IT’s Academic will remain here for posterity, but we are moving new updates and other interactive content to our new Educational Technologies Center site at http://etc.princeton.edu/blog
Please visit us there and let us know what you think!
PULSe – the Princeton University Learning Series is a new IT learning opportunity that supports many of the technologies OIT makes available. Faculty, staff, and students – anyone with a Princeton netID – can participate in the live Friday afternoon webinars or access recorded tutorials on available services such as SharePoint, Roxen, and WebSpace. PULSe maintains a presence on Twitter and Facebook where additional resources are shared. In this Productive Scholar session, you will be introduced to the site, its features, and the iLinc web conferencing system that is used to present the weekly webinars.
Lynda.com is a California-based company that offers online training materials on popular software platforms, web applications, and consumer technology. Some are short introductions to a new technology or software package. Others are in-depth instructions on software applications or suites. Continue reading »
At the Lunch ‘n Learn session on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011, Donna Liu explained and demonstrated AllPrinceton.com, a "hyperlocal multimedia experiment" of which she is the founder and Executive Director. AllPrinceton is not Liu's first multimedia project. After she came to Princeton in 2002 as a Ferris Fellow in journalism, Liu founded the UChannel, in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Before Princeton, Liu had a long career as a news producer and manager with CNN, where she launched CNN’s first production center in Asia. She is an Emmy award winner for coverage of the Tienanmen protests in 1989. Liu opened her talk by describing the history and evolution of the AllPrinceton.com project.
Liu described her transition from analog to digital media during the development of the UChannel at Princeton. Now a digital convert, she not only understands the benefits of new media, but advocates it to others. During the UChannel project, Liu described having conversations with George McCollough, Executive Director of Princeton’s community access TV station, about he future of news and broadcasting, and what the transition to digital might mean for traditional news outlets. Liu noted that she would have loved to experiment with a local news organization during that transitional period, but that there wasn’t enough time to spare among her other responsibilities. When the UChannel was “unplugged," and Donna completed her appointment at Princeton, she suddenly found she had time and decided to begin a local news site that would focus on all topics relating to Princeton.
Liu started AllPrinceton.com with essentially no capital investment and a shared space on a server. She began searching and experimenting with capturing and posting information that seemed to her to be missing or elusive on other local news and civic websites. In order to create the AllPrinceton site, she selected an open source content management system called Drupal especially because there was a supportive community of developers, and also because AllPrinceton's funding organization, The Knight Foundation, was a Drupal advocate as well as being a prime supporter in experimentation with news media. Since Liu considers herself more of a journalist and organizer than a technologist, she chose a pre-configured Drupal theme that was already a favorite among other news organizations using Drupal because it had a lot of news-centric features. As she showed the Lunch 'n Learn audience the new website for AllPrinceton, she explained that the project was in “constant beta” and that the skeletal framework would soon be filled with focused local content, gathered with help from the community. She has welcomed local residents to participate in the AllPrinceton experiment, and has begun to offer regular workshops to get the community involved and informed.
The AllPrinceton.com site is organized into various content streams. There is original content from AllPrinceton writers as well as related, aggregated content from third party sources. The original content is created by students and Princeton community members who are interested in reporting the town’s events and issues. In the center is Town Talk, a group blog where people write their own content about events and issues. Liu described Town Talk as being akin to embedded journalism, where people on the ground report on what they see in the area, and everyone is clearly identified and associated with their various organizations. A calendar, including arts, cultural and civic events, exists where community members might post. A classified section and directory section allow people to exchange information, though it is not yet as popular as other areas on the site. (Liu plans to make these sections more robust over the summer.) The directory, for example, might contain biographical and contact information for Princeton's civic leaders, or other information related to community governance.
Other content on the site is aggregated using curated feeds from established news sources such as The Princeton Packet. The aggregated content exists as a teaser, consisting only of the first few lines of a story, a fragment linked to the entire article on the original site. Princeton Community TV offers a media feed, so that the site also includes links to audio and video content about Princeton.
A search for "Princeton" populates a twitter feed on the site, and as a result, the feed offers not only tweets about Princeton township, Princeton borough and Princeton University, but occasionally picks up a "Princeton" reference that is unrelated to the community. Liu described the accidental inclusion in the feed of lively tweets that referred to an up and coming hiphop prodigy named 'Princeton' (results which Liu was mostly able to filter from the feed). Liu intends to continue applying feed filters so that future twitter content can become more reliably focused on actual Princeton-specific tweets. Liu's goal is to make the twitter feed provide a vibrant and immediate source of information -- as a point of comparison, she described the kind of immediately-aware feeds that we’ve seen occur spontaneously during natural catastrophes such as the recent earthquake in Japan.
