Focus on Research
Penn State Intercom......April 10, 2003

Need map data?
Tell DAVE_G

Computer system responds
to voice and hand gestures

By Margaret Hopkins
Information Science and Technology

Emergency management teams, faced with an approaching hurricane, can access GIS map data through voice and gestures for real-time decision making on issues ranging from protecting hazardous materials sites to evacuating assisted-living facilities by using a computer system developed by Penn State researchers.

The research team said the system also can assist planners and transportation engineers visualize the impacts of potential developments and highways as well as help crisis management personnel respond more quickly to other disasters.

"Our technology is dialogue and gesture-based, and is designed so that people can work together at a large map," said Alan MacEachren, professor of geography and principal investigator on the project. "It makes Geographic Information System (GIS) tools easier to use -- you don't have to rely on technology experts -- and it's responsive, so there's no time delay."

In response to verbal and gesture commands, the Dialogue-Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE_G) can zoom into a particular area and show specific data such as the locations of cemeteries, hospitals and highways. In its first generation, the technology also can indicate flood areas and emergency shelters. While DAVE_G currently relies on text to respond or ask for more information if queries aren't clear, eventually it will talk to its questioners. Subsequent generations also will provide a broader range of geospatial information, MacEachren said.

The three-year research effort, funded by the National Science Foundation, has just begun its second year. Co-investigators for the project are Rajeev Sharma, associate professor of computer science and engineering, and Guoray Cai, assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences and Technology. Geospatial information enables emergency management decision-makers to assess an area's risk, impact and recovery from natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and biological hazards including the West Nile Virus. But current GIS tools primarily support individual users rather than the teams of experts that plan emergency responses.

"There's a huge amount of geospatial information available, but there's a disconnect between that information and the decision makers," said Sharma, a researcher in speech-gesture interfaces. "This will make more and richer information accessible in a timely manner."

On-site visits and telephone surveys to the Florida and Charleston County (South Carolina) emergency operations centers revealed the need for tools that share GIS data and that allow emergency personnel, who often aren't technical experts, to work jointly with GIS data. DAVE_G allows for that collaboration among users as well as facilitates easier access to information by a larger and more diverse population of users. With microphone domes and cameras, the DAVE_G prototype allows two people to interact with a large display map (researchers aim to expand the collaboration potential). Its software, which recognizes gestures and interprets spoken commands and requests, doesn't require a teaching session to start the system, so users can access data immediately. The system's response is multimedia and includes maps, textual messages and generated speech. The system has evolved out of the original iMap developed by Sharma with software support from Advanced Interface Technologies Inc., a company spun off from Penn State to commercialize speech-gesture interfaces. The recognition of speech and gesture is the first step for the system that researchers say can improve and streamline decision making for crisis management personnel and others.

"Our goal is to make the system understand the users‚ information needs based on high-level knowledge about their task and their characteristics," Cai said. "We use intelligent agent technology to enable the information systems to be cooperative partners in the users‚ problem-solving process."

Margaret Hopkins can be reached at mah242@psu.edu.

Professor spearheads portion of $1.4-billion
Spallation Neutron Source research facility

By Andy Elder
Eberly College of Science

Paul Sokol, Penn State professor of physics, is heading the scientific and construction programs of a cold-neutron-chopper spectrometer, which will be part of the U.S. Department of Energy's $1.4-billion Spallation Neutron Source project under construction on an 80-acre site at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It is the second biggest science project in the world right now, behind the International Space Station.

The Spallation Neutron Source is one of the largest construction projects of a scientific facility that the United States has undertaken in several decades. When it is complete in 2006, the Spallation Neutron Source -- a collaboration of the Oak Ridge, Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Brookhaven and Jefferson national laboratories -- will be the world's premier facility for neutron research.

The Spallation Neutron Source is an accelerator-based neutron source that will provide the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world for scientific research and industrial development. It will fire an ion beam down its 30-meter-long accelerator tunnel toward a mercury target; a beam that, at 80 percent of the speed of light, could reach the moon in 1.5 seconds. The resulting protons will bombard a target, generating, or "spalling," the neutrons for use in research.

