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iTunes U is Music to UCLA’s Ears; OIT & OID Lead Campus Effort to Upload Digital Content |
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 There is no question UCLA is a treasure trove of interesting information. Coordinating public dissemination of the university’s academic and cultural wealth, however, could be a daunting task.
So when UCLA approached Apple about joining its “iTunes U,” it was only natural that the Office of Information Technology – known for its campus organizational talents in IT matters – would be drafted as one of the lead coordinators of the effort.
Working with the Office of Instructional Development (OID), OIT is serving as the “go to” center on campus for schools, departments and organizations desiring a presence on iTunes.
Apple’s iTunes, which started as an online digital music store and has since branched into multi-media, created its university portal (itunes U) in 2007, recognizing that higher education could be an excellent source of quality and ever-changing content. A great deal of material provided by the participating universities is offered free to the public, who can watch or listen to it on their computers, ipods or MP3 players.
Leading the UCLA effort for OIT is Rose Rocchio, Director of academic applications, who is cheerleader, coordinator and facilitator for the program all rolled into one.
She and her counterpart, Jim Williamson of OID have been working to spread the word about turning lectures, cultural events and other campus activities into uploadable podcasts for “UCLA on iTunes U.”
“OIT is trying to harvest the content that already exists,” Rocchio said. “We’re trying to reach out across the campus to people and departments that already have content and who want another distribution point for it.”
The UCLA on iTunes U team, with help from The Library and Legal counsel have developed UCLA’s campus podcasting license, which was designed to encourage a steady stream of content for the UCLA iTunes site by placing legal responsibility for uploaded material on the person contributing it.
“Anyone within the participating campus units can be a contributor,” Rocchio said. “Each contributor has the right to upload his or her content. The project team does not want to be a bottleneck in the process. We don’t want to be the content police.”
OIT’s data center is the production home of the computer application that OID developed to keep track of license agreements that contributors sign as they request sites to host their content on the UCLA iTunes U site. The information will remain on an OIT/OID run database.
UCLA on iTunes U was launched in February 2008 as a pilot project, with 20 campus units onboard as contributors of audio, video and/or pdf podcast material. Once the site accumulates the required volume of podcast tracks, UCLA will be listed on the iTunes Web site along with other major universities participating in the iTunes U program.
“It’s evolving at UCLA,” Rocchio said. “The whole idea of it is to have refreshable content, which is why course lectures are such good fodder for this.”
Users of iTunes U can subscribe to a podcast series – class lectures, for example – and can have installments delivered to their computers automatically, which is proving useful to students.
“Conceptually, it’s like going to the library or listening to a radio program,” Rocchio said. “I’m just really excited about the idea that there’s a whole new venue for cultural, wellness, educational and other exciting information that people can fill their minds with.”
In its pilot phase, UCLA on iTunes U features a broad range of content, everything from academic lectures to campus tours, exhibits at the Fowler and exercise videos – courtesy of the campus recreation department.
In the future, the university hopes to upload content designed for specific audiences – primary and secondary schoolteachers, for example. And it is looking into developing a password-protected section of iTunes U designed strictly for the students enrolled in specific courses.
“It’s really just another distribution method,” Rocchio said. “Content contributors get the satisfaction of knowing they’re utilizing all avenues of distribution to get the word out about what they’re doing and at the same time, they’re contributing to the wealth of UCLA’s efforts to “give back” to California and the world.” |
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GIS Mapping Technology: A Place For Everything
And Everything In Its Place
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 In Yoh Kawano’s ideal world, every photograph, every computer-generated model, every illustration created and archived at UCLA would include a geographic context – a complete and accurate description of the image’s physical place on Earth.
In this world, it would be possible to map the campus’ wealth of graphic creations using Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, resulting in a visualization tool with unlimited potential for educational and research applications.
Imagine a computer program that with the click of a mouse, could show changes in street layouts and building locations in a particular community over decades or centuries. Or a program that precisely maps out items unearthed at an archaeological dig site, explaining the lifestyle of an ancient civilization.
It’s possible with GIS, which has the ability to graphically illustrate data that has a spatial – or geographical – component. Rather than looking at a page full of numbers, researchers can look at a picture derived from data that visualizes how the numbers relate to each other.
Kawano is a strong believer in GIS and its virtually unlimited application in an academic setting. As campus GIS coordinator at UCLA’s Academic Technology Services, it is his job to promote and coordinate GIS research on campus.
His arrival at ATS has come none too soon, with an explosion of interest at UCLA in computer mapping.
“Mapping is one of the fastest growing technology fields thanks to Google Maps and Google Earth,” Kawano said. “All of a sudden there’s a huge awareness about mapping. Researchers are thinking, ‘Hey, there’s a cool technology out there that allows us to visualize our data.’”
Kawano’s background is in urban planning, a field in which using GIS is a given. A lot of urban planning is based on mapping demographics. For example, planners will use GIS to visualize data demonstrating gaps in social services available in a low-income neighborhood. Or they’ll use GIS to show traffic flow or to pinpoint areas lacking public transportation. Environmentalists use GIS to monitor air quality, comparing one community to another.
In his new position, Kawano is realizing broader uses of GIS.
“There are just a lot of different applications of using GIS in almost any field,” Kawano said. “I’m expanding my view of how much GIS can affect other disciplines.”
Take archaeology, for example.
Archaeologists will collect data in the field at excavation sites and transfer the numbers to computers. To make this information truly useful, “they want to be able to visualize their data using GIS,” Kawano said.
In the field, they’ve marked the location of a discovered artifact using a global positioning system (GPS). Back on campus, they can use GIS to recreate the terrain of the dig site and to map the location of every object they uncovered. The resulting picture is clearly worth a thousand words.
UCLA archaeologists are so enthused about the possibilities GIS affords that a group of faculty members and researchers asked Kawano to conduct a workshop to help them better understand the technology and how it works. Kawano, along with ATS colleagues Chris Johanson, Stanislav Parfenov and Itay Zaharovits put together a seminar for the group, condensing into two days what it normally takes 10 weeks to teach.
“It was very successful in introducing everybody to some of the basic elements of GIS and demonstrating what it can do for them. It got them to think spatially,” Kawano said, adding that he hopes to conduct more of these customized workshops for different faculty groups.
Yoh Kawano (left), with Kennedy High School teacher Xiutleth Santibanez and ATS interns Stanislav Parfenov and Meghana Reddy.In his role as campus GIS guru, Kawano has become the technical lead for UCLA’s HyperCities project, which offers interactive digital spaces viewable on Google Maps designed for exploring the great cities of the world.
“We’ve put together a GIS platform that allows us to scan digital historical maps,” he said. For example, Germanic languages assistant professor Todd Presner, who originated HyperCities, has collected more than 50 maps of Berlin dating back to the 1700s. The HyperCities team has scanned the maps and overlaid them so that a viewer “can click on a year and see a map of landscaping and streets and toggle back to modern-day satellite imagery and see how it’s changed,” Kawano said. Presner’s students are using the GIS mapping for historical research. The program allows them to plot their own images on the maps, preserve the result, archive it and re-use it.
Kawano’s work at ATS has exposed him to a whole new world of 3-Dimensional imaging. “Lots of projects at ATS are about visualizing 3-D environments,” he said. “What has been lacking to some degree over the last couple of years is applying a geospatial component to these projects.”
Recently, “the focus has shifted a bit and now there’s a bigger emphasis on thinking of these projects in geographical relationship to each other.”
In other words, when a 3-D model of a building or object is created, Kawano is pushing technologists to identify the model’s place in the world to make it possible to put it on a map – “to position those models in their real geographical context.”
Those following Kawano’s advice “are building everything spatially, not as an isolated object.” For example, a geographic component has been added to UCLA’s renowned Digital Roman Forum project, which offers viewers a computer-generated reconstruction of ancient buildings that today exist only as ruins or not at all. As a result, the program can be mapped and is now available for viewing via Google Earth.
“If everything is created accurately, you’re building a library of buildings,” Kawano said. “Put it all together and you have a map of buildings and you know how far one building is from another building.”
In the future, Kawano envisions a new way of searching for information, not just based on text as with a Google search, but also through space and time, made possible by GIS. By defining everything’s geographic location – by giving everything a “geo tag,” this will be possible. |
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SCORE ONE FOR THE HOME TEAM -
UCLA’S TECHIES HELP BRING PAC-10 ATHLETICS INTO THE DIGITAL AGE
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 It’s not everyday that the campus jocks cross paths with the campus nerds. But when it happened at UCLA three years ago, the techies scored big and today, everyone is a winner.
The celebrated UCLA athletic department and its peers in the Pac-10 Conference needed a solution to a problem and they sensed that information technology could be their secret weapon.
The 10 schools were devoting huge blocks of time and chunks of money to the task of sharing game videos as required by the Pac-10 Conference and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Coaches use the videos of each other’s games to scout upcoming opponents and develop game strategy.
Each week during football season, the conference schools used courier services to transport their game videotapes to each other, which required physically driving the tapes to the airport – sometimes located long distances from campus – due to tight time constraints. On occasion, a staffer was forced to wait hours for competitors’ tapes that were to arrive on inbound flights that had been delayed.
Some of the Pac-10 schools tried to transmit their game tapes over the commodity (public) Internet, but the size of the files slowed the transfer process to a crawl.
Then in 2005, at the annual meeting of Pac-10 video coordinators, someone asked about the new high-bandwidth, high-speed network created primarily for university researchers, known as Internet2. Ken Norris, video coordinator at UCLA’s Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, contacted Chris Thomas, senior networking engineer at UCLA’s Academic Technology Services. Together Norris and Thomas devised a plan to exchange scouting video over the network.
Thomas’ and Norris’ efforts to bring the athletic video exchange into the digital age earned them the techie equivalent of the Rose Bowl championship. In March 2008, they and the ten Pac-10 schools were named one of five recipients of the annual Innovations in Networking Awards, presented by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, or CENIC.
CENIC, which is the high-speed regional network that connects UCLA and other Western education institutions to Internet2, was impressed with the practical aspect of the project. Not only has this use of the CENIC connection been a major boon for athletic departments, it also illustrates to academic departments and university researchers the potential of Internet2 for moving large amounts of data.
“We’re demonstrating fundamentally something that couldn”t be done with just the commodity Internet, and therefore couldn’t be done without CENIC,” Thomas said.
Once UCLA got onboard with the game video project, Thomas and Norris worked with each of the other schools, helping them learn how to use the broadband technology to send giant files over the network in a matter of minutes.
“Our job was to coordinate, act as cheerleaders and work with each school saying ‘yes, it’s possible,’” Thomas said.
The effort started as a pilot project during the 2005 football season and involved four conference schools (UCLA, USC, Stanford, and the University of Washington) plus independent Notre Dame.
UCLA’s Office of Information Technology was designated to host the file server, with the Pac-10 schools sharing the costs. “Each week each team would upload its game to the server and the other schools would download it from the server,” Thomas said.
After working out the initial bugs, the schools were able to transmit all 18 gigabytes of a full-length football game video file over Internet2 in as few as six minutes with a gigabit connection or at the most, 20 minutes over a 100-megabit connection.
Over the commodity Internet, the same video file would take as many as 15 hours to be transmitted and often the transfer would fail before completion.
The Pac-10 server generates 1.8 terabytes of network traffic a week. “It’s the first large-scale production use of CENIC on a weekly basis,” Thomas said, and UCLA’s single largest use of CENIC facilities.
Thomas said he knew he had a winner on his hands when video coordinators at the pilot schools started waiting until midday Sunday to download their opponents’ game videos from the UCLA server, confident that the files would make it to their destinations by the 5 p.m. Sunday deadline.
By the 2006 season, all Pac-10 football teams were transferring all of their game video files electronically. In 2007, the electronic video exchange had expanded to Pac-10 women’s volleyball. By Fall 2008, Thomas expects a total of seven sports – with a total of 70 teams – to use the video file-exchange process, many of which were unable to afford the shipping and time costs of this valuable coaching tool in the past.
In addition to the obvious benefits for athletics programs, the exchange system is having a campus-wide impact at the 10 schools involved. The game video exchange offers many campuses their first practical argument in favor of developing true broadband capabilities, which are increasingly necessary to academic and research departments. At UCLA, for example, it validated the decision to install a 10-gigabyte campus backbone network.
“There are now 10 schools that know they can transfer very large files at high speed on a production basis. They now know how to do this and what’s possible,” Thomas said. That’s the most important outgrowth of the sports video program, he said.
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A virtual tour of the White City |
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ETC Associate Director Lisa Snyder presents her own research with UCLA's Urban Simulation Team to sellout crowds at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Read the complete Chicago Tribune article.
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Hypercities Wins MacArthur Foundation Grant |
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 As part of a collaboration between a number of universities over many years, Professor of Germanic languages Todd Presner’s project HyperCities, a Web-based platform that shows city-spaces (Berlin, Los Angeles, and others) as they evolve over time, has won a grant totaling $238,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Read more:
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Making Interactivity go the Distance |
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Scott Friedman Proves Hydra Cluster Can Move Huge Volumes of Data Remotely
 Scott Friedman understands the value of computerized models in academic research. But he’s not satisfied with creating a simple moving picture of a particular data set that a researcher might be studying. He wants that researcher to be able to interact with the model, turn it to the right or to the left or upside down and watch what happens at real-time speed.
Friedman, a computer scientist with UCLA’s Office of Information Technology, has devoted the better part of the last decade and his Ph.D. dissertation to developing technology that enables both high-performance animated graphics and real-time interactivity.
That ambitious pairing takes a lot of computer muscle to succeed. To supply the required power, Friedman came up with an efficient way to use a cluster of graphics-generating personal computers. He calls his collection of computers the Hydra Cluster, after the Greek mythological monster with a serpent’s body and multiple heads.
The Hydra Cluster is housed at the in UCLA’s Math Science Building. Because the Hydra is the power that fuels Friedman’s animated, interactive creations, anyone who wants to utilize the models must do so onsite.
But a recent development may change all that.
For the first time ever, Friedman has solved the distance conundrum that plagues interactive applications.
As part of an international competition last November, Friedman was able to sit at a computer nearly 500 miles away from UCLA and interact with a simulation model powered by Hydra.
“It was a huge, huge, huge thrill to have this working,” Friedman said. The competition judges rewarded his accomplishment with an honorable mention for “making it look easy.”
Distance becomes an issue for interactive applications because of the potential for a time delay between the user’s command on one end of a network and the response from the graphic-generating computer on the other end. With interactivity, “the computer is drawing as the person makes the command to interact,” Friedman said. There are no stored graphics from which to select, as in the case of an animated feature film that has no interactivity.