Liu identified such timely and specific information as a local news gap, one that AllPrinceton might be able to fill. For instance, although there are alerts and institution-specific alerts of snow and wind emergencies, perhaps there is currently no centralized online presence for such alerts in the community. If simple tools could be made available to let the community self-report emerging situations or outages, AllPrinceton could move from simply being useful to being truly essential service. Liu described a recent meeting during which the proposed school budget was discussed. After an extensive search, Liu concluded that the specifics of the budget weren't described anywhere in the local websites associated with the school board. Information about the budget did not exist on the web until a student reporter from AllPrinceton went to the meeting, got a paper copy of the proposed budget, scanned it and posted it on the site. "Public information does not necessarily mean accessible information," Liu explained, "unless there are media channels to make it available."
Liu cited examples of other technology leaders and popular web based tools that have helped to inspire her work on AllPrinceton. One such tool is Steve Johnson’s Outside.in which takes information feeds from a specific zip code and pulls them together into a cohesive collection of local updates. (Liu also mentioned that Johnson's site was purchased by AOL for $10M the day before her talk.) Johnson continues to improve the algorithm that collects the data to feed the site. But even Johnson has come to admit that algorithms are not enough, and that the information gathered by machine has to be supplemented by human reporting, a kind of "hybrid" concept that is central to Liu's visions for the future of AllPrinceton.com.
Liu also quoted Jeff Jarvis, a guru of digital news and media, as having said “Do what you do best, and link to the rest”--which Liu sees as a sound philosophy, and is the rationale for bringing aggregated content from other established sources to the AllPrinceton site. George McCollough, the director of Princeton’s Community Television and Digital Media Center, remarked Liu, gives people the tools and knowledge to create their own media--and then broadcasts the results. Liu sees McCollough's station as a model for what AllPrinceton.com might provide for Princeton's online community.
An intense focus on local news, a concept Liu refers to as hyperlocality, is, she says, similar to a pendulum swinging back from the overtly global concerns of mass media. Mass news media organizations might be perceived on one hand as media monsters, absorbing and eclipsing local media channels. Locality is gaining in importance, said Liu, especially with regard to news. Media sources are regrouping around communities of interest and geographical locations. Liu decided to focus on the geo-location trend in designing AllPrinceton.com -- in part because she loves the town, but also because Princeton, although small, is a place where many interesting things happen..
Liu spoke of the information-gathering tool Ushahidi as an example of the new trends in crowd-sourced reporting. Ushahidi was originally deployed in Kenya to help monitor elections, The tool allows average users to share information and has been used in emergencies such as Haiti's recent disasters, and the Washington snowstorm. SeeClickFix.com (a possible future addition for AllPrinceton) allows local residents to use smartphones to take pictures of problems, record their geolocation, and report details of what needs to be fixed. The information is then posted to the SeeClickFix. site, and remains there until the problem is resolved. Liu shared her own SeeClickFix view of Princeton after the wind storm we experienced last spring. Liu, armed with her phone, took a walk around her own neighborhood and noted the location of several downed trees. If a similar system was in place for Princeton, information about the specifics of weather, or other sorts of emergencies, could be shared more easily through increased reporting at the neighborhood level. However, without the buy-in of the municipal services such reporting would have little effect. If the community reports an issue and no one with the power to fix it is listening, such a site might actually increase confusion and frustration.
Liu concluded her talk by citing how two Princeton faculty members as being influential to her growing interest in using online media as a public concern. An example of bottom-up reporting can be found in Professor Matthew Salganik's AllOurIdeas.org (itself the subject of a recent Lunch 'n Learn talk). AllOurIdeas is a collaborative tool where a group of people with a shared interest can pick a favorite when presented with two ideas. The ideas presented are posed in response to a shared question or problem. Favored solutions rise to the top of the polls, and participants are encouraged to enter new ideas or solutions to the topic being discussed. Liu noted that Salganik's polling tool is being used in New York City to decide upon the use of new public spaces. She would love to see this tool used to discuss local issues, such as the ongoing talks about the consolidation of Princeton's Borough and Township. The second faculty member who influenced Liu's thinking about new media was Professor Ed Felten. Liu recalled a talk she attended a decade ago, where Felten outline a striking description of what he called "the Celestial Jukebox." This was a visionary future device that could be used to make phone calls, take photos, watch and listen to media, connect to the internet and more. Now that we all can have a "Celestial Jukebox, " in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, what, asked Liu, can we do to make sense of the vast amount of information that now flows from individuals to the internet? She recently asked Felten to consider that question. "Filtering," he replied, "is key." Filtering, curating, and selecting information from the web can result in an incredibly rich source of information about a single topic.
