Worley. The book explains
techniques for creating realistic computer generated images and
animations.
- Tim Finin was elected to the advisory board of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for a three year term.
- Tim Finin, Don McKay, Rich Fritzson, and Robin McEntire, "KQML:
An Information and Knowledge Exchange Protocol", in Kazuhiro Fuchi and
Toshio Yokoi (Ed.), Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing,
Ohmsha and IOS Press, 1994.