With a movie, “images are just sitting in a file and you look at them, like an old-time flip picture book,” Friedman explained.
 Add interactivity to the mix and “the flip book is blank. The computer is drawing the images in real time while I’m flipping.” If the user wants to turn a graphic to the left, the computer draws that image on command.
Having the computer respond to a command almost instantaneously is important because without that real-time speed, the technology loses its value to the user. Friedman offered as an example a cell phone.
“Consider having to wait a second between each number dialed on a cell phone. Slowness is frustrating. Speed makes things more realistic. Without good performance, people won’t use it.”
In the case of science researchers, high-resolution images also are key because of the fine detail they provide. High-resolution graphics require an extremely fast update rate – the speed at which the computer is changing a picture to create motion. If the update rate isn’t high, the animation will appear choppy and unrealistic.
Friedman’s goal with the Hydra Cluster is to update a high-resolution image 60 times a second. Putting that in perspective, Friedman notes that a DVD can store roughly 4,000 megabytes. Updating an image 60 times a second is comparable to transferring 400 megabytes a second, meaning he would fill up a DVD with high-resolution, interactive images in just 10 seconds.
Because data sets created by UCLA scientists are so large and complex, trying to render a drawing from them using anything less than the Hydra Cluster would be too slow to be useful.
“A single computer can’t do it at a rate that allows effective interactivity,” Friedman said. “To speed up the process, you need to divvy the work up among a cluster of computers to get the job done quicker.”
Accomplishing all of this while being hooked directly into the Hydra Cluster is one thing. Making it happen remotely is something very different. At the very least, moving that much data would require a lot of network bandwidth.
And that’s where the international competition comes in.
Each year the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers stage the Bandwidth Challenge during their international supercomputing conference.
The purpose of the challenge is to see who can make the most of the huge bandwidth – 10 gigabits – provided to the conference site. Entrants demonstrate innovative applications that involve moving massive amounts of data across the network.
Conference literature states that the competition “is designed to test the limits of network capabilities, and past events have showcased multi-gigabit-per-second demonstrations never before thought possible.”
The Hydra Cluster and its high-resolution graphic and interactive capabilities seemed like a natural for the challenge – as long as Friedman could make it work across the nearly 500 miles spanning the conference in Reno and OIT facilities at UCLA.
For the competition, Friedman chose a chemistry simulation of a diffusion-limited aggregation, illustrating the interesting shapes that form when, for example, particles of dirt are sprinkled onto water.
In Reno, Friedman hooked a computer to the Internet, connecting to the Hydra Cluster at UCLA, and began running software he had written for the competition. Once everything was up and running, “I was able to interactively visualize this data set from Reno.”
Hydra was, in fact, sending high-resolution images in real time over the Internet to the computer in Reno in response to Friedman’s interactive commands.
“It was a very happy surprise to fire it up and it worked,” Friedman said.
In all, Friedman was able to use 2.8 gigabits per second of bandwidth out of the 10 provided for the competition. While it was running, his program accounted for 95 percent of UCLA’s total Internet traffic.
His success in Reno fuels Friedman’s hopes of one day offering Hydra’s capabilities remotely to UCLA researchers in the comfort of their own offices, and perhaps the offices of researchers across the entire UC system. Until then, he’ll continue to develop the data sets and algorithms that will make Hydra accessible to all who would benefit from its exceptional graphics capability.
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Addicted in Second Life |
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 You walk into an apartment scattered with crack pipes, empty bottles and cigarette butts. The walls are smoke-stained, the shades are closed, and it’s dark. But it’s not so dark that you can’t see a couple of glaze-eyed folks shooting up in the corner. One of them approaches you and asks, “Want a hit?”
Take a breath. Think about how you feel being asked this question. Consider the bottles and the pipes and the people getting high. Think about how inclined you are to reply “yes” or “no.” Now, step away from the screen, write down your response, and resume life in the real world, because the situation that you were just propositioned to indulge in wasn’t real. It was a virtual world in “Second Life.”
Chris Culbertson, an Interdepartmental Program Neuroscience graduate student, is using that virtual world to try to find the most effective treatments for people addicted to methamphetamines. The project – being done at the Jane & Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Behavior - is under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Newton and Richard De La Garza. Other partners on the innovative project are Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Academic Technology Services and the Experiential Technologies Centers. Itay Zaharovits of the ETC has been a main contributor in creating the virtual environment that features in Second Life.
The goal of the project is to create an interactive platform that provides a safe way to explore addiction in a controlled, yet realistic environment. The project is one of the first experiments to merge an online social platform with medical research. By incorporating a popular mechanism with pioneering scholarly study, the team may transform the future of medical testing for addiction.
Beginning as a social networking tool that can be imagined as a mix of MySpace and the Sims (a popular strategic life-simulation computer game where the player controls the daily activities of a virtual person), Second Life has become more than a platform for online socializing. The activities of everyday life are mirrored in Second Life, a simulated community that is growing in size and socioeconomic promise. Members are called “residents” and choose a cyber-person to represent themselves. These cyber-persons are known as avatars.
Each avatar is personally designed and can look however the resident chooses. Once in the virtual world, residents move freely between different locales, socialize with fellow residents, go shopping, and buy land to build their homes.
For the project, the team created two physically distinct environments in Second Life. One is a neutral – or clean – apartment that acts as the control environment. The other is a methamphetamine user’s apartment. Although the layouts of both apartments are the same, they look different because of what’s in each room. The neutral apartment is a modern, clean and empty space. In contrast, the user apartment is dirty, dark and full of visual cues meant to stimulate the subject’s cravings for methamphetamines.
Each user who goes into the Second Life environment experiences the scene from a first-person point of view and controls his avatar’s actions like in a video game. A mobile, physical kiosk with a 32-inch monitor, video game controller, and surround sound audio system was constructed to house the program for trial in clinical tests.
The early studies will examine and compare how non-drug users react to the different settings.
During testing, the participants encounter multiple characters engaged in different forms of drug use as well as visual cues. Using cues to measure drug cravings that are stimulated from inanimate objects, such as a glass pipe and lighter, as well as animate scenes - for example, seeing avatars smoking methamphetamine - the test subject’s first response will be monitored for physiological and subjective changes.
Subjects will respond to questions during and after each exposure through a survey that evaluates the responses on a scale of 0-10. Differences between conditions will be closely analyzed for insight into the habits of methamphetamine users, with the hope of using that information in future treatment methods.
--Jade Takahashi
Learn more about the Experiential Technology Center
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When in Virtual Rome
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After ten years of research and hard work that brought together an international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists, Rome Reborn 1.0 – a virtual model of the ancient city - had its first official viewing at Rome’s City Hall on June 11. The Rome model features a real-time viewing experience of the city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as they were in 320 A.D. The project is a collaborative endeavor between UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Professor and Director of the Experiential Technologies Center Diane Favro, Classics Professor Emeritus and Director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Humanities Bernie Frischer, and a team from the Milan Polytechnic Institute.
From the grounds of the Forum to the grand Colosseum, viewers can navigate in real-time through the comprehensive 3D-model that features 30 of the capital city’s most famous buildings, as well as 10,000 other structures that comprise the framework of the city. Adding to the realism, virtual avatars populate the scene and a real-time soundtrack that includes birds, chatter in Latin and music further enhance the feeling that the viewer is in Ancient Rome. Rome Reborn 1.0 is the most complete 3-D simulation of an historic city.
"This amazing model allows us to appreciate individual buildings of ancient Rome within a broad urban context, and thus also to understand how the modern city took shape over time," Professor Favro said. "The dozens of students involved in the research and creation of the Rome Reborn model, as well as those viewing it in classes, benefit from a rich, first-hand engagement with historical Rome."
The model is easily updated in order to show the latest knowledge about the ancient city. Plans are underway to include the evolution of the city from the Bronze Age to the Sack of Rome in the 5th Century A.D.
For more stories on Rome Reborn, see:
UCLA's Roman Forum Digital Library
UVA website for Rome Reborn 1.0
Reuters
MSNBC/Newsweek
ScienceDaily
International Herald Tribune|Europe
globeandmail.com
click on the photo to view a larger
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Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA |
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Digital Innovations Day was a fascinating exploration of UCLA's innovative research utilizing digital technology: digitalinnovations.ucla.edu. Attendees viewed exhibits by UCLA faculty and students on many of UCLA's groundbreaking digital research projects, and met the faculty and grad students involved in their creation.
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Just Like Being in Rome
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The experiential research being done through the ETC is leading to some innovative classroom instruction as well. Architecture & Urban Design Professor Diane Favro often uses reconstructions of the Roman Forum - the civic center of ancient Rome as it appeared in late antiquity – in her classes. The model was built by ETC scholars who are currently working on reconstructions of other landmark Roman structures including the Colosseum, the Basilica Maxentius, the Circus Maximus, and a schematic representation of Republican Rome.
For more information on the ETC: www.etc.ucla.edu
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Summer Science Expedition |
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A group of elementary and junior high students recently visited the Visualization Portal as part of Dr. Richard Boolootian’s Summer Science Expedition. The 18-year-old program allows kids from 9 to 14 years old to meet scientists, engineers and other professionals and to experience science activities first-hand. Through the program, students have traveled to the Galapagos Islands, South Africa, Midway Atoll, Alaska, Hawaii, and throughout California. Local trips include Edwards Air Force Base, Goldstone Tracking Center, and several sites at UCLA – including the Visualization Portal.
Dr. Boolootian – who created the program - has more than 48 years of experience in teaching, writing and research in gifted education. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, has contributed to 24 college textbooks, and written more than 200 original research papers.
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iTunes U at UCLA |
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A new cross-campus IT project will help change the way students study for tests and review classroom lectures. The project will also make it easier for the entire campus community to share information and interests. Several campus units are working through UCLA’s Technology Sandbox on a project with Apple Computers to create an iTunes U @ UCLA website. The project is part of Apples’s free, hosted service for colleges and universities. Through iTunes U, Apple provides easy access to educational content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“This pilot is important because it's a campus-wide collaboration with Apple where we are sharing our expertise and experiences with podcasting to launch a collective iTunes U @ UCLA website,” said Rose Rocchio, Office of Information Technology Director of Program Management.
“And, it’s very exciting because it’s technology changing the way students can access course information. For example, subscription-based podcasts simply download to a subscriber's iTunes U desktop application, as they become available. There is no more checking to see if the files have been uploaded by the professor. That’s a huge benefit for students,” Rocchio said.
Several campus groups are participating in the pilot. The project is being co-led by the Office of Information Technology, the Office of Instructional Development, the Library and University Communications. Participants include professors and volunteers from: Recreation, Student Affairs, The International Institute, Social Sciences Computing, The Center for Digital Humanities, The Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Statistics, Ethnomusicology, CLICC, The Film and Television Archive, AASC and Bruin Online.
The project was officially launched in April and several people have already signed up to participate on one of the two project sub-teams. The UCLA’s iTunes U website should be launched by the start of fall quarter. Currently the pilot is working on content identification and creation, usage rights and process, and a deployment process. If you’re interested in joining the pilot, the two groups meet on alternating Tuesdays from 9 – 10 a.m. in the Technology Sandbox, 4328 Math Sciences. Contact: rrochio@oit.ucla.edu for more information.
There will be a BruinTech seminar about Podcasting and the iTunes U @ UCLA pilot in mid-July.
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Security
Task Force: Keeping Data and Communication Free in an Unsafe
World |
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The UCLA community operates on the assumption that electronic
data and communications are secure, reliable, interoperable,
and have integrity. Ensuring such an environment is a big
challenge. That's why the Office of Information Technology
formed the Applied Security Task Force -
to help create an information technology environment that
is open enough to facilitate the research and instruction
that are the business of UCLA, yet secure enough to protect
the people and data that exist within that environment.
The Applied Security Task Force is comprised of technologists
from seven academic and administrative departments from around
campus. There are also three advisors on the Task Force.
"We went to the campus community to form this task force,"
said Marsha Smith of the Office of Information Technology.
"We know UCLA has very skilled, very knowledgeable IT
professionals working in both academic and administrative
departments, and we knew they would be the best people to
represent not only the needs of their own units, but also
the best ideas and practices that they're using on a daily
basis. Forming the Applied Security Task Force in this way
made good sense."
Specifically, the Task Force works to mitigate the security
risks increasingly associated with email, network and data
centers through a coordinated, campuswide approach. The ASTF
has three primary goals – to:
- Work in an applied way to triage security incidents.
- Become a resource for security-related issues, e.g.,
a task force looking into encryption.
- Help individual units with security challenges.
The ASTF is not theoretical or focused on policy. It is a
"hands on" working group that meets twice a month
and focuses on real issues and practical solutions.
Already the ASTF has built a new website (www.appliedsecurity.ucla.edu),
established an email address where people can ask questions,
report vulnerabilities or threats, and make suggestions
related to IT security (safecomputing@ucla.edu),
and put out a number of "alerts" to
the campus on IT vulnerabilities, threats, patches and
other security issues. The ASTF is also managing the eEye
Pilot to scan networks
for vulnerabilities. This pilot will be open to the campus
sometime this summer.
"These people are seeing the security threats and vulnerabilities,
they're used to working with their specific clients and know
what their clients need, and they're coming up with innovative
solutions on a daily basis. Bringing them in to form the applied
security task force is really what the repositioning IT initiative
is all about - bringing together the expertise and resources
of people from all over campus to ensure the best delivery
of computing resources for the whole campus," Smith said.
Members of the Applied Security Task Force
Ken Davis, Network Manager - External Affairs
Andre Dieudonne, Network Administrator and Security Coordinator
– Anderson School of Management Computing and Information
Services
John Haghighi, Chief Technology Officer - Humanities Division,
(CDH)
Cliff Maraschino, Graduate School of Education & Information
Studies
Victor Mendez, IT Manager - School of Public Policy and Social
Research
Aaron Seligman, Director of Computing Services - UCLA California
Center for Population Research
Steve Woods, Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences
Advisors
Mike Van Norman, Associate Director - Network Engineering
& Operations, Communications Technology Services
Chris Thomas, Senior Network Manager, Office of Information
Technology
Kent Wada, Director - IT Policy, Office of Information Technology
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Learn
more about the ASTF at: www.appliedsecurity.ucla.edu
Read
about the eEye pilot.
Contact the ASTF at: safecomputing@ucla.edu
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Supercomputer for Super Researchers |
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UCLA researchers learn about the Academic Associates Program, which provides University of California researchers free access to large-scale computational and data management storage resources at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Started in 1995, the program helps UC researchers learn how to use Supercomputer resources, paving the way for obtaining larger accounts through San Diego Super Computing allocations. Any qualified UC researcher can request supercomputing time.