Spallation is akin to hitting a bucket of baseballs with a fastball. A few of the baseballs immediately pop out when the bucket is hit, while others rattle around in the bucket and then bounce out a few seconds later. When this process happens in the SNS, spallation occurs as a nuclear reaction in which a high-speed particle hits a heavy atomic nucleus. Upon impact, some neutrons are "spalled," or knocked out, at high energies. A special instrument, the Cold-Neutron-Chopper Spectrometer, works like the shutter on a camera to allow neutrons with desired energies to slip through. Researchers then study the pattern of the neutrons and the speed at which they move to try to solve some of the mysteries of basic science.

Sokol is leading an instrument-development team of more than 30 members from both universities and national laboratories -- one of the first such collaborations for a Department of Energy instrument. Sokol's Penn State team will split design duties with the Argonne National Laboratory. Most of the actual instrument, which will be housed in a 30-foot-diameter, 25-foot-high building at Oak Ridge, will be built on the University Park Campus. The design and construction efforts will involve as many as 30 Penn Staters.

"We'll be able to use our allocated time for research on polymers, zeolites, diffusion studies and magnetism. There are a whole series of experiments we want to do that just can't be done anywhere in the world right now because instruments with high-enough flux sources and sensitive-enough detectors just don't exist," Sokol said.

The knowledge derived from neutron-scattering research has advanced basic science by revealing the crystal structures of atoms, individual molecules such as DNA, and solids. Scientists have used this knowledge to improve such everyday objects as credit cards, pocket calculators, compact discs, computer disks, magnetic recording tapes, shatter-proof windshields, adjustable car seats, weather-forecasting satellites and jet airplanes. The increased resolution of the new cold-neutron-chopper spectrometer, coupled with the broad range of energies and velocities it can handle, will allow it to tackle a wide variety of scientific problems in areas as diverse as biomaterials, polymers, cements, magnetic systems, geological systems and quantum liquids.

"It will allow us to address problems not possible at present," Sokol said. "In addition, this spectrometer is complementary with other instruments planned for the Spallation Neutron Source."

NEWS IN BRIEF

Flexibility key to mastering
flood of information

Companies can keep pace with the knowledge explosion only by equipping their people with the right learning skills to maintain the kind of productivity that meets or exceeds customer demands, a Penn State expert said.

"Information is expanding exponentially," said William J. Rothwell, professor of work-force education and development and a human resource specialist. "More than 7 trillion e-mail messages are received each year by more than 108 million e-mail users. Fifty thousand new book titles appear annually, with 1.5 million books now in print from 20,000 different publishers."

With today's avalanche of new information from all sides, corporate trainers and educators alike must shift their emphasis from content, "the what," to process, "the how," said Rot hwell, who conducted a five-year study of how workers learn how to learn to cope with immediate, job-related problems.

For more of the story, go to http://www.psu.edu/ur/2002/informationclutter.html.

Digital divide encompasses
more than technology

Access to information technology and training in IT skills are supposed to level the economic playing field for women and low-income minorities, but two Penn State researchers say acquiring that expertise alone doesn't automatically lead to upward mobility.

In fact, the information society may be perpetuating social and economic inequalities by race and gender, said Lynette Kvasny, assistant professor of Information Sciences and Technology, and Eileen Trauth, professor of Information Sciences and Technology. By themselves, technology and IT skills will not bring more minorities and women into the workplace. Essential in bridging the digital divide is dismantling the social and cultural barriers that exclude underrepresented groups from equal participation in the information society.

"The assumption is if underserved groups get IT skills, they can compete effectively," Kvasny said. "But there are broader issues and a need to look at the institutions -- be they the workplace, home, schools or communities -- where people are still marginalized."

Without dismantling existing social and cultural barriers, IT will become "the latest mechanism for stratifying society," Kvasny said.

For more of this story, go to http://www.psu.edu/ur/2002/digitaldivide.html

PENN STATE'S RESEARCH HERITAGE

Used for improved livestock breeding, artificial insemination was made feasible for dairy cattle by the work Professor John Almquist, who, beginning in 1944 in Borland Lab, perfected the use of antibiotics to preserve semen and developed commercial methods of using it. His internationally acclaimed research increased food production and breeding efficiency worldwide.

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