http://www.edcenter.sdsu.edu/projects/reu2002/index.html

Real-time Interactive Visualization of Remote Environmental Monitoring Systems for Researchers and Educators (1 student)

(View the ECCSE 2002 REU Final Report, October 2002)

The Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve (SMER) is one of four field stations of the California State University system administered by San Diego State University (SDSU) and dedicated to teaching and research in the field sciences. Research and education efforts at SMER involve collaboration between several groups in high-performance computing and computational science. For more than a year, the High-Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), led by Hans-Werner Braun, has worked closely with SMER technicians to establish high-speed (45 Mbps) wireless communication links to these remote stations. Recently, the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (NACSE), led by NPACI Earth Systems Science Thrust Area Co-Leader Cherri Pancake at Oregon State University, developed a prototype web interface designed to use this high-speed wireless connection at SMER to provide researchers more convenient access to data acquired from remote environmental monitoring systems. Still, the need for more interactivity in both monitoring and remote control of devices is necessary to adequately support inquiry-based learning currently being pursued by undergraduate faculty at SDSU and the CSU for the students in their classrooms. It is worth noting that Larry Smarr, Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-IT2), has identified SMER as a leading site to serve as a model ecosystem for real-time high-speed wireless remote data acquisition and environmental monitoring in a collaborative research and education setting.

This REU project will seek to extend the NACSE prototype web interface by adding to it a powerful data acquisition, control, and visualization tool called NeatTools. NeatTools was originally developed by the Northeast Parallel Architectures Consortium (NPAC), an Alliance partner at Syracuse University. It is now being distributed freely by the Institute for Interventional Informatics (I3), a non-profit organization located in San Diego county working closely with the team of researchers and technicians at SMER. NeatTools uses a visual programming approach to control data acquisition, processing, and visualization. NeatTools currently runs only in Windows, and has no interface to web technologies such as Java servlets or SQL-queriable databases such as MySQL or Oracle. By extending its capabilities to interact with these technologies, we significantly extend our researcher/educator's ability to access and control remote environmental monitoring systems, both in a research lab and an undergraduate student computing lab.

The ECCSE REU student will use the built-in module creation api to test various methods for establishing socket communication between NeatTools and Java servlets. With guidance from ECCSE staff, the NeatTools development team at I3, and a graduate student currently working on a related project, the student will select the best option available and implement the communcation method as a NeatTools module. The student will visit the SMER wireless remote monitoring systems to install and test prototype software to run on the high-speed wireless connection back to the ECCSE for interactive control and analysis. Time permitting, the student will then work with the development team at NACSE to add a component to their existing web interface, such as a java-based remote video camera control panel.

Team Members, Affiliations:

Jeff Sale, ECCSE/SDSU/NPACI

Kirsten Barber, ECCSE/SDSU/NPACI

Kris Stewart, ECCSE/SDSU/NPACI

Jeff Zhang, ECCSE/SDSU/NPACI

Dave Warner, Director, I3

Cherri Pancake, NACSE/NPACI

Relevant links:

NeatTools software, http://www.pulsar.org/neattools/

NACSE, http://www.nacse.org/

HPWREN, http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/

Institute for Interventional Informatics, http://www.pulsar.org/

Plan to Support W/M, Persons w/disabilities: SDSU is a minority-serving institution and, therefore, the project will promote the use of computational methods in a wide range of acedemic disciplines within a minority undergraduate student community. As in past years, we intend to make use of the large minority undergraduate community at SDSU to fill this position.

Distributed Sociology Workbench (1 student)

The Sociology Workbench is a research tool for social scientists who are looking to store, analyze and share survey data online. The SWB v2 consists of a set of Java servlets that serve as a web interface to an Oracle database located at the ECCSE at San Diego State University. Survey data is represented using the DDI Document Type Definition created by the Inter-University Consortium on Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Current SWB projects include expressing the SWB functions as web services using the Web Service Description Language to be used in conjunction with the Data And Knowledge System (DAKS, formerly DICE) XML Mediator.

The Distributed Sociology Workbench project will extend the SWB by making it a distributed system relying on homogeneous Oracle databases at both the ECCSE at SDSU and at ICPSR at the University of Michigan.

The student will be researching interface design issues pertaining to the SWB to determine how to best represent the data from the two separate sources; how to manage the logic of seamlessly connecting to multiple databases; and devising a method for other interested parties to easily connect their own databases to this distributed system.

This project is expected to provide the student with experience scaling existing object oriented Java code to accommodate a distributed environment. The student will work directly with ECCSE staff, attend weekly staff meetings and biweekly developer's meetings where they will have the opportunity to brainstorm with staff and graduate students, as well as other undergraduates.

Team Members, Affiliations:
Chaitan Baru - DAKS Group, SDSC
Ilya Zaslavsky - DAKS Group, SDSC
Peter Joftis - ICPSR, U.Mich
Jeff Sale - ECCSE, SDSU
Kirsten Barber - ECCSE, SDSU
Kris Stewart - ECCSE, SDSU

Plan to Support W/M, Persons w/disabilities: SDSU is a minority-serving institution and, therefore, the project will promote the use of computational methods in a wide range of acedemic disciplines within a minority undergraduate student community. As in past years, we intend to make use of the large minority undergraduate community at SDSU to fill this position.

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