Learn more about the Academic Associates program.
Contact UCLA’s Supercomputer representative T.V. Singh at:
tvsingh at ats.ucla.edu or 5-5698.
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Stat Group Uses IT to Reach Out |
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UCLA's Statistical Computing Group takes the campus emphasis on
scholarly interaction seriously. A group of five people who
spend much of their time thinking about things like logistic
regression and survival analysis, survey sampling, and latent
variable modeling, the group has also managed to use information
technology tools to bring together a community of thousands
from UCLA and universities and businesses from around the
world.
For example, last fall the group created a new section on its web site to post Tech Reports. But the idea wasn't to just post reports. The idea was to create a space where anyone could react to the report in a virtual collaboration. So on Dec. 15, 2005, the Stat group posted Tech Report #1 - Strategically using General Purpose Statistics Packages: A Look at Stata, SAS and SPSS. In less than a month - over the slow holiday season - there were 2,500 hits on the report and more than 30 emails with feedback, comments and sometimes extensive suggestions on improving the document. The current version of the report acknowledges that feedback. Tech Report #2, which focuses on special-use statistical packages, is under development.
The Stat Group's main purpose is to help researchers address problems with statistical computing using packages such as SAS, Stata, or SPSS. The goal is to simultaneously help UCLA researchers solve their problems in statistical computing while helping them enhance their skills for performing excellent research. At the same time, the group provides a variety of unique and collaborative online resources for researchers.
Applied Statistics Courses: There is an impressive array of courses with plenty of opportunities to pick up statistical skills. Get the winter 2006 schedule.
Data Analysis Examples: These pages illustrate the application of different statistical analysis techniques using different statistical packages. Each page provides a handful of examples of when the analysis might be used along with sample data, an example analysis, explanation of the output, and a short sample write-up, followed by references for more information. These pages introduce the essence of the technique to help orient people to when and how a technique could be used.
Statistical Classics Archive: This is a place where the Stat Group scans and posts (with appropriate permissions) classic books, articles, and statistical software manuals. It is a place to archive some great works that still offer tremendous value even though they are out of print. It's the Stat Group's way of storing and sharing with the world works that give perspective on how things have changed. For example, the first item is a computer manual for a 1969 stat program called NYBMUL. Even though the interface for this program reflects the time it was written, it has many features that were ahead of its time and rival what can be found in modern programs.
STATTALK: This is a Podcast Series for People Interested in Applied Statistics and Data Analysis. See the new episode.
The Group is experimenting with a new way of sharing links.
Read the latest Stat Consulting Group News.
Get the Statistical Computing seminar and consulting schedule.
UCLA researchers are welcome and invited to walk-in consulting. Drop by 4919 Math Sciences. View the schedule.
Don't forget to email:  to tell the Stat Group what you think.
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The Grid Connection: First Step Toward the Dream |
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The distance between UCLA and UC Santa Barbara was shortened a bit last month – virtually speaking, that is. UCSB’s 128-node Dell Cluster has been added to the UCLA Grid, which will allow CNSI members from both UCLA and UCSB to have access to, and utilize, computing resources to jointly further research being done through the California Nanosystems Institute. UCLA and UCSB are partners on the CNSI, which will facilitate a multidisciplinary approach to develop the information, biomedical, and manufacturing technologies that will dominate science and the economy in the 21st century.
The dream is that some day the Grid will provide an overlay to world wide computing, data, and visualization resources. For now, the UCLA Grid Portal group is celebrating the first step in this direction.
Grid computing is “a form of distributed computing that involves coordinating and sharing computing, application, data, storage or network resources across dynamic and geographically dispersed organizations,” according to Grid.org. Grid technologies enhance the way organizations tackle complex computational problems. Adding the UCSB cluster to the UCLA grid was a joint effort between the UCLA Grid Portal Group and Paul Weakliem from the UCSB CNSI Group.
"This is the first of what we hope are many new virtual collaborations for UCLA researchers, both within the UC system and eventually among national labs and supercomputing centers", said Bill Labate, project manager for the UCLA Grid Portal project. "This might seem like a small step but it took lots of hard work to push the technology envelope while maintaining an easy-to-use, uniform front-end for researchers across many disciplines and platforms accessing a wide variety of computing resources."
The next step for the UCLA Grid Portal project is to enable Grid-to-Grid connections using what is called the “Inter Grid Resource Broker.” The Inter Grid Resource Broker will allow the mutual acceptance of user access between via certificates. In principal this is a much more difficult operational, security, and technical issue than the Grid Portal itself.
The UCLA Grid Portal group (which includes Kejian Jin, Prakashan Korambath, TV Singh, Joan Slottow and Pete Nielsen) has applied for a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation to build and implement the Inter Grid Resource Broker and several other major enhancements to the UCLA Grid.
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Grid Web Interface Now Available
The UCLA Grid Group has developed a web interface to the UCLA Grid and is pleased to announce that the interface, which interacts with the Globus Toolkit 3.2, is now available for beta testing on the Hoffman Cluster.
A Grid is a distributed computing infrastructure that integrates distributed, individually managed computational resources and presents a common user interface to these resources by providing coordinated resource-sharing. The new web interface will present a common view of all computational clusters that join the Grid.
The concept of Grid computing was investigated and developed starting in the early 1990s by the Globus Alliance (http://www.globus.org). They have developed the Globus Toolkit to facilitate the creation of Grids.
The web interface to the UCLA Grid can be accessed at http://grid.ucla.edu. This interface allows users to submit and monitor jobs, do resource discovery among all participating clusters, and manages files. File management includes the creation and editing of files, the transfer of files between a user’s local (desktop) computer and a cluster, and the transfer of files between clusters. The UCLA Grid Group invites users to test and use this new web interface to the Hoffman Cluster and to provide feedback. Of course, users can continue to ssh to the Hoffman Cluster and login in the usual manner.
In order to use the Grid web interface, a user’s login id on the Hoffman Cluster must be Grid-enabled. To initiate that process, users should visit http://grid.ucla.edu and follow the instructions on the first page to apply for access. Users will be notified once their applications are approved. Users can not login until after they apply for grid access and the application process is completed.
The ATS HPC Group is currently going through the process of Grid-enabling the top 40 users on the Hoffman Cluster. If your account is Grid-enabled you will receive an email directing you how to proceed.
For more information, contact the UCLA Grid Group at: atshpc at ucla.edu.
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Internet Explorer Security Threat |
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A dangerous vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser (versions 5.x and 6.x for various versions of Windows) has recently been identified. An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected computer, which would allow the intruder to read confidential email, steal personal information, delete or change files, as well as do other damage.
Microsoft has not yet issued a patch to address this vulnerability. There may be some temporary actions individuals can take to mitigate risk. Users are advised to work with their local IT support staff to decide what procedures will work best for their particular situations.
Of course, everyone should be diligent – now and always – to avoid clicking on links to suspicious web sites, no matter how many millions of dollars they promise, if the user would only hit the reply button. Users should be particularly cautious surfing the web and reading email that includes web links.
Related technical information can be found at:
http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2005/Nov/1015251.html
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/911302.mspx
http://www.frsirt.com/english/advisories/2005/2509
http://www.computerterrorism.com/research/ie/ct21-11-2005
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Experiential Technologies Center Research Scholars spent their summer doing field work on some of the interesting projects they spend the rest of the year working on virtually. In July ETC Research Scholars Chris Johanson, Dean Abernathy, Itay Zaharovitz and Steve Guban went to Rome as part of the Mellon Foundation Grant to create a digital model of Ancient Rome. Throughout the summer the four also traveled to Albania, Milan, Bordeaux and Turkey.
The scholars used Rome as the base of operations for the summer's work and while there, they met with Dr. Heinz Beste (Director of the German School in Rome) to examine the ETC's digital model of the hypogeum, the basement of the Coliseum. The basement, a Frankenstein-like structure consisting of a series of walls and intersecting phases, was used to house and transport the beasts that fought in the gladiatorial games. Dr. Beste had created a series of individual wall studies but had never attempted to study all of the walls of the hypogeum in their three-dimensional context until viewing the model. The researchers were able to critically analyze the passages available for the conveyance of the beasts and the elevator shafts and trap doors used to convey them to floor of the arena.
In Milan, Chris Johanson and Itay Zaharovitz visited Dr. Gabrielle Guidi (Politecnico di Milano) and his team of researchers, who have been working to create a real-time-ready model from a point cloud data scan of the plastico, a plaster of Paris model located in EUR, in Rome. The team toured the lab, assessed the current state of the project, and collected data.
In Albania, Johanson and Zaharovitz stayed in a monastery located near the ancient city of Apollonia. It was at this spot that Octavian (who had not yet become Augustus) was being educated when Julius Caesar was assassinated. The scholars worked in the field at an early Iron Age tumulus near the village Lofkënd. During their short stay the scholars collected GPS data points, arranged a UTM grid, and converted a point cloud and CAD topographical lines to a real-time mesh model. The UCLA/Albanian team of archaeologists was directed by John Papadopoulos.
In Turkey, ETC Director Diane Favro and Professor Fikret Yegul led a two day data collection foray to the giant-scale Temple of Artemis located at the ancient site of Sardis. There, the team gathered information to further refine the surrounding topography in the digital reconstruction of the temple. This model will be used for a series of lighting analyses and phasing studies.
In Bordeaux, Steve Guban and Itay Zaharovitz met with a team of engineers and researchers to study the techniques they used to link models and components of models to a descriptive part database.
Before leaving embarking on their travels, the scholars had met with the project scientific committee and developed the agenda for the summer of field work on the Mellon Grant, which is supporting work on the Forum of Caesar, Ludus Magnus, the Arch of Constantine, the Arch of Titus, Basilica Maxentius, the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Septizodium. The scholars had follow-up meetings with the scientific committee at the end of their travels and again in September to evaluate their progress and obtain the committee’s seal of approval.
The scientific committee was composed of Dr. Carla Amici (University of Lecce), Dr. Cairoli Giuliani (University of Rome), Dr. Paulo Liverani (Vatican Museums), and Dr. Russel Scott (Bryn Mawr).
 
 
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UCLA’s Visualization Portal is getting three new Christie Mirage S+2K 2000-lumen DLP stereoscopic projectors as part of an upgrade of the virtual reality room’s display and control systems. The result – a clearer, brighter and more colorful display – can be seen later this month, when the Portal reopens after being closed for most of the summer.
The Portal is an integral part of UCLA’s new Institute for Digital Research and Education and the Experiential Technologies Center, both of which were created to support cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and educational work by faculty and students. Both the new Institute and the ETC facilitate grant-writing and are developing “technology toolkits” that can be used to further research and the sharing of that research within the sciences, arts, humanities and performing arts.
Read more about:
Go to UCLA’s Grid Portal
To visit the Portal, write to: events@ats.ucla.edu
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Multimedia Links:
Read more about:
Go to UCLA’s Grid Portal
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UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center has been awarded one grant, is a partner on two other grant awards and will participate on a fourth grant in the next year. Formed less than a year ago, the ETC supports scholarly research, cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and educational work by faculty and students, fosters partnerships between UCLA and other colleges and universities, and provides a robust K-12 outreach program. In the process of fulfilling these overarching goals, the center facilitates grant-writing and is developing a “technology toolkit” that can be used to further research and the sharing of that research within the arts, humanities and performing arts. The center is located within the Department of Architecture and Urban Design in the School of Arts and Architecture
A focus on experiential historical architectural research distinguishes the ETC from other digital media centers by allowing the center to expand upon current scholarly investigations and technology investments in virtual reality and sonification.
The ETC is a partner on a grant to hold a summer Institute for College and University Teachers in 2006. Professor Sander Goldberg, Classics, and ETC Director Diane Favro, Architecture and Urban Design will be co-directors of the two-week institute that will bring 25 college and university teachers to UCLA to get an introduction of the new technical tools and digital models that can stimulate insights into ancient Roman urban life.
The ETC also is part of a grant project funded by the Graham Foundation. “The Structure of Ornament and its Design Potential” project is being led by Dr. Anthony Alofsin, University of Texas, along with Professor Favro.
The center will also be involved in modeling of Karnak, Egypt as part of a Teaching Learning Resources and Curriculum Development grant, which was recently awarded to UCLA Professor and Egyptologist Willeke Wendrich. The center also has received a grant from the Steinmetz foundation.
Read more about the Experiential Technologies Center.
To see historical models created through the ETC program at the Visualization Portal, write to: events@ats.ucla.edu
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Multimedia Links:
Read more:
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Ecce Homology Exhibit Merges Art and Science
Imagine a work of art that provides an individual viewer the opportunity to become part of a complex science experiment at the same time that it offers beauty and a meditative moment.
Ecce Homology – a 60-foot-long, 12-foot-high interactive art installation that uses a variety of innovative computer technologies is such a work, and it’s set to open as part of the Fowler Museum’s “From the Verandah” exhibit on Nov. 6, 2003.
Several projects at UCLA in the past two years have been aimed at tying art and science in a way that will draw in lay audiences and allow them to become acquainted with sciences that include genomics, proteomics, and nanotechnologies. Ecce Homology – the latest of such art-science blends, is an artistic exploration of the human and rice genomes.
At the Fowler exhibit, visitors will become part of a huge projection in which they can discover evolutionary relationships between human genes and those from a rice seedling. A custom computer vision system will track each visitor’s movements and create light-filled traces into the actual projection. This will allow the visitor to interact with luminous pictographic projections – visualizations of actual DNA and protein information – as the viewer stands in front of the projection surface.
Each pictogram represents either a human gene or a gene from the rice genome that is part of metabolic pathway for the process by which starch is broken down into carbon dioxide. The pictograms are both scientifically accurate visualizations and metaphors for the cycling of energy and the unity of life.
Each viewer – by placing his body into the projection area and moving slowly, performs a scientific experiment that looks for evolutionary relationships between the human and rice genomes. This artistic experiment is the same experiment conducted by researchers participating in the world-wide genome sequencing projects that is done via web-based servers and interfaces using a tool called “BLAST.”
BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Sequence Tool) is the method to access what is currently known in genomic biology. Almost every life science-related research laboratory in the world uses BLAST, making it the most widely used data-mining tool in history. The national Center for Biotechnology Information receives more than 100,000 BLAST searches daily. Despite its ubiquity, for most researchers BLAST is an unseen process.
Ecce Homology is an artistic representation of the BLAST process. While participating in the art installation, each visitor initiates the BLAST operation to generate automated comparisons of the human and rice genomes, which are shown through changes in the pictograms.
