Slashdot Mirror
On the State of Scientific Telecollaboration?
Douglas Arnold asks: "This summer I will take over as director of the
Institute for Mathematics and its
Applications in Minneapolis, one of the world's premier institutes in the mathematical sciences.
(This year's program on
mathematics in multimedia should interest many Slashdot readers)
The IMA hosts visits by over a thousand scientists a year, mostly
using Linux to meet their computing needs. I am interested in
pursuing telecollaboration and teleconferencing at the institute,
so a scientist there can work with a scientist off-site, carrying
on a mathematical discussion as if they were at the same
blackboard. What sort of hardware and software exists for this
sort of application? Is there anything that works well under
Linux? I am thinking of things like shared whiteboards,
'collaboratories,' networked graphics tablets (on which it is
comfortable to enter formulas and do calculations), integration
with audio or video conferencing systems, and so forth."
The habanero project is now over, but it's still online at http://havefun.ncsa.uiuc.edu/habanero/, and may still be of value. It might be interesting to sdeee if it could find a new home, as well.
Don't ask a bunch of Linux geeks how to do "Math Stuff" on linux. Ask your customers the scientists what they need. While we can give you some interesting ideas we as a rule have no idea what you need, and therefore can't get you there.
Or as a bumper sticker I saw said:
We don't know where we are going, but we're making record time!
Erlang Developer and podcaster
... On the math side, recognizing mathematical notation will be very hard, and would require a lot of work in user interfaces.
...
....a low-level specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication. It provides a much needed foundation for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages
I dont have any suggestions for recognition, but display (and possible manipulation) could be MathML. The W3C page describes MathML as
Go to the MathML tools page for software tools and specs.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Frankly I'd not approach it from "I like Linux how can we use it" direction but rather from "What are my researchers comfortable with and how can I support that?" As you noted this is about collaboration; you're going to need to interoperate with a large number of systems not under your control.
With that in mind your goal is likely to be platform independence, not Linux-specific solutions. Standard protocols, not specific "solutions".
As part of that you'll presumably want a system that supports both pen-based graphics (the classic "scribbled on a napkin") as well as more structured mathematical layout (as used by TeX, MathML or Mathematica.) Really you'll need whatever folks express themselves most easily in. For voice the telephone is universal & standardized, video has a number of reasonable standards with some degree of interoperability.
Personally I'd invest in a good computing infrastructure, encourage the researchers to network with their peers & discover solutions that suit them, or failing that undertake to write/sponsor an open tool that would facilitate the collaboration you're looking for.
Whatever the case I'd wait until I was in place, see what's being used now, how effective it is and what directions present themselves. Your user base is likely to have some strong opinions and presumably has some experience with what works for them and what doesn't.
(f it were up to me I'd look into some sort of Wiki system that supports mathematical notation - hit a search engines for details, here's one hit: http://allmyfaqs.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Math_symbols. That & again, good telephones.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I have used LyX also (front end for LaTeX), and it is quite good. It's math-entry and rendering is the best I've seen yet in a user interface. My girlfriend now uses it exclusively to write papers (beats the crap out of bloated M$ Word or Staroffice). I usually use straight TeX for my papers and presentations so I can manipulate things at a lower level, and use some macros developed by/for physics people.
As to extending graphitti, I'd think that this would be a losing proposition. After adding strokes for the roman alphabet, greek alphabet, hebrew alphabet, numbers, and symbols, you might as well have just tried to recognize the symbols in the first place. I think for a tablet the easiest thing to do would be to have an "input" area that is very large (i.e. write very large) that then gets recognized and transferred to the document. The input area should draw a vector-graphic with your pen strokes, and after the stroke is complete, attempt to recognize it after-the-fact, allowing for you to correct it. (maybe tap on the incorrectly-recognized letter and have it bring up a list of nearest matches)
I have found graphitti less than perfect for most of my needs. I prefer to type. I'm not sure how much extra work scientists would be willing to put up with in entering formulas. I mean, usually there's a "bigger picture" in the back of your mind, trying to work out the calculation. If you have to interrupt your thought process a whole bunch to enter the formula in a way the computer can handle, you've lost the advantage of putting it on the computer in the first place. Attempting to recognize existing math and notations would be a big win.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
The hardware exists...a 11" TFT LCD screen, Wacom-like pen input overlaid on top. It needs to have a high resolution (both the screen and input) for accurate handwriting recognition. Wouldn't need a very fast processor. Could sync to my computer over USB.
