Current Research
At the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign (UIUC), I am simultaneously a Senior Research Scientist and a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS).
Most of my recent papers and presentations are available on line. Papers by myself and by others are also linked off of the various project-specific web pages mentioned.
My bookmarks (private).
The the Electronic Archives Project website, including CEP archiving software downloads
The Illinois Government Information (IGI) search engine searches the over 280 websites of Illinois State Government
The Illinois Electronic Documents Initiative (ILEDI) provides permanent access to those official publications of Illinois State Government which are available in electronic form.
2001-present: With the Library Automation and Technology division of the Illinois State Library, my students and I have implemented and operated a low-cost, highly-automated system (CEP) for archiving government (or other) websites. CEP has been in use for over 4 years for Illinois State Government webpages. Further, it has been used for at least a year with the State Government webs of Alaska, Arizona, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin -- a total of more than 2.6 million files archived (as of July 2005). This work was primarily funded by National Leadership Grants from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Using metadata and whole-text harvested by CEP in the web archiving process, we also operate the IGI search engine. IGI supports several search modes, and can search either all State of Illinois websites or any one. Further, it supports browsing by author/publisher and by subject classification (for those webpages which are so classified using metadata).
ILEDI provides a permanent web address and storage location for the official State of Illinois publications. Hyperlinks and bookmarks pointing to these documents, or their access surrogates (containing the description of the documents, plus all metadata) should "never" break. Documents retained within ILEDI are human-selected as important, official publications, or otherwise valuable in connection with State of Illinois governance. Further, each document contains an extensive set of descriptive metadata, making locating the correct document and version much more a specific process than it is for the general web.
See the following pictorial summary of the main points of each of these projects to date.
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| CEP | IGI | ILEDI |
Many activities by the Illinois State Library's Library Automation and Technology Division, including our efforts listed above, won the Illinois Libraries Association's "Hugh Atkinson Award for multitype library cooperation and/or resource-sharing" in August 2005.
From July 1995, through December 2000, I managed NCSA's largest projects to date involving the use of the Java programming language. This effort initially centered around the Habanero object framework for the construction of real-time collaborative tools. Principal support for the Habanero research was via a major DARPA grant for the "Framework for Integrated Synchronous And Asynchronous Collaboration" (ISAAC) project, of which I was Principal Investigator.
Noteworthy milestones include:
- Habanero was heavily used in the GeoWorlds project -- an extensive Technology Integration Experiment by DARPA (Robert Neches, USC ISI, PI), combining software systems from many of the flagship grants of the Digital Libraries Initiative (I) of NSF, DARPA, NIH, NASA, et al. GeoWorlds demonstrated the applicability of all of these research projects in a disaster coordination and relief scenario.
- Habanero was used in the Kansas Engineering and Science Interface, an early NCSA effort at including collaborative functionality in a science community portal, by the NCSA Chemical Engineering Applications Technology team. Similar collaborative portal investigations utilizing Habanero are being done by NCSA's Nanomaterials team.
- We demonstrated our first CAVE-to-"P130 laptop" tele-immersion application at the NCSA/Alliance all-hands meeting in October 1996. This demonstration validated our claim to the bandwidth reduction possibilities in the principle of "state sharing with view substitution". 2-D top-down views of shared participant state were substituted on the laptop for the more expensive immersive 3-D views going on in the CAVE. The demonstration required a bandwidth of only 15,000 bits per second, and (clearly) minimal CPU and graphics support by the laptop. Yet, laptop participants could see and interact with colleagues in the CAVE view, and could both manipulate (i.e., change the state of) objects in the shared environment.
- NCSA's Java3D group, spun off from the Habanero group, has done an extensive investigation into the use of Java3D in High-Performance Computing (HPC) visualization applications, developing applications for NCSA's Environmental Hydrology and Instrumentation/Astronomy teams in the Spring of 1998. In addition, they also produced the You-Build-It Virtual Reality program, the Grand Prize entry in Sun's Java3D programming contest at SIGGRAPH'98.
- An exploratory effort with Kodak created large-format collaborative image analysis systems for evaluation by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).
- Habanero is used by the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) project at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Department of Energy in conjunction with their DOE-2000 Collaboratories projects for remote access to major scientific instruments.
- A DARPA Technology Integration Experiment (TIE) was done with the Worlds/Orbit CSCW project, headed by Professor Simon Kaplan, at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, the University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia, and the VIRTUE visualization experiments under Professor Dan Reed at UIUC.
- Professor Adrienne Perlman of UIUC's Department of Speech and Hearing Science heads a deployment project in CSCW/telemedicine based on spin-off technologies from ISAAC/Habanero. In televideofluroroscopy, MPEG-based video is used with a fluoroscope in remote diagnosis of oropharyngal dysphasia.
I was the technical program manager for the NCSA Mosaic Web browser project from April 1994 through August 1995. During this time, our user community grew from about 1,000,000 to about 4,000,000, Netscape came into being, and Microsoft licensed Mosaic as the baseline code for Internet Explorer. Noteworthy milestones include:
- Mosaic was significantly involved in the Digital Libraries Initiative project of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at UIUC's Grainger Engineering Library. Web-based distribution of SGML documents, with an attendant viewer program connected to Mosaic, was the initial means whereby the electronic document collection at the Grainger library was distributed to a user base across the Big Ten universities. For a summary of Mosaic's involvement in the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative (#1), see the paper "Federating Diverse Collections of Scientific Literature" from IEEE Computer, 29(5), pp. 28-36, May 1996. (Available on-line at the CANIS lab.)
- The digital library work included development of the Common Client Interface, a predecessor of browser plug-in technologies, for deployment of the Panorama SGML viewer from SoftQuad.
- Additionally, in the Microsoft Windows version, we implemented an on-demand image zoom facility based on the Kodak Photo CD software libraries that won NCSA's 1996 Industrial Grand Challenge Award.
- e-mail is by far the best way to contact me.
"lsjackso" at illinois.edu - telephone +1-217-333-0949
- Mailing address and physical location:
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
501 East Daniel
Champaign, Illinois 61820 USA
Within the UIUC inter-office (snail-) mail system, use mail code "MC-493".