Ecce Homology was created by in silico v1.0 – a group of UCLA artists and researchers whose work bridges art and science through the use of dynamic media. Ruth West, an artist and molecular genetics researcher is leader of in silico v.1.0. Ecce Homology is the result of a creative collaboration between artists and scientists Ruth West, Jeff Burke, Cheryl Kerfeld, Eitan Mendelowitz, Tom Holton, JP Lewis, Ethan Drucker, Weihong Yan.
The project is being supported by several academic and commercial organizations, including UCLA’s Technology Sandbox, Academic Technology Services, Intel Corporation, NEC Corporation, the UC San Diego Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and the Computer Graphics and Immersive Technology Laboratory, USC Integrated Media Systems Group.
For more information, visit:
http://www.insilicov1.org
www.fowler.ucla.edu
www.ats.ucla.edu.
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Multimedia Links:
See the Ecce Homology video:
Read about Ecce Homology at SIGGRAPH
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Distance Learning Portal Style
Twice a week last quarter about 20 UCLA students joined 40 of their counterparts in Kyoto, Japan in the Visualization Portal to attend a computer science course called “Inventing the Future, Again.” The two sets of students – almost 6,000 miles apart – were brought together through videoconferencing and the floor-to-ceiling, 180-degree Portal screen that made it seem almost as if the Kyoto students were in the same room with the UCLA students.
Adjunct Professor Alan Kay taught the course at UCLA and Professor Hajime Kita taught from Kyoto. Offered in collaboration with Kyoto University, the course has been taught at UCLA for the past three years. This was the first time it was taught in the Portal, which provided a more integrated classroom setting for the class than Knudsen Hall, were it was originally held. The class was started as part of the TIDE program.
Although the course went very well, there were challenges to get past. One is that while the Japanese students do speak English, they were sometimes timid about speaking up in class. There were also some technology issues, including firewalls, incompatible systems, and chat room problems. The course used Timbuktu, and there were often lags in the conversation, that detracted from the interaction. The subdued lighting that is used in the Portal also caused some problems in the videoconference.
But the benefits of being able to “explore high-tech environments and to facilitate the cultural exchange of ideas” made it worthwhile, said Kay’s assistant Kim Rose.
Course Description: Inventing the Future, Again
Today's "PARC-style" personal computing was developed in the 70s when computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, educators, and designers worked together to create a "baby step" that is now used worldwide by almost a billion people. The best results came when the design was aimed at what children can learn and do with the new dynamic medium.
It is now possible to make a $100 laptop wireless computer for children of the world. What kind of environment should we make for them? How will we help them learn the powerful ideas of the last several thousands years?
This class will explore and create another step towards the real computer revolution that is still in the future by again visiting the world of children and other learners to design authoring environments that allow the most powerful ideas to be understood and used. Much of this has to do with understanding how to teach the underlying ideas of science to very young children, and to those who would like to help children learn.
This course is open to undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, engineering, education, media studies, psychology, and the arts.
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Multimedia links:
Read more about Alan Kay
Read more about “Inventing the Future, Again”
Read more about the TIDE Program |
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Dawson Cluster Ranks as 162nd Top Supercomputer Site
UCLA’s Dawson Physic Cluster has been ranked number 162 of the top 500 computer sites in the world at the 20th International Supercomputer Conference held in Heidelberg Germany.
"We are very excited and proud that the Dawson did so well in the ranking" said Bill Labate, Project Manager for the Dawson Cluster. "The fact that this was designed and built by a university and that it could achieve this kind of performance is very impressive."
The Dawson’s winning performance was 4.403.2 Tflop/s (trillion floating-point operations per second Rpeak, the theoretical peak speed the Dawson can operate at and 2.135 Tflop/s Rmax, which is the speed that it processed the Linpack performance benchmark. And for those of you who aren’t a physicist or a cluster operator that means that this is one fast and powerful computing cluster.
Most of the other clusters in the same range as the Dawson are running with many more processors, were built by large computer manufacturers for various institutes, or run expensive interconnect fabrics to reduce latency within the cluster.
The Dawson Cluster consists of 128 2.0GHz dual G5 Xserves and 128 2.3GHz dual G5 Xserves in addition to various support servers.
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Multimedia links:
To read more about the Dawson cluster
See how the Dawson came together (movie) |
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A Physicist's Dream
UCLA Professor and renowned physicist John Dawson would be proud of his namesake. It’s a 256 dual-node computing cluster that can process vast amounts of data faster and cheaper than anything Dawson ever used. John Dawson dreamed of a computer cluster that would help build simulations and solve the most complex problems – and now UCLA physicists are using the Dawson Cluster to do just that. Physics and Astronomy Professor Warren Mori, who is also the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation grant that paid for the Dawson Cluster, said that John Dawson was, “a mentor to us all.” “This was his vision,” Professor Mori said, as he put the last node in place late last March. “I just wish he were here to see it.”
Hear John Dawson talk about his vision: Fast | Slow
Read about the Dawson Cluster
Learn about the ATS Cluster Hosting Program
Read about John Dawson
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Dawson Cluster Proves its Speed and Ability with First Output |
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Plasma Physicist Frank Tsung says he's amazed at the speed and capability of the new Dawson cluster and that he “can't even imagine how much physics we'll accomplish when the cluster becomes twice as big as it is today.” Mr. Tsung used his Mac desktop and Apple File Sharing to visualize cluster data and produce a short movie of a plasma wave being produced by a laser. The simulation parameters were taken from a real experiment that is being planned at UCLA. The simulation uses about 180 million cells, 200 million particles, and 10,000 steps, which corresponds to almost a centimeter of real plasma.
“This is much faster than shipping the data to my computer,” he said. “The first frame of the movie shows the laser by itself, in a vacuum. The laser enters the plasma and produces a wake which trails the laser and the wavelength of the wake is very different than the wavelength of the laser.”
It will take about 50 hours to run this job to completion on 64 CPUs of the cluster. “A job of this size at the supercomputer centers takes about two months of wall-clock time, so this is a BIG improvement,” he added.
The Dawson cluster is UCLA's new 256-node, 512 processor computing cluster. Built with Apple technology, the Dawson is the largest cluster at UCLA . It will be used for research and education in Plasma Science. Technologists have already installed the first 128 nodes of the new OS X-based cluster in the UCLA Research Data Center . It was purchased with a Major Research Instrumentation award from the National Science Foundation. The principal investigator for the grant is Professor Warren Mori of Physics and Astronomy and of Electrical Engineering.
See the Dawson Cluster come together (video):
High bandwidth
Low bandwidth
Read more about the Dawson Cluster
Read more about Frank Tsung’s plasma waves
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Dawson Cluster: Big, Fast and Powerful
Question: What weighs almost six tons, contains more than a mile of cabling, consumes enough power for three homes, outputs 250,000 BTUS of heat, and can process over 4 trillion double precision, floating point operations per second? Answer: UCLA's new 256-node, 512-processor computing cluster that will be used for research and education in Plasma Science.
Technologists have already installed the first 128 nodes of the new OS X-based Dawson Cluster in the UCLA Research Data Center . It was purchased with a Major Research Instrumentation award from the National Science Foundation. The principal investigator for the grant is Professor Warren Mo ri of Physics and Astronomy and of Electrical Engineering. Co-investigators are Professor Steve Cowley, Dr. Jean-Noel Leboeuf, Professor George Mo rales, and Dr. Phil Pritchett.
Installation of the cluster was a joint effort that included students from the Physics Department, Academic Technology Services staff, Apple sales and systems engineers and people from the ASUCLA Computer Store. As many as 10 people at a time were busy opening boxes, scanning serial numbers, separating various screws and rack equipment, installing nodes in racks, running network and power cables and loading system images on the nodes. The cluster should be fully operational in fall 2004.
Apple Computer was awarded the contract to supply UCLA with its first 256- node, OS X-based cluster. UCLA started working on the Request for Proposals for the cluster in October 2003 and sent out the RFP in January 2004. Eight companies supplied proposals, and Apple was awarded the contract. A two-stage evaluation process ranked all proposals based on a set of objective and subjective criteria, which included the Plasma Physics Groups benchmarks, cost of individual nodes, Gflop performance of a node, Tflop performance of a 256-node cluster, power draw per node, and software tools.
Academic Technology Services has technical responsibility for the Dawson Cluster through the ATS Cluster Hosting Program. The Cluster Hosting Program was designed to preserve researcher ownership and on-demand access to the resource while making available data center space and, and in some cases, cluster administration.
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UCLA Researchers Get NSF Award to Build Largest-Ever UCLA Computing Cluster
UCLA researchers have received a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award from the National Science Foundation to build a 256-node, 512-processor computer cluster to advance research and education in broad and diverse areas of Plasma Science. This major award recognizes the significant role computation plays in scientific discovery and technological advances and especially highlights the strong computational research programs in plasma science and technology at UCLA.
Computing power is rapidly transforming the way scientific investigation is conducted. Along with theory and experimentation, computational-based modeling and numerical simulation are now essential tools in the advancement of scientific knowledge and engineering practice. As a result, parallel computer clusters are now the major instruments used by computational scientists, just as telescopes and particle accelerators are the major instruments used by astronomers and particle physicists.
Plasma research is yielding a greater understanding of the universe, as well as providing many practical applications now in everyday use, such as plasma TV screens. Plasma is the most common form of matter in the universe. At UCLA, frontier plasma research is being conducted in such areas as: fusion energy - which has the potential to provide a safe, unlimited renewable energy source; new particle accelerator technology - to reduce the current kilometer size of atom smashers to meter lengths and for developing compact accelerators used in medical treatments; space weather - to understand the near-earth plasma environment to guarantee the reliability and performance of communication and weather satellites; and astrophysics - to understand how galaxies are formed.
When completed, the NSF-funded cluster will have a peak speed of 3 Teraflops (one Teraflop is 10 - 12 floating point operations every second). The cluster will be housed at the UCLA Academic Technology Services data center and managed by ATS staff.
The principal investigator for the grant is Professor Warren Mori of Physics & Astronomy and of Electrical Engineering. Co-investigators are Professor Steve Cowley, Dr. Jean-Noel Leboeuf, Professor George Morales, and Dr. Phil Pritchett.
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Read more about the ATS Cluster Hosting Program
Read more about the Plasma Physics MRI |
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Changes in GIS Program at ATS |
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| Dear
GIS Community:
After many years of service, GIS-ESRI Specialist Yafang Su
will be leaving Academic Technology Services at the end of
this month. As part of preparing for her departure, we have
engaged many in the community and asked what type of program
and GIS service they would like to see. Many have responded
in positive ways, but in ways that encourage us to move in
a new direction.
GIS has many facets, and ATS consulting was providing an
important, but relatively small focus. GIS is, of course,
much bigger than ATS and we want to begin to tap into the
activities, skills and knowledge base that exist on the UCLA
campus. As we push forward to help the campus develop the
best possible GIS program, there will be changes in the ATS
GIS Consulting program as of July 1, 2005.
ATS will continue to provide licensing services for ESRI
products and ERDAS Imagine as in the past.
However, GIS one-to-one consulting services will be on a
"best effort" basis until the program is better
defined and resourced. During this interim period, ATS will
have access to consultants from ESRI to help with the most
complicated GIS issues. We have also created a small group
within ATS to triage more routine problems and to help find
the support you need.
We ask both for your patience as we work through the development
of a new, community-based program and most importantly
for your thoughts on what a robust GIS program would
look like at UCLA. If you also have GIS expertise that we
could use in a triage situation, please get in touch with
us.
I hope that you will contact the Academic Technology Services
GIS Group at gis@ats.ucla.edu with any questions or suggestions
you have that would help us build a better GIS program at
UCLA.
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New Institute for Digital Research and Education – Message from Vice Chancellor Roberto Peccei |
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I am pleased to announce the formation of the Institute for Digital Research and Education, a center that will address high-end computation, system simulation, and visualization in a way that will focus and enhance the faculty's already significant efforts in this expanding area.
The vision for the Institute has been building for several years and has finally come to fruition through the concerted efforts of Dean Tony Chan of the UCLA College; Dean Vijay Dhir of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science; Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology James Davis; Professor Warren Mori; and my office.
The campus has an extraordinarily large number of investigators who are deeply involved in digital and computational research and working in the realms of engineering, science, the arts and humanities, and applied mathematics. The new director of the Institute, Professor Alan J. Laub, plans on capitalizing on UCLA's considerable strengths in such areas as plasma science and engineering, brain mapping, computational chemistry, fluid dynamics, and climate modeling to obtain base funding that will link researchers in innovative and dynamic ways.
Professor Laub comes to UCLA from UC Davis with a long and distinguished career in control theory, numerical linear algebra, and advanced computing. He will hold appointments in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics and will report to me.
In keeping with its collaborative nature, the Institute will be governed by a Council of Deans representing the Physical Sciences and Life Sciences Divisions of the College, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the School of the Arts and Architecture, and the School of Theater, Film and Television. The Institute also will have the benefit of significant staff resources and state-of-the-art facilities of Academic Technology Services through a partnership with, and a realignment within, UCLA's Office of Information Technology. Bringing together this robust team will enable the Institute to immediately compete with, for example, the National Labs, which already benefit from this kind of infrastructure.
Professor Laub began his University of California career in 1983 at UCSB. He served as Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering there from 1989 until 1992. In 1996, he moved to UC Davis as Dean of the College of Engineering. He subsequently worked for two years in the U.S. Department of Energy as the director of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program in Washington, D.C. While at DOE, he also co-chaired the High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force for the National Science and Technology Council (under the auspices of the Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy).
He currently serves on the "Simulation-Based Engineering Sciences" panel for the National Science Foundation. The panel seeks to accelerate the use of computers in engineering research and education, which will also be a focus of the center. Another emphasis will be Geographic Information System-based research and curricula in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Please join me in both welcoming Dr. Laub to UCLA and in helping to launch this new Institute. You can expect to hear more about the Institute and opportunities for collaboration in the coming weeks and months.
Sincerely,
Roberto Peccei
Vice Chancellor
Research
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House of Augustus |
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High school students get a tour of the House of Augustus, located on Palatine Hill in Rome. The virtual reality model – built as a project of the CVRLab – is a simplified elevation of the surviving structure, including the Studiolo of Augustus, the Room of the Masks, and the Room of the Pine Garlands. Former UCLA student Phil Stinson was the project modeler, under the direction of Professor Bernie Frischer, director of the Lab.
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Read more about the House of Augustus |
Virtual Sound Makes Portal Visit Just Like Being There |
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The only difference between Judy Baca’s virtual Great Wall of Los Angeles that can be seen in the Visualization Portal and the real thing, are the sounds you hear as you stroll down the San Fernando Valley flood-control channel. But David Beaudry, Sound Designer and Visiting Professor in the School of Theater, Television and Film is working to fix that.