For the AllPrinceton.com project, that topic of shared interest is Princeton itself, and Liu hopes that some creative filtering and channeling through a community collection of "celestial jukeboxes" might result in something that can benefit and enlighten all Princeton residents.
If you are interested in working with Donna Liu in developing the AllPrinceton.com site, drop in on one of her regular Friday workshops from 10-12 at the Princeton Public Library. Additional, more advanced workshops are scheduled on an as-need basis at Princeton Community TV.
A podcast of Donna Liu's talk can be heard here.
CC license, Steve Snodgrass, via Flickr.
David Hollander, Law and Legal Studies Librarian at Princeton, and Willow Dressel, Assistant Librarian at Princeton's Engineering and Furth Libraries, gave a talk on Wednesday, February 9th about the history of patents, the complexity of the law behind them, and how one can use this knowledge to perform better patent searches to find patents, and how to conduct historical research on past patents and patent applications.
Hollander began the talk by remarking that the concept of protecting inventions and ideas had been a part of English law for hundreds of years before the existence of the United States. The first idea of something like a patent can be found in laws relating to English craftsmen’s guilds. In the U.S., an inventor's right to an ideal was written into the original version of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Cause 8, by the inclusion of the phrase allowing congress "[t]o promote the Progress of the Useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Inventors the exclusive Right to their Discoveries."
This language authorized Congress from the very beginning to grant and protect patent rights, and the idea of patent protection was passed into law in the first Patent Act of 1790. Since then, these concepts have undergone only three major revisions (with many smaller amendments and changes): patent acts were passed in 1793, 1836, and 1952, the last of which is the version that is still current today.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was formed by Congress to handle the application process for, and granting of, patents. Challenges to patents are handled by the U.S. court system. What are the basic steps involved in securing a patent and what are the results of a successful application?
First, the inventor must prove that he or she has come up with a new, useful and non-obvious process or product.
Second, if the patent is granted, the inventor is entitled to a 20-year period of patent protection. During that time the inventor has the exclusive right to, make, use, or sell the invention.
Hollander continued to say that there are two main views of what a patent represents. First, some view the patent process as a means to ensure further progress and invention by virtue of the fact that patents are made public for others to study. By securing the inventor's rights, disclosure of a new invention can further the state of the art in that particular area. Some others regard the patent process as largely protective of private property, because an inventor has the right to keep any new invention or process secret. The patent process mediates in this case to make disclosure possible through the government's guarantee of 20 years of exclusive rights to the inventor. In both cases, disclosure is a prominent part of the patent process. Patents are by nature public.
The specific terms "new," useful, ““non-obvious,”“process and "product." are critical to understanding patent law. The concept of "process," or "product" is a description of the actual thing being patented. There are several types of patents including “utility,” “design,” “plan,” and other patent types, however utility is by far the most common. A process, a machine, a manufacture, or a composition of matter can constitute the basis for a patent that describes a new process or product. A useful improvement on any of these aspects of invention can also warrant granting a new patent that builds on an older patent. Nothing beyond this list of four categories can be patented. Ideas, for example are not patentable.
Computer-related patents raise an area of ambiguity in patent law, because computers rely upon math and algorithms to operate. Math is regarded as a "law of nature" by the patent process, and until recent decades, was not patentable. Because of this, early inventions in computing were not patentable, although that opinion has relaxed somewhat in recent years, as the lack of protection for inventor’s rights became an obvious detriment to progress in computer technology.
How then is a new patent application examined for viability? According to Hollander, there are three main points of consideration for a successful patent application:
First is novelty. In order to investigate this quality, events that occurred before the patent that might have anticipated its development are examined, and the current state of the art related to the patent in the U.S. and other countries is examined.
Second, the patent must show some degree of minimal usefulness. If a new invention has no perceived use, it cannot be patented.
Multiple similar patents that are filed at the same time, a process called “an interference procedure,” trying to determine which application has priority.
Hollander cited an example of a complex patent challenge in a current case of Microsoft vs.. a small company, i4i, which successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement. The courts decided in favor of i4i, and granted a hefty settlement, but Microsoft has twice challenged that decision, arguing that Microsoft knowingly infringed the i4i patent, but that patent was wrongly granted in the first place, and so, was invalid. (The technology in question was the use of custom XML, patented by i4i, and used by Microsoft in Word 2007). Here is a link to i4i’s summary of the case so far. An account of the same case from The New York Times can be found here.) The case is expected to go to the Supreme Court later this year.
