Object technology and the manipulation and distribution of various type of data, such as sound,  images, text. To this end, we got involved in a number of application areas involving such a diversity of data type so to appreciate the different requirements. Image processing with Stavros Nikolopoulos, telephony with Andy Citron and educational multimedia with Nikolopoulos and RPI's Prof. Spooner.

This work contribution in this area relates multimedia and telephony. Specifically we  introduce a simple way of capturing and processing data in a multimedia real-time environment of parallel processes, where the data must be processed quickly before it becomes obsolete. We presented a mechanism that achieves this performance requirement by avoiding the overhead of locking or buffering while permitting concurrent access to shared data.  Its novelty is based on the fact that in a multimedia environment, data loss isn't catastrophic, but it must be recognized when data loss occurs. Thus, this approach effectively relaxes concurrency control by permitting the processing component to recognize whether captured data is obsolete prior to processing.  If the data is obsolete, it is discarded.  This is useful and acceptable in a multimedia environment where data to be processed has to be complete and not corrupted. The algorithm presented in this work has been published in the following paper and has already been implemented and shipped in IBM's Mwave  Telephone Answering Machine (TAM) offering. Extension of this work to incorporate sound and video is under way.

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In studying image management in a side effect manner, we got involved in track detection. In broader terms the problem we considered is that of image-processing/feature-extraction. Such a problem has applications in the area of automated target detection and tracking; an area quite significant and evident in systems such as radar, sonar, radioasronomy, etc. This work demonstrates how the problem of tracking targets, which appear as either straight or curved lines in two dimensional display images (or data images) can be formulated in terms of a directed weighted graph model and how dynamic programming techniques can be efficiently applied to reach an optimal or sub-optimal solution. In general, track detection algorithms providing optimal solutions have good detective ability, but most of them suffer from the inability to detect discontinuous lines or to resolve efficiently pairs of crossing lines. A sub-optimal solution is provided that efficiently overcome these weaknesses. We focus on modeling the track detection problem in terms of a graph, formulating fast sequential/parallel sub-optimal track detection algorithms and testing them on simulated data in order to show their detective ability. Moreover, we specify the conditions under which sub-optimal algorithms can perform at least as well as their corresponding optimal algorithms. This is significant for the track detection problem where fast, accurate and real-time detection is considered a necessity. 

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Educational multimedia is one other area that we are looking into with the development of a hypertext textbook for teaching introduction to computer science for non-majors (CS001). The goal in teaching such a course is to provide students with the knowledge of computing that they need to successfully apply computing in their own discipline. This couple with a new network of UNIX workstations for educational use motivates us to explore the possibility of developing an object hypermedia textbook for this CS001 introductory course. An integral part of this hypermedia book is a series of science, engineering and economics case studies that are used to introduce fundamental concepts in programming and computing, and to motivate the students to learn the material and applied it in their other courses. More specifically, we are working in a hypermedia textbook integrating text, graphics, animation of programs and algorithms, video and sound as appropriate to serve as the basis for a CS001 course for non-majors. This textbook integrates lecture material, laboratory projects, self study material and background reference material in a form that student can readily access and annotate with their own notes. In addition, we propose to augment the hypermedia system with tools to monitor how student use the hypermedia textbook. This will allow us to better understand how to organize, manage and present University-level course material in a hypermedia document. A BS thesis has been developed around these ideas while another one is in progress developing more case studies. A prototype has been build demonstrating a lot of these ideas. Some of our results have already been published in "Teaching Computer Science for Non-Majors through a Hypertext Book" while the more complete work has been submitted for further publication. 

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