Beaudry, and ATS Sound Intern Jonathan Snipes, spent hours along the wall recording ambient sounds and are in the process of inserting them into the model. An added feature of the virtual wall is that Baca is always available to talk about her work in the Portal. Narration of the artist talking about what motivated her artistic and cultural decisions for each panel are also being inserted into the model, along with an interview that newsman Bill Moyer did Baca back when she unveiled the mural back in the 1980s.
"There really isn’t that much to say about the sound model,” Beaudry said. “It really just needs to be heard.”
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External Network Reviewers tell UCLA: Harness Exceptional Expertise to meet the Challenges of the Future |
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A group of external reviewers from peer research universities spent three days talking with information technologists about UCLA’s network infrastructure and cited “exceptional strength” in the resources the campus dedicates to its network infrastructure. The group also made several recommendations for improvement.
“UCLA must preserve and leverage its IT strengths,” and “should harness the exceptional expertise at local levels more globally across campus,” the report says. It specifically recommends that UCLA pull together campus central and distributed network engineers and architects to design and implement the next-generation campus-wide network infrastructure.
The reviewers said that the university is facing both opportunities and hard work that will help it meet future challenges Those challenges include joining other major universities that have developed “campus-wide ‘end-to-end’ shared network infrastructure and related services and utilities that are now indigenous to nearly all research universities,” implementing middle-ware infrastructure, and readying itself for a role in the emerging cooperative research and education fabric of ‘cyber-infrastructure.’
The network review is part of a campus Repositioning IT Initiative aimed at creating new fiscal, resource and technical models that will best enhance UCLA’s IT infrastructure and at the same time preserve local resources for frontline research, education and direct user support. These new IT models are necessary to meet the goals of UCLA’s IT Vision document. Created in 2001 after more than a year of campus interviews and surveys, the vision document outlines five areas of emphasis for the campus:
- Integrate students into an IT-enhanced teaching, learning and research environment
- Make UCLA a leader in data management and analysis, digital media and computation-based research
- Use the Internet to support scholarly interaction both internally and externally
- Enhance productivity for individuals across the campus
- use IT resources to improve UCLA interaction with external communities
Specifically, the Repositioning Initiative challenges UCLA’s current distributed environment and seeks to significantly reduce the number of email systems, network structures, security centers and data and server centers to achieve these goals while supporting the distributed, entrepreneurial culture of UCLA.
UCLA’s Information Technology Functional Oversight Committee is analyzing the network review report and working groups are being formed to lay out the best plan for improving the campus network infrastructure. Additionally, a Faculty Request Survey will be sent out before the end of this year to seek faculty input on their requirements and goals. The campus IT governance committees, which include the Information Technology Planning Board (ITPB) and the Common Systems Group (CSG), will be used to guide the initiative process.
The External Network Review report was written after the study of exhaustive background materials and the March onsite review. Nearly all of UCLA’s network coordinators and central organization information officers participated in the review, along with deans, faculty, students, and campus executives. The external review team was comprised of Ron Johnson, Vice President for Computing and Communications at the University of Washington; John Silvester, Vice Provost for Scholarly Technology at USC; Charles Wellford, Professor at the University of Maryland; and Ken Klingenstein, Director of Middleware Service Development for Internet2 and Chief Technologist at the University of Colorado.
Some recommendations of the review report are to:
- Identify leveragable IT-oriented services, facilities and infrastructure, and develop “inducement-oriented” approaches for providing these services
- Integrate the operations of central administrative business systems IT to coordinate system architectures and consolidate networks.
- Set up security services that will allow the campus a better picture of what is happening across campus.
- Address risk-assessment, disaster recovery and business continuity in a coherent and “tough-minded” campus-wide fashion
- Take a close look at the impact of burdens that are placed on students because of UCLA’s “diverse IT infrastructure”
- Reinforce the UCLA CIO’s role in coordinating the evolution of campus-wide IT architecture, services and resources.
In concert with the External Network Review, UCLA has also embarked on an Email Consolidation initiative and a project to gather information on UCLA’s data centers (http://www.oit.ucla.edu/RepositioningIT/data-documents.htm).
To see the comprehensive External Review Recommendations, go to: http://www.oit.ucla.edu/RepositioningIT/docs/External_Review_Report_and_Cover_7-April-2005_FINAL.pdf
To learn more about UCLA’s Repositioning IT Initiative, go to: http://www.oit.ucla.edu/RepositioningIT/ |
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ATS Intern Program Helps Build a Wall |
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UCLA students working with noted mural artist Judy Baca at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, Calif., knew how to create movies and still frames using a computer application called Maya. What they didn’t know was how to create a real-time, interactive computer model.
That’s where Academic Technology Services got involved through its intern program. Bruce McCrimmon, Coordinator of UCLA’s Modeling Lab, became a personal tutor to student modeler Enrique Gonzales other students working at SPARC. Working in the Modeling Lab, the students built a virtual version Baca’s mural the “Great Wall of Los Angeles, ” a half-mile-long mural documenting Los Angeles’ ethnic history painted on the wall of a San Fernando Valley drainage canal.
“Movies are of a given duration and configuration,” McCrimmon said. Real-time interactive models are responsive to the viewer. “The navigator (of the model) can veer right, left, up, down, turn around, change speed. It’s all according to the whim of the navigator.”
“We happened to know how to translate from Maya to MultiGen Creator,” an interactive application, McCrimmon said. However, the Maya model had to be simplified in order to reduce the number of polygons, or construction elements, in the piece to insure smooth movement during navigation. “That required a lot of cooperation between them and us,” McCrimmon said.
“You have to push anything like this to get it finished,” he explained. “Modeling is very complicated and quality is always an issue – you always want to make models as efficiently as possible.” Since the students were learning the technology as they went along, McCrimmon made sure they didn’t get bogged down in the process.
“We taught them how to build an interactive, real-time model,” McCrimmon said. “We went through the whole process and then we showed them how to use each application along the way. We gave them classes on how to use the MultiGen Creator.”
In all, the process took about a year. But the model remains a work in progress. “The Great Wall model is typical of models we work on,” McCrimmon said. “We know the client is going to add and subtract things in the future. Our models are dynamic. They’re always being rebuilt.”
In the case of the Great Wall of Los Angeles, David Beaudry, a clarinetist and sound designer who is also visiting faculty in sound design in the Department of Theater is working to add environmental sound to the interactive model. Baca and her art students are designing new panels to be added to the mural. The plan is to add those panels to the model in the future. |
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Judith F. Baca’s mural, the “Great Wall of Los Angeles" |
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| To get the full impact of Judith F. Baca’s mural, the “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” a person would have to take a two-hour, half-mile-long walk to gaze at the bold images painted on one side of a San Fernando Valley flood-control channel.
Or a person could sit in the UCLA Visualization Portal and “fly” through a virtual version of the monument to L.A.’s ethnic history.
The portal’s digital model of the Great Wall “is the very first time anybody can really understand the scale of this piece,” said Baca, founding artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, Calif., and art professor for the César Chávez Center at UCLA and World Arts and Cultures Department.
In the past, Baca was forced to reduce her massive work to photographic slides to show it to audiences. “With the portal, you get 180 degrees and you can see the whole thing. We can navigate and fly through it. That’s a way to show the piece much more true to how it really looks,” Baca said.
Teaming up with Academic Technology Services and using the Visualization Portal are part of Baca’s desire to “bring muralism into the 21st Century,” she said. Technology is dramatically transforming her genre, both in its execution and preservation, and Baca is at the forefront of the change.
She and her students working at UCLA’s César Chávez Digital Mural Lab at SPARC are using technology to develop new ways of designing murals, researching their content and applying artwork to walls. The Internet allows for greater public input into a mural’s working design, a crucial component to public art, Baca believes. What is being developed at the digital mural lab “will change the way large scale public artwork is done and the way it can be visualized on the site in advance,” Baca predicted.
Baca has been defining public art for more than 30 years. She is passionate about the role the arts play in society, writing, “Art is a tool for social change and self-transformation, capable of fostering civic dialogue in the most uncivil places.”
She grew up amid racial conflict and misunderstanding in Los Angeles’ Watts and San Fernando Valley neighborhoods. While she was a student at Cal State University, Northridge, the social justice movement led by United Farm Workers founder César Chávez was in full swing.
“I walked into a movement, and the only question really for me was how to apply an art practice to the issues that were affecting my family and my communities,” she said. Baca became “very interested in how graffiti was a defining element of the streets.” After studying mural-making in Mexico, she began painting murals for the city of Los Angeles, employing members of rival street gangs in East Los Angeles to help her. She proved that art aided in bringing the two warring factions together, and these efforts became the model for other local, youth-based community mural programs, including her own Great Wall project.
Baca had become the first director of Los Angeles’ Citywide Mural Project in 1974 when the Army Corps of Engineers enlisted her to help develop a park along the Tujunga Wash drainage canal southeast of Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley. The focal point of the park would be Baca’s half-mile-long Great Wall of Los Angeles, the world’s longest mural, painted on the canal’s concrete wall.
To develop and design the mural’s images, Baca consulted with ethnic scholars and fellow artists. More than 400 multicultural, disadvantaged neighborhood youth - many of whom were at-risk or already in trouble with the law - did the actual painting under Baca’s tutelage during six summers between 1976 and 1984.
Many of those same youngsters are the adults who today are behind a city-funded restoration of the Great Wall. Fueled by this new wave of interest in the Great Wall, Baca, who went on to earn a masters degree and to become a university professor, has launched a project to extend the mural with new images representing the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Only this time, her work incorporates digital technology instead of just pencil, paper and rulers.
“We went to see UCLA’s Visualization Portal and I started thinking, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get the mural off that incredibly difficult site and we could visualize it and we could expand it and do it virtually,” Baca remembered. ATS technologists helped her create the Great Wall of Los Angeles Model.
The digital model “gives us the opportunity to bring in scholars and for them to relate to the whole wall and the content more effectively,” Baca said. “The primary beauty of the portal is that it creates almost an auditorium for architecture. When you’re dealing on an architectural scale, it’s extremely effective to be able to bring it into a space in which you can see architectural scale, you can experience it and you can understand it without being in it. You don’t have to fly to Rome or go into a flood-control channel that has water in it part of the year.”
Baca also is hoping technology and the Visualization Portal will help her realize her ultimate dream for the Great Wall of Los Angeles – that the mural will continue on without her. She and her students are working on a new technique to make giant prints of the mural designs that can be transferred to the flood-control channel wall. Baca will be able to visualize the extensions to her mural and determine if the new panels will work with the old ones by looking at them in the Portal.
As a result of this new way of making murals, the physically grueling installation work can go on without the on-site, hands-on approach Baca took in the 1970s and ’80s. “We’ll print the designs out systematically, put them on the wall, and then because they are giant-scale works of art that could take a lifetime to create, they could be on the site, painted systematically, summer after summer by the next generation of muralist interpreting American history,” she said.
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is located adjacent to Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street. You can participate in the development of its content on the Internet at http://www.sparcmurals.org/home.html.
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Pod People
The Research Computing Technologies group at ATS has joined a growing number of people who are using Apple iPods to make their jobs a little more efficient. The group is using iPods for various system administration tasks such as system imaging, preventative maintenance, upgrades and problem diagnostics on computing clusters that are being hosted in the UCLA Research Data Center.
The iPods have allowed the group to have virtually everything they need for working on a cluster in a small, self-powered device that will work on both Linux and OS X systems.
"We are always on the lookout for tools that will help us do our jobs more efficiently." said Bill Labate, manager of the Research Computing Technologies Group. "If we're more efficient, we can bring in more hosting customers with the same amount of staff."
Before Brian Pape and Bill Labate came up with the idea of using the iPods, they would either have to install the diagnostic tools and systems utilities locally on all the nodes of a cluster, have them on a file server somewhere (that is located within the internal cluster network), or carry a large and bulky hard drive with everything installed on the hard drive.
System images means making a copy of everything on the hard drive of a particular system. In this case the group is referring to systems on both head nodes and compute nodes of clusters. A computing cluster has one "head" node that manages the work being done by the cluster, while the computing clusters do the actual work. System images are cloned to 1) make an exact backup at a particular point in time in order to recover a system that destroys itself 2) to rebuild a system back to a certain point prior to an upgrade that might be causing problems, and 3) to use that system image to clone a new system on to new hardware.
The iPods are also used as diagnostic tools and system utilities. The utilities and tools can tell the status of the operating system, hard drives and memory usage. They can also diagnose hardware issues, clean out caches, optimize the system, rebuild permissions, diagnose RAID server problems, and distribute updates. Some tools can't be run from the system they are running on, so an external source - usually a hard drive that is bulky and difficult to maneuver around the clusters - must be used. The iPods were a perfect solution that provide easy maneuverability. Plus, Labate points out, there's an added benefit to the iPods.
"It's nice when you're using the iPod for cluster work." he said, "because you can always listen to your favorite tunes while you work." |
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Unique Talents Team-Up On Unique Project
Two professors and an information technologist are working on a unique, interdisciplinary project that links atmospheric data, scientific visualization and sound technologies. Atmospheric Sciences Professor Bjorn Stevens, Research Scholar David Beaudry, a clarinetist and sound designer who is also visiting faculty in sound design in the Department of Theater, and Visualization Portal Development Coordinator Joan Slottow, are working on a project to analyze data in innovate new ways.
Prof. Beaudry is using his expertise in sound design and music to sonify cloud data provided by Prof. Stevens. Sonification is the use of sound and music in the display of data. Ms. Slottow has created a scientific visualization of the same data. The project will help Prof. Stevens understand and interpret cloud data, which was produced by simulations of non-precipitating cumulus clouds in the tropics.
The impetus behind this project is to examine how visual artists, sound designers, and musicians can help visualize and sonify complex datasets by creating new visual and sensory approaches to help in the understanding of data. This project is specifically focusing on developing more universal sonification tools to aid in the interpretation of atmospheric scientific data.
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Stat Computing Group Helps Thousands |
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Each year UCLA’s Statistical Computing group meets about 1,200 times with walk-in clients, makes available online more than 25 seminars, and answers about 2,400 emails - all with a staff of four. How do they do it? Simple – they use a variety of information technology tools that the group has been incorporating into its daily business since 1998. Read more.
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Web Collaboration Speeds Stat Course Development |
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UCLA’s Statistical Computing group has been using information technology tools to expand what the four-person team can do for the past seven years. One of the most dramatic benefits the Internet has brought to the group is the ability to collaborate more efficiently – and much more quickly - on the development of new courses.
The exceedingly long time it took to develop new Statistical Computing courses became painfully apparent in 1998, when a Sociology professor asked the group to develop a two-hour Stata class that would support his students.