As a theoretical physicist, I desparately want something like this. I'm a massive computer junkie, but currently, the highest-tech way I can do calculations is pencil and paper... On the math side, recognizing mathematical notation will be very hard, and would require a lot of work in user interfaces. In the short term, just recording the user's penstrokes and saving it as a vector graphic would be sufficent. In the long term, interface it to a basic Computer Algebra System. i.e. something that will check all those factors of two, negative signs, etc. In the very long term, have the interface do most of what I do by hand. For instance, apply a mathematical identity to an equation, and copy the new equation to the next line. Allow me to manipulate individual terms. Most of all, allow me to define new notations. Each sub-field of math, physics, chemistry, and engineering uses its own notation, and a rule-system should exist to check the validity of the input in the notation that is familiar to the user.
Right now I use pencil and paper, some Maple, and computer programs to numerically evaluate things. Maple's interface is not well suited to a pen-based manipulation system. (don't mention Mathematica, I will not professionally support their absurd pricing and draconian licensing policies) I have high hopes that a viable open-source Computer Algebra System will evolve out of the existing Octave or GiNaC.
*Sigh* if any of you entreprenuring business types are listening, WE WANT TABLETS AND WE WANT THEM YESTERDAY . And not those stupid web-browser tablets. sheesh.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/collab/
...in the post preview section slashdot seems to be peeling off the :2080 in my URL for some unknown reason. If you can't get to the site paste the link in and it should work.
i worked on this as undergrad, its been along going steadily for years. There are other DOE notebook projects at Berkeley and Oak Ridge--they all supposedly can share data with each other.
IBM recently made available a tablet-notebook PC. I believe it does tablet handwriting capture, if not recognition (i.e., digitizing). Since you sound like you know what you want, in some detail, and have real linux based applications waiting for satisfaction in the academic/scientific community, I would expect that the folks at IBM's labs might be glad to correspond with you.
NetMeeting is just a standard H.323 client, so rather than using VMWare it'd be more obvious just to run a native Linux H.323 client such as OpenH.323 or CUSeeMe.
http://www.openh323.org/
One of the most active groups involved in the development of scientific collaboratories is CREW (the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work) at the University of Michigan. It's an interdisciplinary team that has worked on a number of successful Projects including Collaboratories for Space Physics, AIDS Research, and Breast Oncology.
Telecollaboration needs more than just one tool. You need to make use of a range of cooperating tools in order to provide effective telecollaboration. Videoconferencing is only one piece, and arguably the least useful one. You need:
Document sharing
Real-time communication
Long-term communication
Audio and video are good, but only on an "it-would-be-nice" basis. Mitre Corp. produced just such a tool, failed in the marketplace, and opensourced the result. It's available as Collaborative Virtual Workspaces.
Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my ken, that site is totally broken at the moment. If the site ever gets fixed, give it a try.
The U.S. Government, being more than somewhat peeved at Mitre for some reason, decided everyone should be using InfoWorkSpace, IWS, by good old General Dynamics. Snappy little Act of Congress there: if you like their money, then you are informed you love IWS. IWS represents a collection of similar tools, but unlike CVW, they're not really bound together, and don't interoperate. Still, it's a pretty good system if you can stand to use it.
You might want to check out Muse, a synthetic environment which allows collaboration, video conferencing, and multidimensional data mining from a UFO deck. Used by oil researchers, nasa (the ISS) and boeing among others.
VNC can share a screen with multiple people (when set up in shared mode) so that everyone sort of shares the same keyboard and mouse. You'd have platform independence that way, and you could either use a sound server on each client's machine or other audio-conferencing tool to supplement the video interface.
There are quite a few useful whiteboard type tools already. This would get the best of both worlds in that you wouldn't be foistering a pre-packaged solution on the scientists but you would be working with a robust, open platform that would be available both on site and off site.
James
Nothing to do with Groove
See here for qVIX/cu30, a GPL'ed videoconferencing program put out by Cornell that is superior in quality and bandwidth requirements over Netscape's Netmeeting.
Though it seems to require some extra work for the integration you have in mind.
There is an excellent p2p project sharing client for windows at groove.net from the people that did lotus notes. Sadly right now there is no linux client but the tech on display is pretty nice, it looks like a lot of it is in java so who knows maybe one day we'll see a linux client.
I don't know exactly how it will compare in price to other solutions, but it was intended to be low-cost. I used it to get a lecture from a prof when he had to head over to CERN once; we were all entirely too distracted by playing with the cameras, but it worked very well. We didn't use the whiteboard, though, just the "point camera at blackboard" method.
Even better- I poked around a bit, and it looks like they might have an installation over at U of M that you could check out, though it's not clear they're still using it. Good luck. Congrats on the position!
What about teleportation?
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.