9422044 Fischer This award is to purchase high-performance networking and computing equipment which will be dedicated to support research in computer and information science and engineering. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including the following: Video compression algorithms will be developed for packet-switched networks, emphasizing robustness to packet loss and development of quantization methods that achieve most of the available granular and entropy gains. Distributed algorithms for computer vision will be developed, including techniques for parallel verification of hypotheses in three-dimensional object recognition, and techniques for high-performance sampling of discrete Markov Random Field models. A "virtual reality VCR" system, which was proposed as a mechanism for image-based recording and immersive playback of virtual environments, with particular emphasis on scientific documentation, will be prototyped. Finally, new techniques will be developed for recurrent design and automatic recurrent modeling of shapes in natural images. ***