Since the classes were developed by one person at a time, it was not possible to get the classes ready in less than four to six months. Plus, each consultant pretty much “owned” the material. There was no collaboration, no automation, and no way to speed up the process.
The professor was livid when he heard how long it would take to develop what his students required right then, and Mitchell knew that the group wasn’t responding to its clients’ needs. “They needed materials from us, and we couldn’t deliver them on their timeframe. It was a moment that said, ‘the way we’re doing this is a mess, and we have to completely rethink everything.’”
That’s when the group came up with the idea of developing classes in a modular way, with multiple Stat consultants working collaboratively in parallel. The group started making use of existing class notes, and rather than creating all new materials for each new class, they began adapting materials that they were already using. All of this was done on the web. The result was being able to create new classes in a couple weeks instead of months.
Now, when a professor calls looking for a new course, he looks at the group’s menu of modules, picks a couple of existing modules he wants, and identifies other topics. The modules for the new topics are created – often using existing materials that the group has at their fingertips – combined with the existing modules, and the professor gets a custom class for his students – all in a few short weeks.
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Experiential Technologies Center (ETC) |
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UCLA has established the Experiential Technologies Center (ETC) to focus on the use of new technologies for research in diverse disciplines including architecture, the performing arts, classics, archaeology, foreign language studies, and education. Projects at the center explore a wide range of phenomenological issues including movement, sequencing, sonification, and visualization. Located within the Department of Architecture and Urban Design in the School of Arts and Architecture, the ETC was created to support cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and educational work by faculty and students, to foster partnerships between UCLA and other colleges and universities, and to provide a robust K-12 outreach program. The Visualization Portal, 3D Modeling Lab and the Sound Lab all play an important role in the supporting the center’s work.
Read more about the ETC.
Read about the ATS facilities and services that support the ETC.
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Director’s Corner: A message from Marsha Smith |
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When it comes to information technology and declining budgets the charge of coming “centralization” drowns out the reality of UCLA’s thriving distributed environment. Just as the healthy tension between conservative and liberal has protected our democracy, the healthy tension between local and central affairs protects joint governance at UCLA. As in national politics, when there is polarization between these two states, relationships, and the trust and cooperation spawned from them, break down. In many ways, when things get tough it is easier to draw a line in the sand than to do to the hard work of building and sustaining relationships.
Coming out of some very polarizing days in the mid 1990s, the then-Office of Academic Computing (OAC) had been slow, in my mind, to recognize that the model of central investment and tightly controlled allocation of computational resources had given way to a new model of local control for technology decisions and investment. UCLA was a microcosm of what was happening worldwide –even as technology became more powerful, the costs of producing it were continually being pushed down toward commoditization, putting increasingly powerful resources directly in the hands of researchers, educators and administrators. One only had to be in the audience of the Chancellor Carnesale’s Homecoming and Parents’ Weekend last week listening to Bill Kaiser, Electrical Engineering, Robert Winter, Music, and John Dagenais, Spanish and Portuguese, to understand how technology has not only enriched the research and educational experience but become essential to more forward.
Not having to focus on the provision of tightly controlled computational cycles allowed a new organization, Academic Technology Services, to emerge and concentrate on building relationships and partnerships that would guide the organization to the full realization of its new name as a service organization. This manifests in our participation in cross-departmental teams – technologists, researchers, educators and technology vendors - on new technology development in a conceptual and physical space called the Technology Sandbox and in the development of multidisciplinary research centers and institutes like the California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI), the Center for Embedded Networking (CENS), and the proposed Computational Science and Engineering Institute. It challenged us to peek outside our traditional role in the computational sciences to apply a rich and diverse skill set in scientific computing and visualization to new research and educational challenges for artists, architects, and historians through programs in the Visualization Portal and embryonic Experiential Technologies Center (ETC).
During this time the Internet was becoming the virtual means to building relationships and communities. ATS looked at ways of leveraging the Internet to reach more people to deliver more services – a great example being the ATS Statistical Computing group and its use of the web to transform the nature of its service. Using the web to deliver basic educational statistical modules to more students and researchers allowed the group to expand the breadth and depth of their in-person consultations to ever more challenging statistical analyses. Another example is UCLA’s Computational GRID that allows researchers and students to use the web to discover computational resources and submit jobs without having to know the location of the resource or its operating idiosyncrasies.
Just recently ATS and Administrative Information Systems (AIS), through their long partnership found the funding and worked out the details for making a significant upgrade to their shared data center in Math Science. The results of this upgrade make the center more secure and give the center more cooling and power to support an increase in the number of hosted computational clusters for research. In parallel ATS built out a pilot program based on a relationship-driven philosophy that researchers own and determine the direction of their own resources, while at the same time taking advantage of the central infrastructure and support services offered through the ATS hosting program – all under a shared management system built on trusted relationships. All of these partnerships, rich in their diversity, set the stage for winning a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant submitted by the Plasma Physics group, led by Professor Warren Mori, which resulted in the largest research computational cluster at UCLA.
It wasn’t easy giving up traditional ways of doing business - a business that in the early days of computing served the campus very well. The business of relationships is often messy. Control gives way to processes that gather diverse input and the time required to form consensus becomes more important than moving the ball forward in one decisive leap. As director of ATS I am appreciative of the campus community that has given this organization the time it needed to build itself within the guidance the campus provided. And, I’m especially grateful and proud of the smart, highly skilled group of people at ATS, who have been continually asked to rethink, adapt, and “sit down at the community table” to extend the capabilities of research and education at UCLA through information technology services.
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UCLA’s 3D Modeling Lab |
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Whether they’re building the Roman Forum, a monster-size 3D model of a chemistry molecule, or the Island of the Sun, faculty, researchers and students can get help for their projects in UCLA’s 3D Modeling Lab. The Lab is dedicated to developing modeling and visualization projects that support research and instruction at UCLA. While the Lab focuses primarily on projects to be displayed in the Visualization Portal or other real-time interactive venues, lab staff – such as Lab Coordinator Bruce McCrimmon and Assistant Jimmy Suo, will also help in the creation of videotapes, movies, model-related data animations, web VR objects and other images that originate within these projects. Learn more about the UCLA 3D Modeling Lab.
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The ‘Wickedest City’ on Earth |
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Seventeenth century Port Royal was the perfect haven for pirates and privateers. It drew Captain Henry Morgan and hundreds of other English buccaneers, who would make their living preying on the heavily laden treasure fleets that veered off the Spanish Main and sailed too close to the port.
The city of Port Royal was founded in 1655 by an English expeditionary force, which took the land from the Spaniards who had colonized the Island of Jamaica in 1509. Within five years, forts ringed the 51-acre area that sat on the tip of an eight-mile sand spit that enclosed one of the best harbors in the Caribbean. Built hastily on unconsolidated sand, without regard for climate or geology, the new settlement had the appearance of an English town with timber-frame and brick buildings, gable roofs, inner yards, wharves, warehouses, a splendid church, meetinghouses, a synagogue, a schoolhouse, two prisons, a courthouse, markets, taverns, several brothels, stocks, cages, and a thriving harbor. In those first five years of English stewardship, Port Royal became known as the “Wickedest City on Earth.”
By 1670, the importance of Port Royal and Jamaica to England was increasingly due to trade in slaves, sugar, and raw materials. The town soon became the mercantile center of the Caribbean area, with vast amounts of goods flowing in and out of the port through an expansive trade network. By 1690, there were 2,000 buildings and almost 7,000 people in the town, rivaling Boston in size and far surpassing it in wealth.
But the glory of Port Royal was short-lived, and by 1692, it was all over. On the morning of June 7, a massive earthquake hit Jamaica. Tremors rocked the sandy peninsula on which the town was built, causing its buildings to disappear beneath the sea. An estimated 2,000 people living in Port Royal were killed immediately; 2,000 more died from injuries and disease in the following days.
In 1981, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, in cooperation with the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, began underwater archaeological investigations of the submerged portion of Port Royal. The work continued for a decade.
UCLA has built two virtual reality models of Port Royal, to be used by educators and students. One model, developed for the purpose of filming footage for SpiegelTV-Germany, includes a reconstruction of the buildings excavated by Texas A&M, St. Paul’s Church, excavated in 1969-70 by Philip Mayes for the Jamaican government, and a restoration of the street plan of the entire city. The unexcavated parts of the town have been speculatively rebuilt based on the surviving evidence of maps, views, and property records. Another model, of present-day Port Royal with the undersea archaeological site, was created to be used at the Ocean Institute (Dana Point, California) to help recontextualize artifacts found by Texas A&M.
See Port Royal, the Movie: Low bandwidth | High bandwidth
See the Port Royal model at the Visualization Portal by emailing: events@ats.ucla.edu.
Learn more about the Visualization Portal at: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/portal/default.htm
Learn about the Modeling Lab, where Port Royal was created at: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/portal/modeling_lab/default.htm
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See Port Royal, the Movie:
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Shared Scholarly Work |
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Graduate students in the Research Scholar and Intern Program work with faculty and information technology consultants on a variety of projects that range from the creation of virtual reality models of historical monuments such as the Roman Forum, to visualizing data and creating unique sound for the models. The program – which creates production-quality tools that can be used to further research and exploration - steers and supports the work of graduate students within the Visualization Portal, 3-D Modeling Lab, Technology Sandbox and Sound Lab. The Research Scholars work on developing applications that can be used across disciplines, while the Intern Program focuses on giving graduate students the opportunity to work on a variety of modeling, visualization and sound projects.
Read more about the Research Scholars and Interns.
Read more about the Dynamic Sound Environment Generator.
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Atmospheric Data Sonification Project |
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Atmospheric Sciences Professor Bjorn Stevens, Research Scholar David Beaudry, a clarinetist and sound designer who received a Doctorate in clarinet performance from UCLA and is visiting faculty in sound design in the Department of Theater, and Portal Development Coordinator Joan Slottow, have joined to visualize and sonify atmospheric data. Prof. Beaudry is using his expertise in sound design and music to help Prof. Stevens understand and interpret cloud data produced by simulations of non-precipitating cumulus clouds in the tropics through sonification, the use of sound and music in the display of data. Ms. Slottow is creating visualizations for the project.
The impetus behind this project is to examine how visual artists, sound designers, and musicians can help visualize and sonify complex datasets by creating new visual and sensory approaches to help in the understanding of the data. This project is specifically focusing on developing more universal sonification tools to aid in the interpretation of atmospheric scientific data.
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In a healthy heart, waves of electricity make the muscle contract and produce a rhythmic heart beat. In an abnormal heart, those electrical waves become unstable and fragmented, which produces chaotic, mini-contractions, instead of a steady rhythm. Called ventricular fibrillation, these episodes are the leading cause of sudden cardiac death.
Dr. Alan Garfinkel and his team of researchers at UCLA’s Department of Medicine have been researching heart fibrillation and drugs that can stabilize the heart before total cardiac arrest occurs. In particular, they’re looking at a drug called bretylium, which could be a precursor to future antifibrillatory drugs.
Dr. Garfinkel has created a visual representation of a heart in fibrillation and of the effects of particular drugs on cardiac arrhythmias, using UCLA's Visualization Lab. To simulate one second of heart activity in one section of the heart required 7 trillion calculations run over a period of several days on a cluster of high performance computers.
The results of those calculations show up the Visualization Portal screen as a trio of cubes in bright blues and oranges and yellows and greens. The first cube represents a healthy heart in perfect rhythm. The colors flow serenely over the surfaces of the cube. The second cube represents the heart in fibrillation – with pulsating colors smearing chaotically across the cube with no definition or rhythm. The third cube shows the effects of the drugs, with the colors beginning to smooth into patterns that will eventually become more and more rhythmic.
Such visualizations allow researchers to demonstrate their work to associates and to possible donors to UCLA research programs.
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Dynamic Sound Environment Generator
UCLA/ATS’s DySE Generator (Dynamic Sound Environment) is a Mac-based (and soon to be Windows XP-based) software application that provides a powerful sound design tool for virtual reality (VR) applications. This software is built using Cycling74’s Max/MSP/Jitter, a high-level graphical programming language for music, audio, and multimedia. DySE Generator had its origins as a custom-built tool for very specific applications controlling both live and pre-recorded sounds for live theater, but has since evolved into a less-specific tool for both building sound models, and functioning as a sound server, for virtual reality applications.
Those familiar with Max know that one of its greatest advantages is its tremendous flexibility. It can do almost anything in real-time multimedia processing, and the fact that a patch can be built as needed for each application from the ground up, with every aspect of the sound design user-controllable, has made Max a solution that is almost without limits in the realm of sound design for live performance applications. However this lack of specialization is also a drawback in the deadline-driven world of sound design. Every time you sit down to create a new design in Max, you are starting with a blank screen. So rather than simply tell each sound designer “Max is a great tool – now go learn it”, over the past three years we have been developing a wrapper that allows virtual reality sound designers and model builders (and by extension theater sound designers as well as sound designers for computer games) to use Max’s real-time signal processing without having to program in Max. This has proven to be a formidable challenge: how to create a wrapper that is as powerful as Max, yet not be Max. Our process in developing DySE Generator has been to build functions in Max for very specific applications, then to make each working function into a non-specific ‘tool’ with an easy-to-use GUI that is incorporated into DySE Generator.
Since we view navigation of VR models as a form of performance, the primary motivation in DySE Generator’s development is to focus more on a dynamic approach to the sonic material for virtual reality - what makes up the soundscape and source material of a particular model and how to make these sounds as engaging, dynamic, and performative for the viewer/observer as possible. For example, in addition to the more traditional functions of a sound server (i.e., playing sounds spatially while flying through a model), DySE Generator allows sound designers to establish relationships between human behavior and sound content by giving them the ability to map viewer behavior (e.g., how long they have remained in a particular room, directness of their path, total distance traveled, etc.) to control of the sonic material, allowing the designer to create a more personalized experience for each user. DySE Generator is more than simply a playback device or a sound server that focuses most of its computational power on modeling room acoustics; it is as an environment for specifying conditions and/or systems of relationships by which sounds will be produced and affected.
Control of DySE Generator (either local or remote) uses OpenSoundControl (OSC) over UDP. For example, based on messages from the VR engine giving positional information for a particular sound source and viewer, DySE Generator is able to determine the panning and attenuation of the sound source and place it appropriately in the sound field. Here is the typical data flow: viewer behavior > VR engine > OSC (describing current state of model) > DySE (as configured by sound designer) > Max Patch > Sound.