A question from the audience about international patents prompted Hollander to explain that patents can be filed in different countries simultaneously, a labor-intensive process. Alternately one can file a patent in any country that abides by the Paris Convention of Industrial Property—which gives the applicant a one-year grace period for filing in other countries.
The third option for international patents, Hollander explained, is to file under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, to which 125 countries have agreed, before filing in any other country. This also gives the inventor a one-year grace period for filing individual patents, but patent applications under this treaty must subsequently be made individually in other countries.
Hollander concluded by showing a patent for “pet display clothing,” a wearable structure that allows a pet owner to carry small pets like gerbils in visible tunnels on his or her body. Despite the extensive, and somewhat ridiculous drawings of the “pet display garment,” the only part of the patent application that mattered in securing this odd patent are the list of claims at the end of the application.
Willow Dressel next explained how to use various web-based searches to find existing patents for research and discovery. For those searching for patents because they want to file their own patent, Dressel recommended engaging a patent professional for the most accurate and comprehensive results. Professionals are best qualified to do these sort of searches of prior art in patents, whether they are a patent attorney, or--in the case of patents arising from work-related inventions at Princeton--the Intellectual Property and Licensing Office, part of the Office of Research and Project Administration at the University. However, a desire to file a patent is not the only reason for doing patent searches, and Dressel explained several resources that aid in doing comprehensive patent searches.
Dressel showed a LibGuide she has made containing a list of links to resources to aid in patent searches for scholarly and historical reasons. For legal advice on patents relating to research, she referred the audience to the website of the Intellectual Property and Licensing Office, cited above, which can advise inventors on patenting inventions and processes that arise from their work at Princeton.
There are many reasons for searching patent literature, for historical research, where as she remarked “patents are a great gateway into the literature of a particular field or technology,” and can simply help to understand how things work. Patents also contain a wealth of information about research, as many corporations do not publicize their research interest, but are obliged to file patents for new discoveries. Each patent contains references to prior patents that relate to that technology. Patents also contain a lot more information about a process or invention than is generally available otherwise. Particularly since the patent office has records of patents since 1790, the literature can provide an unparalleled historical view as well as providing a greater understanding of how certain inventions and processes developed over time.
Dressel emphasized the importance of defining synonyms for search terms describing patents, by thinking of the words that describe an invention or process, and consulting a thesaurus to find similar terms in order to conduct the most productive and complete searches. A huge keyword set will help in making the most fruitful searches. Searching patents, said Dressel, is an iterative process that can be added to as new searches provide more ideas for searching.
Patents can also be searched in a specific field by using the class numbers defined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Citation searches contain references to patents that refer to other patents, as each patent cites references to other relevant patents.
A Google search for “free patent search tools” revealed several sites of more or less value. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office database is the authoritative guide, with the most current documents, but full-text searches are only available for patents since 1976. Patents from 1790 to 1975 can only be searched by date, classification number, or patent number.
Free Patents Online combines keyword searches for European Patents, and other World Patents, and combines both applications for patents as well as patents in their database, two sources of data that would require separate searches at the U.S. Patent Trademark Office. This resource, however, also has ads.
Google Patents attempts to provide full searching of patent documents from 1790 to the present, but the searches depend upon many documents, some handwritten, that were scanned, and which may miss some terms that were not recognized by the optical character recognition used by the software.
Dressel used Free Patents Online to search for touchscreen technology in mobile devices, using terms “mobile,” “computer,” “input,” “phone,” as search terms. The search revealed that each patent is filed under a code that describes the class of technology that the patent belongs to, and the classifications can be nested by hierarchy into other classifications. As an example, Dressel searched for inventions that might relate to touch-screen input technology for mobile devices. She demonstrated how one needs to think about a variety of search terms that might relate to a touch screen, and discovered a fairly recent patent that contained a large amount of information that could lead in other directions for searches in this area. The search result turned up patent titles and a excerpt of each abstract, listed in order of relevance. Looking at a patent for a “touch screen for a mobile telephone,” revealed a summary of the patent application, its primary class, its inventor, and a PDF of the actual application.
Following the primary class listing, Dressel visited a link to the U.S. Patent Trademark Classification listing for the patent she found, in order to visit the classification homepage to find out more about that classification number. (She pointed out that U.S. classification numbers can be translated into European classification numbers using tools on the Patents Online site, which extends searches to other countries.) Drilling down on the patent classification for “visual display systems” revealed a number of entries in the hierarchy of that classification, as well sub-classes and parent-classes indicating their level within the classification hierarchy. Both patent applications and patents were returned in the search at Free Patents Online.
