CONTRACTOR'S PROGRESS STATUS AND MANAGEMENT REPORT HPDST Intelligent Collaboration & Visualization for the period 22 July 1997 - 22 Jan 1998 Report #2 CDRL A001 CONTRACT N66001-96-C-8507 21 Feb 1998 SUBMITTED TO Receiving Officer e-mail address: "hpdstnrad@nosc.mil" Rich Laverty Frank Schindler Bob Medearis 619-553-2918 619-553-2845 619-553-6377 laverty@nosc.mil fschindl@nosc.mil medearis@nosc.mil SUBMITTED BY University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599 Principal Investigator Administrative Contact Contract/Financial Contact Prasun Dewan Sarah Thompson (919) 962-1823 (919) 962-4673 fax: (919) 962-1799 (919) 962-5011 dewan@cs.unc.edu sarah_thompson@unc.edu Do not distribute to DTIC or other data depositories. Distribution authorized to DOD components only; premature dissemination (date). Other requests shall be referred to Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center (NCCOSC), RDT&E Division, San Diego, California 92152-5000. Quarterly Status Report High Performance Distributed Services Technology HPDST Intelligent Collaboration & Visualization for the period 22 July 1996 - 22 October 1996 Contract N66001-96-C-8507 CDRL A001 1.0 Purpose of Report This status report is the quarterly contract deliverable (CDRL A001) which summarizes the effort expended by the University of North Carolina team in support of HPDST Intelligent Collaboration & Visualization (IC&V) on Contract N6601-96-C-8507. 2.0 Project Members UNC/Dewan and others. spent: ??? hours sub-contractor/ODU. spent: ??? hours sub-contractor/PSU. spent: 0 hours 3.0 Project Description (last modified mm/yy) 4.0 Performance Against Plan Spending was as planned for this reporting period. Moreover, we continued to make progress on the steps started last quarter. 5.0 Major Accomplishments to Date In the last two quarters, we have several parts of our current design of the collaboration bus. Hussein Abdel-Wahab and Mohamed Elmadin at ODU implemented a composable session management system for application sharing engines. It is implemented on top of the the Java Shared Data API (JSDA) from Sun. It consists of four levels: the top level is the session information service, the second level is the session managers, the third level consists of the application sharing engines and the audio/video streams, while the lowest level contains the actual shared applications. To test its composability, the ODU group has integrated it, with little effort, with the JCE collaboration system developed at ODU and NIST. Goopeel Chung and Sadagopan Raajaram have designed and implemented a composable mechanism for allowing users to late join a collaborative application. It logs output requests of the collaborative application in terms of an abstract interaction model to which the requests of a specific application must be mapped. Our solution provides three different schemes, of increasing flexibility and efficiency, that make increasing assumptions about the amount of semantic information available from the application. To test its composability, we have integrated it, with little code, with a collaborative spreadsheet application we developed previously This version addresses a subset of the intended services. Vassil Roussev has defined the major parts of our current reference model. He has identified several of the canonical components of a collaboration system such as session manager, version, view, concurrency controller, coupler, and logger; and defined the exact protocol and default introspection-based implementations of several of these components. Two components he ignores are session management and latecomer accommodation. The protocols and composable default implementations of these components have been designed by Hussein Abdel-Wahab (at ODU) and and Goopeel Chung. Last year we completed an initial prototype version of the Sync system for asynchronously merging object versions. Jon Munson has made some important improvements to the system. It is now composable with the application object that must be merged. He ash also added a composable persistent object server to it, which defines a hierarchical directory structure. Thus, the Sync directory is much like a hierarchical file directory except that it stores Sync objects rather than files. Consistent with contemporary hierarchical browsers for opening files, Jon has developed a hierarchical browser for opening Sync objects. To test its composability, he has integrated Sync, with little effort, with an existing shared whiteboard application. Dennis Brown has eveloped a semantic model of awareness for virtual environments. The model supports ``virtual training wheels,'' which provides varying levels of artificial awareness in a shared virtual training environment. We have implemented a ``capture the flag'' application to illustrate the model. It allows the participants to turn on or off various clues about the correct path in a maze to the flag that must be captured. The model has been implemented as part of an initial reference architecture for collaborative VEs. 7.0 Issues 7.1 Open issues with no plan, as yet, for resolution: 7.2 Open issues with plan for resolution: We currently plan to use the extension to the 3-D Java library that is expected from UIUC NCSA. 7.3 Issues resolved: An important issue from our last report was shich 3-D graphics library should we use? We have used the Open GL C-based library, interfacing it with our Java code. As a result our code is not portable. When an efficient Java graphics library is developed, we will port our code to it. 8.0 Near-term Plan Finish implementation of the basic Bus connection module and use it to automatically connect many of the modules that have been hand connected so far. Finish implementation of generic composable Java modules supporting user-interface, coupling, concurrency control, and access control services, and compose them with existing IC&V Java projects such as Habanero, C-Space, and Disciple. Implement a concurrency-control translator allowing two different implementations of concurrency control, fine-grained locking and floor control, to interoperate. One of these implementations is a collaborative spreadsheet application we developed and the other is a version of the spreadsheet running under Habanero. Compose an existing walkthrough application developed at UNC with collaboration facilities developed as part of our currenet reference architecture for collaborative VEs. 9.0 Completed Travel In May, Dewan attended the San Diego IC&V PI demo. 10. Equipment Purchases and Description 11.0 Summary of Activity 11.1 Work Focus: Our focus this quarter was on the implemenation of: composable coupling and concurrency control, composable late-commer accommodation, composable session management, translation between floor control and fine-grained concurrency control, bus agents. As mentioned above, we completed some of these steps above and expect to complete the remaining next quarter. 11.2 Significant Events: None beyond what was said in major accompolishments. FINANCIAL INFORMATION: Contract #: N66001-96-C-8507 Contract Period of Performance: 7/22/96-7/21/99 Ceiling Value: $981,697 Reporting Period: 7/22/97 - 01/22/98 Actual Vouchered (all costs to be reported as fully burdened, do not report overhead, GA and fee separately): Current Period Prime Contractor Hours Cost Labor 3020 59,153 ODC's 9,658 Sub-contractor 1 (ODU) 80 + 480 15,709 Sub-contractor 2 (PSU) 0 0 TOTAL: 84,520 Cumulative to date: Prime Contractor Hours Cost Labor 5580 102,392 ODC's 960 18,493 Sub-contractor 1 (ODU) 0 0 Sub-contractor 2 (PSU) 0 0 TOTAL: 136,594