Messages controlling many of the functions of the DySE Generator are embedded into vrNav, UCLA/ATS’s navigation code for virtual reality. OSC messages can also go from DySE Generator back to vrNav, providing a two-way, network-based communication link between the sound server and virtual reality model that not only provides sound control, but also the ability to manipulate graphics in the virtual reality model from the sound server side.
Research into sonification is another area of great interest. This is an investigation into building tools that allow sound designers, musicians, and scientists to explore how sound and music might be used to aid in the interpretation of complex scientific data sets. The Sonification Toolbox is being developed as a module of the DYSE Generator.
Hi-lights of DySE Generator.
- Built using Max/MSP, a powerful tool for real-time audio processing allowing us to create a more flexible and dynamic environment in which to do sound design.
- Began as a custom-built tool for controlling sound for live theater, which led DySE Generator's development to be very performance oriented.
- Allows designers to establish relationships between human behavior and sound content by giving the ability to correlate viewer actions to sonic material.
- Introduces unique tools for designing such as the use of visual overlays to map viewer location and/or behavior to specific sound processing parameters.
- Messages controlling many of the functions of the DySE Generator are embedded into vrNav, UCLA/ATS's navigation code for virtual reality.
- Control of DySE Generator (either local or remote) uses OpenSoundControl (OSC) over UDP.
- Equally adept at working with both live and prerecorded sounds.
- Functions as both a sound server and a sound model builder.
- Allows for ‘off-line' building and testing of the sound model without needing to be linked to the actual VR model.
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Grid Web Interface Now Available
The UCLA Grid Group has developed a web interface to the UCLA Grid and is pleased to announce that the interface, which interacts with the Globus Toolkit 3.2, is now available for beta testing on the Hoffman Cluster.
A Grid is a distributed computing infrastructure that integrates distributed, individually managed computational resources and presents a common user interface to these resources by providing coordinated resource-sharing. The new web interface will present a common view of all computational clusters that join the Grid.
The concept of Grid computing was investigated and developed starting in the early 1990s by the Globus Alliance (http://www.globus.org). They have developed the Globus Toolkit to facilitate the creation of Grids.
The web interface to the UCLA Grid can be accessed at http://grid.ucla.edu. This interface allows users to submit and monitor jobs, do resource discovery among all participating clusters, and manages files. File management includes the creation and editing of files, the transfer of files between a user’s local (desktop) computer and a cluster, and the transfer of files between clusters. The UCLA Grid Group invites users to test and use this new web interface to the Hoffman Cluster and to provide feedback. Of course, users can continue to ssh to the Hoffman Cluster and login in the usual manner.
In order to use the Grid web interface, a user’s login id on the Hoffman Cluster must be Grid-enabled. To initiate that process, users should visit http://grid.ucla.edu and follow the instructions on the first page to apply for access. Users will be notified once their applications are approved. Users can not login until after they apply for grid access and the application process is completed.
The ATS HPC Group is currently going through the process of Grid-enabling the top 40 users on the Hoffman Cluster. If your account is Grid-enabled you will receive an email directing you how to proceed.
For more information, contact the UCLA Grid Group at: atshpc at ucla.edu.
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Positron Acceleration Simulation |
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The Particle-in-Cell Simulation group at UCLA is world-renowned for its innovations and expertise in large-scale simulations of fusion plasmas, plasma-based accelerators, and space plasmas. One of the challenges associated with these large simulations is the interpretation and visualization of the large quantity of data that come from these runs. Frank Tsung, Physics, and Joan Slottow, ATS, view the preliminary simulation result for a proposed plasma wakefield experiment. In the experiment, a high energy positron drive beam will be injected into the plasma, creating a wakefield for positron acceleration. The beam - shown in yellow and green, moving from left to right – attracts the background plasma (shown in red) to the axis and some instability may arise due to their mutual interaction.
Frank Tsung said that ATS has provided many services for his projects, including code optimization, visualization, and hardware.
“In recent years, the Portal has been a place where the researchers can get gain insights using the various software tools and the large displays,” he said. In addition, the meeting facility in the Portal allows the researchers to present a large quantity of data in a user-friendly manner.”
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Collaborative Virtual Reality |
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ATS has been working with Iowa State University’s Virtual Reality Applications Center to develop the innovative techniques and build the infrastructure to share virtual reality models across the Internet. This technique – called Collaborative VR – was added into the vrNav software, which is normally used to fly through virtual world models in the Portal. Collaborative VR was demonstrated in April between the Portal and Iowa State’s Human Computer Interaction Center.
Here’s how it works. With Collaborative VR now built into vrNav, vrNav is started up on the same model in two different facilities. As the people at one location fly through the model, the vrNav they are using controls the vrNav at the other facility so that it flys identically. The audiences at both locations see the same view of the model simultaneously.
At the same time that people at UCLA were modifying vrNav, research at Iowa’s VRAC were modifying vrJuggler for collaborative use. One of their innovations was to add an avatar to the scene. The avatar, which marks the location of the viewer in the model, is controlled by one side and moves identically through the models at both locations.
Research Scholar Chris Johanson and Visualization Portal Development Coordinator Joan Slottow led the UCLA team to build in rudimentary Collaborative VR into vrNav. Learn more about vrNav at: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/rct/vrNav/default.htm).
For the April demonstration, Professor John Dagenais, UCLA Spanish and Portuguese Department was in the UCLA Portal as he gave a virtual tour of the Santiago de Compostela model to the audience at Iowa State. The second successful demonstration of Collaborative VR was made the following day between UCLA and the University of Mexico.
The long-term benefit of Collaborative VR, is that it will allow an expert in one geographic location to fly through computer simulated models in real-time at two locations as he delivers lectures to a remote audience.
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Learn about vrNav: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/rct/vrNav/default.htm |
Future Scholars |
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Roosevelt School third graders get a close view of tornadoes whirling across the Visualization Portal screen. Atmospheric Sciences Professor Robert Fovell created this cloud model simulation using field data collected in the vicinity of a tornado-producing storm in Del City, Oklahoma. The simulation shows the sequential development of tornado-like vortices associated with a rotating supercell storm. More than 1,800 students representing 50 K-12 schools have visited the Portal since it opened in 2001.
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Computation-based Research at ATS |
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Academic Technology Services has implemented a program for hosting computational clusters in the newly renovated research data center. The core idea is to preserve researcher ownership and on-demand access to the resource while making available data center space and, and in some cases, cluster administration.
ATS will offer tiered levels of service. Tier 1 provides space, enviromentals, and security for researchers who plan to administer their own cluster. Tier 2 continues ATS’ existing cluster consulting program for researchers who want to locate their cluster in their own space but need support in its configuration. Tier 3 (full service) provides Tier 1 service levels with the addition of ATS system administration, storage and archival services.
ATS has established a long-range goal of eventually supporting a total of 1,200 nodes and is currently identifying the required infrastructure to support such a resource.
ATS is already involved in two cluster-hosting arrangements.
Plasma Physics Cluster: Academic Technology Services has submitted a RFP on behalf of the Plasma Physics group for a 256-node, 512-processor computer cluster to advance research and education in broad and diverse areas of plasma science. Vendor selection is expected to conclude in this month. The cluster will be built using a $1 million National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant to UCLA Physics faculty. The cluster will be housed in the UCLA research data center.
California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) Cluster: The CNSI Computational Committee is now in the process of upgrading their HP cluster. ATS - through the Technology Sandbox - will conduct benchmarking on 3 HP products: a new dual-Xeon node, the fastest Itanium 2 node, and a mid-range Itanium 2 node. ATS will also be investigating a new switch that will allow CNSI to upgrade to a total of 50 to 60 nodes and plans to add an HP backup system with this upgrade.
For information on cluster hosting at Academic Technology Services, contact Bill Labate at: labate@ats.ucla.edu or 310-206-7323.
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Student Advances to Professor Faster Using Portal Resources |
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Abdul-muttaleb al-Ballam earned his Ph.D. in architecture and is embarking on a career as a university professor a little more quickly than he might have, thanks at least in part to UCLA’s Visualization Portal and Modeling Lab. al-Ballam is one of six people who have used the Visulization Portal to work on or defend their dissertations.
“With the facilities at ATS, I was able to finish my dissertation in one year,” al-Ballam said. “This would have taken me three years in a different place.”
Al-Ballam, who came from Kuwait to study at UCLA, had been doing his computer-aided design work at another digital facility on campus when a fellow student introduced him to the high-speed world of ATS.
“The Modeling and Visualization Lab is what impressed me because they had many types of software that I needed in order to accomplish my dissertation,” al-Ballam said. “I could build my 3-D urban models in Creator and transform them into VRML Code. That’s a 3-D representation language for the Web. From there, I could take the code and manually change it and enhance it.
“With the availability of fast PCs equipped with very fast video cards, which enable you to run the real-time animation, I was able to shorten the project time,” al-Ballam said.
For his doctoral dissertation, al-Ballam developed a digital teaching tool that he hopes will help college architecture students better understand how an urban environment evolves through the ages. It focuses on the Lebanese city of Baalbek and was designed to be viewed in real time over the Internet. It allows students to “fly” through the streets of the ancient city, studying the influence of the numerous cultures that settled there over a span of 13 centuries. “It gives a good idea of how certain urban evolution has happened,” al-Ballam said. “As a student moves through the model, he will witness the buildings change with time. It’s a virtual time machine.”
Al-Ballam, who holds a master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in architecture, explained the importance of understanding how different cultural influences on urban development are related. “When a historian interprets history without an overall view of the connection between cultures, then he has a problem. He doesn’t see how the city evolved continuously. With my tool, he’ll be able to see this continuous evolution and he’ll have less of a chance to be biased against certain cultures.”
As his model was developing, al-Ballam would invite his professors and advisers to Portal for viewing and critique sessions. He also used the Portal for the successful defense of his dissertation before his doctoral committee. “The setting of the portal is very professional,” he said. “It has elevated my project. There is no other place on campus where you could find a wide-screen projector. Seeing my project there helped my committee ‘live’ the model.”
With his new Ph.D. degree in hand, al-Ballam is returning to his homeland where a teaching position awaits him at Kuwait University. He said his time in the Modeling and Visualization Lab and in the Visualization Portal has inspired him to work to reproduce the same kind of facilities at home.
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Dancing in Digital Space |
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Dancer Norah Zuniga Shaw, Department of World Arts and Cultures, used the Visualization Portal to teach an undergraduate course that examined the relationship between emerging technology and the arts. Shaw and her students linked up with their counterparts at the University of Riverside to develop movement and media improvisations that bring together live dancing bodies, virtual reality models, streaming media and OpenMash videoconferencing technologies.
Read the course proposal.
See more photos.
For more information see: www.zunigashaw.com.
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In Victoria Vesna's world, science is artistic and art is scientific. Vesna is a media artist, and she defines her art as "experimental research." A professor at UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture, she is chair of the school’s Department of Design | Media Arts and is a renowned master of her genre. A media artist, Vesna explains, is "someone who works with technology and collaborates with many different disciplines, looking at contemporary issues that are raised by scientific and technological innovations."
In her field, the computer is not a tool - it is a medium, like oil colors or a piece of clay. And her creations aren't merely physical – something on display in a gallery or museum. They also exist in the virtual world of the Internet.
"My goal is to show that these worlds have a distinct quality in relation to time and navigation but are not separate, and one is not more important than the other," she said.
Vesna's primary world is art, but in the past decade, her interests and curiosities increasingly have crossed into the realms of science and technology.
She says she finds "science labs much more fascinating then artist studios." As a result, her numerous collaborations with scientists should come as no surprise. In particular, she has been teaming up with those working at the atomic and molecular levels in the field known as nano technology.
One of her more recent works, titled, "zero@wavefunction: nano dreams & nightmares," was created in collaboration with noted UCLA nano scientist James Gimzewski in tribute to her fascination with hexagons and their role in nature. The work incorporates virtual buckyballs – the nickname given to a hollow, sphere-shaped carbon molecule reminiscent of architect R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome.
Zero@wavefunction is meant to simulate the way a nano scientist manipulates an individual molecule – projected on a monumental scale. Software authored by then-UCLA Design | Media Arts student Josh Nimoy allows a viewer – both in person, looking at a giant screen, and via the Internet – to manipulate the buckyballs by activating a series of visualizations, sounds and texts.
The work has become a permanent installation at the Visualization Portal. Academic Technology Services was instrumental in the work's creation. "Without their help, this piece simply would not have been achieved in time to premiere at the Biennial of Electronic Arts in Perth, Australia, in August 2002," Vesna said.
Vesna also worked with ATS staff as well as Design | Media Arts students when she redesigned the entire California NanoSystems Institute Web site, which, like her artwork, is interactive, allowing viewers to change images as they wish.
Zero@wavefunction is at the core of a new work commissioned by LACMALab. nano opened this month at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will be on exhibit through September 2004. Once again, Vesna has partnered with nano scientist Jim Gimzewski to create what she calls a "groundbreaking exhibition that will immerse visitors of all ages in a visceral, multimedia experience of the convergence of computing, nano science and molecular biology."
Vesna says visitors to "nano" interact with multimedia representations of atomic- and molecular-scaled structures. They experience the exhibit through their eyes, ears, hands, "even through their feet as they wander over a reactive floor that mimics the structure of graphite," she said.
The UCLA Technology Sandbox – a place where innovation and collaboration are encouraged - provided Vesna and her team with a testing ground for various elements of nano. "The ATS Sandbox's support has proved to be critical in the production of these new works," Vesna said. "These projects are viewed by the public at large and support the creative work of UCLA artists, scientists and humanists who work collaboratively to promote new ways of thinking and being in the ever more complex world we occupy."
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| Professor John Dagenais, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, uses the Visualization Portal to show a model of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the Romanesque pilgrimage cathedral of the medieval period.
The digital model recreates the medieval cathedral and allows students and researchers to experience the space of the cathedral as it would have been seen by medieval pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela.
The simulation serves as the background for Professor Dagenais' introductory course in Medieval Spanish literature and as an ongoing research project for students in a summer-session class studying and traveling the pilgrimage route. The model is also beginning to be used by architectural historians and archeologists to pose questions about the development of the building over time and as a way of testing various scenarios for archeological reconstructions. This restoration project shows the building as it appeared when dedicated by Bishop Pedro Munoz on April 3, 1211 A.D.
Dean Abernathy, Architect, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, was chief modeler on the project.
Compostela Scholars
Dean Abernathy, UCLA Cultural VR Lab (left); Jose Suarez Otero, Archeologist and Conservator, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (center); John Williams, Visiting Mellon Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh (right); John Dagenais, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese (top).
