Bruce David Lucas

An architecture for a scientific visualization system

The architecture of the Data Explorer, a scientific visualization system, is described. Data Explorer supports the visualization of a wide variety of data by means of a flexible set of visualization modules. A single powerful data model common to all modules allows a wide range of data types to be imported and passed between modules. There is integral support for parallelism, affecting the data model and the execution model. The visualization modules are highly interoperable, due in part to the common data model, and exemplified by the renderer. An execution model facilitates parallelization of modules and incorporates optimizations such as caching. The two-process client-server system structure consists of a user interface that communicates with an executive via a dataflow language.<<ETX>>

A data model for scientific visualization with provisions for regular and irregular grids

A mathematical data model for scientific visualization that is based on the mathematics of fiber bundles is presented. Previous results are extended to the case of piecewise field representations (associated with grid-based data representations), and a general mathematical model for piecewise representations of fields on irregular grids is presented. The various types of regularity that can be found in computational grids and techniques for compact field representation based on each form of regularity are discussed. These techniques can be combined to obtain efficient methods for representing fields on grids with various regular or partially regular structures.<<ETX>>

VoiceXML for Web-based distributed conversational applications

Development of speech services has been hindered by a lack of easy-to-use standard tools for managing the dialogue between user and service. Interactive voice-response systems are characterized by expensive, closed application-development environments. Lack of tools inhibits portability of applications and limits the availability of skilled application developers. Consequently, voice applications are costly to develop and deploy, so voice access is limited to only those services for which the business case is most compelling for voice access. Here, I offer an introduction to VoiceXML, an emerging standard XML-based markup language for distributed Web-based voice services, much as HTML is a language for distributed visual services. VoiceXML brings the power of Web development Bruce Lucas

Method and apparatus for executing voice commands having dictation as a parameter

In a computer speech recognition system, the present invention provides a method and system for recognizing and executing a voice command that has a dictation portion. Upon receiving a user input, the spoken utterance is processed to identify a pattern of words which matches a pre-determined command pattern. Then, computer system command is identified that corresponds to the pre-determined command pattern and has at least one parameter. The parameter is extracted from a dictation portion of the spoken utterance which is separate from the pattern of words matching the command pattern. The computer system command is then processed to perform an event in accordance with the parameter. If the spoken utterance does not contain a pattern of words matching a pre-determined command pattern, then the spoken utterance is recognized as dictation and inserted at a specified location into an electronic document or other system or application software.

A scientific visualization renderer

While scientific visualization systems share many requirements with other graphical applications, they also have special requirements that make solutions based on standard rendering hardware or software not entirely satisfactory. Those requirements are illustrated by describing the renderer used in a production scientific visualization system, Data Explorer. The requirements for a visualization renderer are discussed. Implementation techniques used to meet the requirements of parallelism, volume rendering of irregular data, clipping, and integration of rendering modalities are described. The renderer described is a software renderer, but it is hoped that the requirements and implementation presented might influence the design of future generations of rendering hardware.<<ETX>>

Collage: A Declarative Programming Model for Compositional Development of Web Applications

Collage is a declarative programming model and runtime expressly targeted at building and deploying cross-organizational software as compositions of web components. Collage is based on an RDF data model, data-driven execution model, and flexible support for cross-organizational composition of both application and UI components. In this paper we outline a uniform set of Collage language features addressing end-to-end application design, including business objects, but with particular focus on user interaction, and adaptation to current interaction platforms such as web browsers.