NCRR Meeting Notes
Wednesday, August 2, 2000, 12:00 pm

Rob MacLeod and Dave Weinstein

• Introduction
• General Information Items
• Progress Reports
  • Administration and Reports
  • BioPSE
  • Conferences
  • Documentation
  • Map3d
  • Personnel
  • Research
  • Web site
  • Miscellaneous
• Agenda for for future meetings
• About this document ...

Introduction

With these meetings we hope to achieve the following goals

• Make sure all members of the NCRR group know each other and are aware of both the long terms goals and the course of progress of the projects.

• Report progress, present ideas, and solicit feedback and ideas in front of the group.

• Constantly review and upgrade priorities of the various projects and ensure that tangential concerns do not distract from the progress of the group.

• Maintain momentum on the high priority projects.

General Information Items

Vis 2000 Demos:

Utah is hosting the Visualization 2000 conference in October and we will have an evening visit from conference attendees to show projects within the School of Computing. For this, we need to develop some demos that emphasize the application area of our activities. The plan is to have a number of rooms available to set up computers and projectors so that we can show our stuff to a reasonably sized group; we can also prepare handouts and reprints to provide to those interested. This is a great opportunity not only to highlight the group's activities, but also to get back feedback on the ideas we are presenting. There will be some top level people at the conference so we really need to take advantage of the opportunity. The whole SCI group will be involved in the effort so please contact Dave or Rob for specific ideas of what you would like to demonstrate. We will also be approaching people to help develop and present other demos.

Michael Callahan:

Please welcome Michael Callahan (michaelc@cs) to the NCRR team. He was doing his University orientation today and we are still playing musical offices so you may find him in the SCI Lodge or the VSC for next week before he settles into Kurt's current office.

Progress Reports

We will organize the progress reports not by person but by topic, which better reflects the way the discussion in the meeting often unfolds and provides a structured overview of our activities.

Administration and Reports

Annual Report:

Rob and Greg and almost done with the revised version of the annual report that we submitted last month. This new version will allow easy generation of full or sub-documents in a number of formats. The immediate goal is to create a version to send to our advisory board and then have a web-version for our collaborators and other interested people.

BioPSE

Tinderbox:

this software is used for testing of codes and Marty is working to get in installed and running so he can evaluate it for our purposes.

Fields class:

Eric reports that he is almost done with a working version of the fields class.

Module review:

because of time constraints, we did not get to discussing modules today.

View tracking module:

Alex has more or less completed a module for setting up and tracking the viewpoint for SCIRun. Details can be found in ther CVS tree under PSECommon/Salmon/EditPath and documentation will be ready shortly.

Conferences

World Congress:

this meeting included a number of groups from biomedical engineering and medical physics and Chris and Rob v. U. attended for the group. We handed out our one-page information sheet on the NCRR center and Chris presented a talk on source localization. The conference was enormous with 15-24 tracks going in parallel with lots of people there from a wide range of areas. There was great interest in our center and the software we will release. There was especially intense interest in the geometric models we will make available.

SIGGraph:

Dave and number of others attended this annual graphics love-in and between feasts and parties, there was some good research and new developments in graphics hardware. Dave reported an increase in image-based rendering in which multiple images of a scene form a set of base data that are interpolated depending on the user's viewing direction to create efficient realistic renderings.

Upcoming conferences:

Conferences coming up that are of special relevance to the group include:

• Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES): October 12-14, 2000 in Seattle (Rob will be chairing a session). www.engr.washington.edu/~uw-epp/bmes/
• Visualization 2000: Oct. 09, 2000 - Oct. 13, 2000, Salt Lake City.
• NFSI III: September, 2001, Innsbruck, Austria

Documentation

• Marty is coordinating the technical implementation of the documentation system and now has cocoon working so that it generates documentation from the source code
• We discussed the need to develop the documentation structure for the Web site and begin to identify needs. There have already been requests for information on the data file formats for the software we will release so that people can prepare for its release.
• Marty is working on style sheets for documentation from the XML code we will use to document all the modules. He estimates that in 1-2 weeks he will have a report of the steps for documenting modules so that we can being to assign module documentation of the PSECommon to others in the group.
• Erik and Rob will work together on ways to convert L^ATEX to HTML in a consistent layout and format for inclusion on the web site with minimum work.
• Ted has created an overview of the document layout for the PSE and everyone should check it out and provide feedback
  www.sci.utah.edu/scirun_docs/doc/docMap.html

Map3d

Map3d ready for trial use:

Chris Moulding has released the first version of map3d and Rob will test it out over the next week, then release it for internal use.

Release schedule:

the plan is to have map3d released by September 1, 2000.

Documentation:

there already exists a manual for map3d but this will need updating prior to release.

Personnel

Xinlong Wang:

we are still negotiation with Xinlong Wang and working on his visa requirements so that he can join us soon as the meshing post-doc.

Michael Callahan:

see above for information on Michael

Research

Laura's project :

Laura has uncovered some (expensive) journal articles on her research topic and is working to create a (L^ATEX) document that describes the background of the project and proposes what her research will include.

Chris Butson's project:

Chris is working to refine his thesis proposal ideas.

Leah's project:

Leah is working on details of the project with EGI group in Oregon.

Web site

Data archive:

after our meeting last week, Erik has been working on creating the web site structure for the section of the web site dealing with archived geometries and datasets. Some highlights of the overall layout are as follows:

• main sections are determined by geometry data as we will have many fewer of these than datasets
• each geometry will have a link to description of the file formats and segments of code for reading the data files
• each geometry will contain images of the geometry as well as complete documentation on its source and the steps used to create it
• under each geometry any simulation and measured datasets we release will be organized
• we should try and create both structured and unstructured versions of geometry whenever we can

Tracking hits:

Erik and Robert are working to get a script installed that will track the hits to the web pages in the NCRR site.

Web site parsing:

Erik is checking into software that will check our web site for bad links and also parse it for items that might cause incompatibilities with browsers. He will check the reviews and send some suggestions to Dave and Rob to order the required software.

Miscellaneous

NCRR Poster:

The poster is nearing completion and we circulated a draft at the meeting for comments. Erik has since placed an updated version at http://www.sci.utah.edu/~erikj/Miscellaneous/poster.pdf so please check this out and send comments to Rob and Dave.

Agenda for for future meetings

Most of the next meetings will be organized around the brief reports from all present and then discussion of modules. Each person in the group has volunteered for one more more modules and will lead the discussion, which will center on the design and capabilities of the module. For details on the overall layout of modules and a list of BioPSE modules we have envisioned so far, go to
www.cvrti.utah.edu/~macleod/ncrr/technical/modules-19jul00.shtml

About this document ...

NCRR Meeting Notes
Wednesday, August 2, 2000, 12:00 pm

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