Jose Suarez Otero, Archeologist and Conservator, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (left); Dean Abernathy, UCLA Cultural VR Lab (center); John Williams, Visiting Mellon Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh (right)
Concert in the Cathedral
Portal visitors made a virtual pilgrimage to 13th century Spain to visit Santiago de Compostela during a two-day history and virtual reality conference hosted by Professor John Dagenais, Spanish and Portuguese Department. Highlight of the conference was a concert by the Medieval singing group, UCLA Sounds, held in the virtual cathedral. This was one of the first truly "mixed" virtual reality performances, where live performers were placed acoustically in a virtual model of the medieval cathedral Santiago de Compostela.
Read the story of Santiago de Compostela.
Read about the innovative sound server that made the concert possible.
Concert in the Cathedral Program
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Disabilities and Computing Program Open House |
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Patrick Burke and John Pedersen in the Disabilities and Computing lab on Wednesday, Oct. 29 show off the latest adaptive computing technologies available. Demonstrations of state-of-the-art technologies in screen-reading, magnification, voice recognition, scanning and reading and study software.
For more information about the Disabilities and Computing program, see: www.dcp.ucla.edu
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The Universe
Studying the birth of the universe has traditionally been a matter of theory, prediction, speculation, and more recently, computer simulation. But today, astronomers such as UCLA’s Matt Malkan are able to look deep into the sky and observe the real thing as it appeared billions of years ago. Highly advanced telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck in Hawaii, have dramatically changed the field of astronomy. Thanks to these telescopes, Malkan and others can view the infancy of very distant galaxies – back when their stars had just begun to throw off detectable light.
And, thanks to UCLA’s Visualization Portal, Malkan and other UCLA researchers are able to bring their work to students, other researchers and broader audiences.
“The Portal allows us to look pretty closely at these rather horrendously complex simulations. A supercomputer can simulate literally millions of points in a volume of space, more than most humans can comprehend.” The Portal offers a 3-dimensional moving display of a computer simulation, making it easier for the human mind to grasp.
“We’re using telescopes as time machines so we can look back in the early days of the universe and see what these young galaxies are doing,” Malkan said. “It takes the light rays that we’re detecting more than 10 billion years to travel from where they started – from when they were produced – and they leave their galaxies carrying a lot of interesting information.”
The hope is that by studying these faraway galaxies in their formative stages, astronomers will be able to update scientific theory and prediction to answer lingering questions about the structure of the universe and the evolution of our own galaxy - the Milky Way.
Malkan’s work focuses on the photons – or light particles – that infant galaxies produce, especially when a star is created. Once the photons are collected on the Keck’s or the Hubble’s giant mirror, Malkan works to determine how long they’ve existed and how far back in the history of the universe he is peering. He’s able to make these measurements by comparing the size of the universe when the light rays first began their journey through space to the current size of our ever-expanding universe. A relatively new calibration of the universe’s expansion has made it possible for astronomers to put a fairly accurate time stamp on each of the galaxies under observation. Malkan is working closely with University of Zurich physics theorist Ben Moore, a proponent of the “dark matter” theory of galaxy formation.
“The Portal is unique in letting us look at these millions of points in space simultaneously,” Malkan said. “We can watch the universe move forward or backward in time and see how it’s changing before our eyes.” He also is able to move around inside the simulated universe and see how it looks from different locations.
As a teaching tool, the Portal is incomparable, Malkan added. “Watch this model in the Portal for five minutes and you will understand better how our universe formed its structure,” Malkan said.
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Multimedia Links:
OuickTime Movie of the Universe:
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UCLA performers in the foreground and Stanford performers on Portal screen in the background.
Faculty Advisor David Beaudry (left) and student Alex Hoff.
A distributed, improvisational performance was presented in the Visualization Portal earlier this month as an Advanced Sound Design class project. Visiting Assistant Professor David Beaudry, UCLA Department of Theater and Consulting Professor Elizabeth Cohen, Information Studies, were faculty advisors on the project which was designed to explore the possibilities and challenges of creating a theatrical performance that occurs simultaneously in two geographical locations. The performance featured two groups of theatrical improvisers - one group at Stanford’s Wallenberg Hall and the other at UCLA's Visualization Portal.
The UCLA-Stanford Distributed Performance Project - created by Visiting Assistant Professor David Beaudry, UCLA
Department of Theater, Consulting Professor Elizabeth Cohen, Information Studies, and Stanford student Daniel
Walling - explored the possibilities and challenges of creating a theatrical performance that occurs simultaneously in two geographical locations. The performance featured two groups of theatrical improvisers - one group at Stanford’s Wallenberg Hall and the other at UCLA's Visualization Portal. A group of theater sound design students from UCLA created immersive, multi-channel environments and sound effects to support the improvisations. The improvisational groups were connected by real-time audio and video streams using the Internet2 backbone.
This project addressed several problems.
First, it attempted to overcome the geographical distance between actors and designers during the performance.
Previous attempts to do this have fallen short due to network latency issues that negatively impact the quality of sound and video. Improving one was generally at the sacrifice of the other, and therefore it was impossible to create a viable forum for exchange. Recently, however, technological advances - particularly in networking – allowed the project participants to create viable virtual performance spaces: two physical locations joined by the Internet to create a single, unique and fluid performance environment.
The second goal was to address the problem of theatrical sound design for both an improvised performance and a
networked performance. In traditional theater - where audiences are located in a single location - sound designers build cues and sound effects to support the action on stage. When building those cues, designers usually have a script from which to design the sound component and a predictable (i.e. linear) order of execution during performance. The designers on this project were challenged not only to create interesting and complex sound as a viable part of an improvised performance, but they also had to design the sound to be engaging in both geographical locations. This dual challenge required a rethinking and restructuring of the traditional methods used in theatrical sound design.
The third goal of this project was to effectively archive the performance. How does one document and archive a
collaborative theatrical performance when the performance bodies are in physically distinct locations and the collaborative environment is virtual? How does one handle the archiving of eight channels of audio, two video streams, nine actors, and two audiences that were involved in this production? Documenting such an event - not
just the performance but the process as well - was a formidable challenge.
Project Goals
• To enable spatially distributed improvisational performance.
• To identify the technology that enables spatially distributed performance.
• To understand what contributes to the perception of “ensemble.”
• To create a robust digital archive of the performance.
• To address the problem of theatrical sound design in entirely improvised performances, as well as
network-based performances.
Several important components comprised this performance project.
Audio and Video Streaming
The audio connection is supported by the StreamBD software - created by the SoundWIRE research group at Stanford’s CCRMA - streaming uncompressed, multi-channel, professional-quality audio over Internet2. StreamBD
is research-prototype software that provides low-latency uncompressed audio streaming over high quality networks. It was created to run on "CCRMAlized" computers running Linux/OSX. The delays in streaming are only a few milliseconds above latency.
The project uses OpenMash for video streaming. OpenMash allows for high-quality video streaming approximately
150 milliseconds above network latency. The project also uses RTPtv, an open-source software package that runs
on Linux and Windows to send and receive high-bitrate "broadcast quality" television - stereo audio and either
720x480 or 720x576 interlaced video (D1 video) or 352x240 or 352x288 progressive video (CIF) - over IP using
the IETF RTP protocol and M-JPEG (Motion JPEG).
Sound Design
The sound designers built custom software and interfaces for real-time control and processing of both live and
prerecorded sound. The software uses IRCAM/Cycling74’s multimedia programming environment, Max/MSP.
Faculty Advisors
David Beaudry, Visiting Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Theater Virtual Reality Audio Specialist & Audio Technologist, UCLA Visualization Portal/Academic Technology Services
Elizabeth Cohen, Consulting Professor, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Information Studies, UCLA
Chris Chafe, Professor of Music, Stanford University, Director CCRMA
People Involved
Actors - All of the performers are current members or alumni of the Stanford Improvisers (SImps), coached by
Patricia Ryan.
Sound designers - Both sound designers were students in David Beaudry’s Advanced Theater Sound Design class.
Archivists - All archivists were students in Elizabeth Cohen’s class.
Coordinators:
UCLA – David Beaudry, Visiting Asst. Professor in Sound Design, UCLA Dept. of Theater, and Virtual Reality
Audio Specialist, UCLA Visualization Portal.
Stanford University – Daniel Walling, Stanford University.
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Video clips of the performance:
This video clip shows a scene about a child and her grandfather on a fishing trip. Actors from UCLA and Stanford simultaneously act out the same scene. The catch is that the actors from each place take turns making up dialog and acting out a story as the actors from the other venue imitate them. On the clip you’ll see the UCLA performers in the foreground and the Stanford actors on the Portal screen in the background.
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zero@wavefunction: nano dreams and nightmares, a unique UCLA Media Art/NanoScience collaboration was recently unveiled to a campus audience at the Visualization Portal.
Created by Victoria Vesna, chair of the Department of Design/Media Arts and James Gimzewski, a leading expert on nanotechnology and a professor in UCLA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, zero@wavefunction was conceived to help make nanoscience more accessible and understandable to the broader public. Buckyballs (shown in the photo) respond via sensors to movement of a person’s shadow.
See a movie of buckyballs:
Quicktime (high bandwidth) / Quicktime (low bandwidth)
For more information, go to: http://notime.arts.ucla.edu/zerowave
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OuickTime Movie of Buckyballs
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| Medical Students viewed a live orthopedic surgery from the Visualization Portal as part of an Internet2 member meeting hosted by USC. While doctors in the UCLA Medical Center explained the surgery and answered questions, students were also linked to an orthopedic surgeon at Stanford’s SUMMIT, who used a 3-D hand model to further explain the surgery, and to orthopedic surgeons at the conference site. Goal of the project was to explore teaching opportunities provided by Internet2.
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UCLA's Visualization Portal features a variety of virtual reality models of historical monuments. For a quick trip to ancient Rome , visitors can view a 3-D immersive computer model of the Roman Forum as it was at the peak of its development just prior to the fall of the Roman Empire . Believed to be the most complex digital model ever created of an archaeological site, the model currently shows 22 buildings and monuments based on the latest research on the Forum. Only two of the structures – both badly damaged – survive in Rome today. More buildings are being added to the model.
The model was created under the direction of Dr. Diane Favro, Architecture and Urban Design, Classics Professor Bernard Frischer, and Research Scholar Dean Abernathy.
Informal demos are shown in the Portal every Friday at noon. For more information, contact: events@ats.ucla.edu .
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| Musical Arts Doctoral Candidate David Beaudry used the unique capabilities of the Visualization Portal for his research on finding new forms of musical expression for acoustic instruments through interactive digital technology. His goal is to “return interactivity to musical performance and generate new performance media,” which involves designing pathways for communication between acoustic instruments and computers. Learn more about David’s work by viewing his video or reading his proposal.
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Multimedia Links:
 David Beaudry Sound Engine - Low Bandwidth | Beaudry Sound Engine - High Bandwidth
 David Beaudry Sound Engine - Surestream
 Read David Beaudry's Proposal |
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Academic Technology Services, Seeds University Elementary School, and the UCLA Hammer Museum have finished the successful pilot of a Visual Thinking Strategies program designed to introduce elementary teachers to an innovative teaching strategy for young students. The pilot project also explored a variety of educational and training possibilities offered by UCLA’s Visualization Portal and Internet2. ATS is currently working with Linda Duke, director of Education at the UCLA Hammer Museum, on a videotape of the project that will be shown at the Internet2 Fall conference to be held at USC.
The Visual Thinking Strategy – developed by Psychologist Abigail Housen and art educator Philip Yenawine - focuses on helping young students learn to appreciate the arts and apply critical thinking skills learned in art appreciation to other fields.
The project had three primary objectives – to develop a model for VTS training that employs Internet2 and can be scaled up for use in public schools, to expose pre-service teachers – through videoconferenced participation – to a model of rich, probing discussion among colleagues about their teaching, and to experiment using the VTS to prepare students to actively engage with on-screen images that might be used in later distance-learning initiatives.
“Organizers of this pilot believe there is strong evidence to indicate that the skills and behaviors fostered in students by the VTS are exactly those needed for a satisfying educational experience with other computer-based instructional programs,” said Ms. Duke.
The VTS uses facilitated peer discussion of art images to help students develop critical and creative thinking, evidence-based reasoning, advanced looking, and communication skills.
“This is such a rich curriculum,” said Sharon Sutton, coordinator of Technology and Outreach at Seeds UES. “The benefits for the students and the teachers are just tremendous.” Ms. Sutton worked with Ms. Duke to create the program at UES.
Nine UES teachers completed the training, along with several UCLA graduate students and Los Angeles Unified School District staff members. ATS videoconferenced the teacher training and debriefing sessions from UES to the Visualization Portal and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over Internet2. |
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UCLA’s new Statistical Computing Web Portal - located at http://statcomp.ats.ucla.edu - offers visitors an easy way to learn more about commonly used statistics packages at the same time it provides an opportunity for people who are interested in statistical computing to interact with each other. One of UCLA’s Centers for Scholarly Interaction, the UCLA Stat Computing Portal is a virtual meeting place for the UCLA research and teaching community and for collaboration among statistical consulting centers located around the world. See: http://statcomp.ats.ucla.edu/propcollaboration.htm
The Stat Computing Portal, which provides links to web sites for commonly used statistical packages such as SAS, Stata, and SPSS, can also search across those sites to save users the time and effort of searching each page individually.
The Stat Computing Portal augments the ATS Statistical computing pages located at http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/ and other Statistical Consulting services (http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/Qtr_Schedule.htm).
For more information about Centers for Scholarly Interaction, go to: www.itpb.ucla.edu and click on Strategic Plan Areas of Emphasis.
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Web Accessibility Seminar Shows Best Practices, Introduces New Software for Web Accessibility
 
UCLA’s Technology Sandbox and the Disabilities and Computing Program hosted a virtual Web Accessibility Seminar and Software Demonstration that featured AccRepair and AccVerify products from HiSoftware (www.hisoftware.com). The Disabilities and Computing Program provided updates on the latest developments in the accessibility arena and updates on current best practices, including a variety of accessibility-checking tools. Vendor representatives from HiSoftware made their presentation virtually via Webex.
AccVerify and its related products can be integrated with Microsoft FrontPage or run as a stand-alone software. Beyond the basic accessibility tools, HiSoftware has gone further than most companies to incorporate accessibility functionality into a comprehensive site management system. The products permit both local and remote management of web content via interfaces that are themselves accessible, which allows people with disabilities to take part in all levels of the web development process.
The Technology Sandbox was created as a mechanism where technologists from across campus can come together to work on special projects. The Sandbox also provides vendors with a single point of entry to the campus. The Technology Sandbox lab – located on the 4th floor of the Math Science Building - opened earlier this year.
For more information about Web Accessibility, see www.dcp.ucla.edu |
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Accessibility
Information
