This is an infrastructure award to support the acquisition of a high speed network of data servers, computation servers, parallel processors, and workstations for the support of research in software, artificial intelligence, and parallel algorithms. The software research is in operating systems, wireless distributed systems, parallel processing, and software engineering. The artificial intelligence research is in intelligent multimedia interfaces and vision and robotics. The parallel algorithms research is in parallel string matching with applications to genome matching. New networking technologies make it possible to support computation intensive activities distributed across networks. This support requires new software tools that will support distributed and parallel computing. This award is for the infrastructure necessary to test this new software and also for the infrastructure necessary for research in robotics and parallel algorithms for large information system searches. The operating system research concentrates on a high performance operating system for distributed and parallel computers. The distributed systems research is for research in wireless distributed computing in which the transmission medium consists of radio waves. This research promises the true portable workstation in which no wires whatsoever are needed in order to access the network. Both the parallel processing and the software engineering research involve rule based systems. The parallel processing research uses rule based systems to distribute computational tasks while the software engineering research uses rule based systems to coordinate cooperative work amongst multiple software developers. The multimedia research involves the construction of virtual realities for the manipulation of multi-dimensional data. The example application area is financial data. The vision and robotics research is aimed at processing multiple sources of spatial data in order to navigate a robot in a natural environment and to control robot manipulators. Finally, the parallel algorithms research is concentrated on string matching algorithms applicable to data arising from genome databases. This research is important for actually using large databases that will arise from the human genome project.
