NCRR Meeting Notes
Wednesday, August 30, 2000, 12:00 pm

Rob MacLeod

• Introduction
• General Information Items
• Progress Reports
  • Administration and Reports
  • BioPSE
  • Conferences and NCRR Seminars
  • 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:

Reminder: plan your demos now and talk to Dave about them!!!

Meeting time:

The regular time for the NCRR meeting is now Wednesday, 10:00-12:00 but this is causing some conflicts so we need to re-examine this question.

Progress Reports

Administration and Reports

Budgets:

Greg reported that he and Allyne are working on the budget carry forward for the new (second) year of the grant.

BioPSE

Installing SCIRun:

Yarden expressed a recurring need for more ease of installing SCIRun at remote sites. He was at Brown U and trying to make SCIRun work but had significant difficulties. A particularly problematic area is ensuring the peaceful coexistence of our versions of standard libraries and the regular (often newer) versions. Some of this will hopefully improve with Sourceforge, but there are other problems that we still need to address.

Sourceforge:

We are still waiting for final approval of the open source agreement from the University Technology Transfer Office. Without this, we cannot really set up the source forge project for BioPSE.

Event manager:

At a past meeting we discussed the idea of creating an event manager to handle in a more general way the interaction from the user with the salmon window. Marty asked what we had identified as the driving application for this facility. The ones that came to mind included picking objects in the scene and transmitting that information back to modules upstream from salmon.

Fields class:

Eric is even closer to a final version of the fields class and will present this next week. In the meantime, the design document has been updated so go to www.sci.utah.edu/scirun_docs/src/SCICore/Datatypes/doc/domainDesign.html

Flight path module

No news on this.

Module review:

No module reviews at this meeting-please look at the module list and select the next module you would like to design and report this to Dave.

Module list:

Current list of models is available at www.cvrti.utah.edu/ macleod/ncrr/technical/modules.html

Netsolve:

Chris M. is still working with the Tennessee folks on making Netsolve work. The problem we are working on with John Wikswo will end up being a good test problem to see if this approach makes sense for use to include as part of the standard BioPSE.

Data typing:

another recurring question is how to develop ports that can handle multiple data types, especially types derived from base classes. At present, typing is fairly strict and while this has advantages, it is not clear whether this approach is optimal. Another topic for further discussion.

Conferences and NCRR Seminars

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.
• 7th International Conference on Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulations: September 25-28, 2000, Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. We would like to send Xinlong to this, but are not sure if he will be here in time. Xinlong will attend this conference and present a paper from Dave etal.
• NFSI III: September, 2001, Innsbruck, Austria

NCRR Seminars

• Tom Feree from U of Oregon has postponed his visit because of an emergency and will reschedule as time permits.

• Martin Schweiger from Simon Arridge's lab in London, England will once again visit us in early September and we will ask him to present an NCRR seminar. This project involves diffuse optical tomography. Chris J. will be the contact on this visit.

Documentation

Spec-XML:

Marty is still working on mechanisms for converting the Spec-XML documents to viewable (HTML) and printable forms.

Doc Link:

The new link for all the BioPSE docs is www.sci.utah.edu/scirun_docs/doc.

New SpecML:

Ted is rewriting the SpecML document format to make it simpler and easier to use.

Map3d

Map3d progress:

Rob, Chris, and now Guo are all working on getting the version 1.0Beta of map3d ready for placement on the website.

Release schedule:

We discussed this and decided to try and push out a preliminary version asap and then plan to follow up shortly with a new version, rather than wait for the next major round of revisions. Rob, Chris, and Guo met and generated a list of top priority features to finish for the first release, which will be a few days later than planned.

Personnel

Xinlong Wang:

will arrive here August 31 and we are getting his office and computer ready now. Expect to see him at the first September NCRR meeting.

Research

Laura's project :

has installed the ``air'' package for image registration and seeing if this useful for here work. She is also continuing her work on the background and literature review for her thesis project.

Chris Butson's project:

no update

Leah's project:

no update

Rob v. Uitert:

no update

Web site

Data archive:

Erik has put some of this together and needs to get some data from Rob.

Tracking hits:

tracker program is in place and running on the CoE web site; if satisfactory, we will move it to other SCI sites.

Links:

Erik has created a set of links to existing NCRR centers and other related groups.

BioPSE logo:

no update

Web site parsing:

Erik has the new program for checking the web site, but has not had time to apply it to the NCRR site.

Miscellaneous

NCRR Poster:

We have several copies of the poster printer and they will be framed this week and sent to NCRR and placed in the lab.

Agenda for for future meetings

Specific agenda items for the next meeting include:

1. Update on NCRR seminar speakers and scheduling their talks
2. Schedule for NCRR meetings
3. Ted and Marty's presentation of the XML module template and tools for editing and viewing them
4. Eric's presentation on Field Class
5. Event manager for BioPSE
6. Installation of BioPSE

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.html

About this document ...

NCRR Meeting Notes
Wednesday, August 30, 2000, 12:00 pm

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