Google-IBM-NSF Partnership in Data-Intensive Computing

Grant Specifications

"The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a solicitation for proposals for the new Cluster Exploratory (CluE) initiative. The CluE program was announced in February as a part of a relationship between Google, IBM and NSF. NSF hopes this initiative will help lead to innovations in the field of data-intensive computing, as well as serve as an example for future collaborations between the private sector and the academic computing research community.

CluE will provide NSF-funded researchers access to software and services running on a Google-IBM cluster to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing. NSF will allocate cluster computing resources for a broad range of proposals which will explore the potential of this technology to contribute to science and engineering research and produce applications which promise to benefit society as a whole."

    Goal: Building a semanticly capable search engine

Apple iPhone

"KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund™ is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund™ will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.

"A revolutionary new platform is a rare and prized opportunity for entrepreneurs, and that's exactly what Apple has created with iPhone and iPod touch," said John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "We think several significant new companies will emerge as this new platform evolves, and the iFund™ will empower them to realize their full potential."

Goals:

• Implement above search engine an a intuitive manner, a visual user interface.Have the program run on the cluster through the internet so the search can be conducted efficiently

• Tie this project into a interactive learning environment COGS 329 Embodiment project. Kids could record clips from theatre            

performances, take pictures of art, record and play music clips and analyze data on the device by drawing and plotting data. Could       install a visio like program to chart out the progress. Work with the pachyderm software to analyze. Work with programmers to

analyze the amount to which the applications can be tweaked.Some good software may be possible. Apple would be a good company to get involved with.

Software Ideas:

• Diagramming Software, somewhat like Microsoft Visio?, maybe resulting from some of Steve Dee's Cognitive Diagrammatics research
• Gesture software, possibly utilizing pachyderm
  • "Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author’s website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation."
• Stemma Learning Program on the iPhone
  • Reach a large audience to research the effectiveness of stemmatic learning
• Agent Research
  • Can an agent run on a remote cluster and still interact with the phone in some way?
    • Maybe to control the search engine, or perform some action, search, data analysis or statistical work
• Speech Processing/Synthesis
  • Can we create a project with Patrizia to create a processor and synthesizer for both stemmatics and search engine work
    • The stemmatic component could serve as a handheld translator
    • The search engine could just be a reference source, the device could talk and explain the results and the meaning of the information.