Dressel concluded by mentioning a catastrophic fire in the U.S. Patent Office in 1836, when all the patents from 1790 to 1836 were destroyed. Only a few--less than 3000--of the lost patents were eventually recovered from other sources, for example patent holders who had a copy of a historic patent. Because of the loss of information, all pre-fire patents were renumbered, beginning with an “X,” to show that they are part of this fragmentary period of record. There are other databases at Princeton, Dressel explained, that help to cover the missing data from pre-fire patents, scans of supporting documentation for lost patents. A special tab on Dressel’s LibGuide labeled “1836 Patent Fire” provides information about how to find information about patents prior to 1836.
For reunions last year, OIT created a special web site tailored for the small mobile devices that are now proliferating in the marketplace, cell phones with web browsers, iPhones, Blackberries, and the like. The experiment proved to be quite successful. To accelerate the development of such services, OIT signed an agreement in December that will give the University access to Blackboard Mobile, an environment that will permit users to access public information about the University in a format especially suited to such mobile platforms.
The result will soon be a Princeton-specific application, m.Princeton, for leading brands of smart phones.
Mobile Central was founded by a group of Stanford students who developed the core products offered by Mobile Central by rising to the challenge of a course assignment in a Stanford computer science class - the task: to deliver real mobile solutions for the Stanford campus community.
iStanford now permits users to search the campus directory and campus map, view athletics and course information, and a variety of other campus services. The students later formed the company TerriblyClever Design in 2007, and developed several more mobile suites for other colleges and universities.
During the past year, several universities, notably Stanford, Duke, and MIT, have used these same services to permit mobile users to access campus maps, directories of people and places, bus schedules and campus tours, event calendars, announcements and news, as well as images and videos.
Princeton is now building a full suite of such mobile applications for the benefit of the entire campus, as well as visitors, parents, and prospective students. OIT has assembled a team with representatives from several departments to complete the first phase of the work in time for reunions this coming May. The first phase will include a campus map, a campus directory, athletics schedules, course information, news, and the public events calendar.
During the first phase, Princeton will also assemble support for Reunions, from events and campus maps through directories and local restaurant menus.
The second phase will be ready in time for the fall. It will deliver real time shuttle information, access to the library catalog, an image gallery, additional video content, building maps (library floor plans, for example), as well as an online Orange Key tour.. Additional changes will be made as needed and will be delivered as updates to the existing application.
At the April 28 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Janet Temos ‘82 *01 and Ryan Irwin ‘10 of Blackboard Mobile Central discussed the details about the coming Princeton mobile apps. They noted that the apps will be delivered in formats that support the Blackberry Storm, Curve, and Bold, the iPhone, the iPod touch, and eventually the iPad. The apps will also work on any smart phone that can support a web browser. The application will be free, but users will need to download the application that suits their brand of phone.
The Apple applications will be available for download via iTunes. Blackberry applications will be available from the Blackberry app store. Blackboard Mobile Central and Princeton will host the web-based version.
Check back soon at www.princeton.edu/princetonmobile.
Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.
The podcast and presentation are available.
In the Fall term of 2009, Princeton conducted a pilot sponsored by the High Meadows Foundation, the University Library, and the Office of Information Technology, to assess the use of e-readers in the classroom. The reader used was the Amazon Kindle DX, a lightweight, portable e-reader with the capacity to hold approximately 3500 books, in three University courses.
The project aimed to explore the use of the e-readers in classes for which e-reserves were the primary readings. The printing of e-reserve readings at Princeton accounts for a large portion of printing in public clusters (total of 10 million sheets of paper last year). The e-reader pilot sought to target e-reserve readings and present them on an e-reader to see if printing could be reduced.
The pilot participants consisted of three faculty members, 51 students, and several administrators in the Library and the Office of Information Technology.
The three courses in the pilot involved considerable eReserve reading, all had some content in the Kindle store, and they had to be of a size that would permit the involvement of three courses. The courses in the pilot were Civil Society and Public Policy (Professor Stanley Katz, an undergraduate seminar), U.S. Policy in the Middle East (Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, a graduate seminar), and Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome (Professor Harriet Flower, a graduate seminar).
Devices were given to students in September. The pilot was voluntary with opt-out possibilities at any time. One student opted out at the start of the pilot. No student opted out after the pilot began. Students were asked to do the bulk of the course reading on the Kindle. 95% of the students reported that they had not previously used an eReader.
Participants were asked to do pilot course readings on the e-reader without printing as much as they felt it was possible. The pilot concluded with a survey and some final focus groups in February 2010.
The survey results are available at at the e-reader project web site and in the presentation slides.
The goals of the pilot were to reduce the desire to print, to explore the unique strengths of eReaders, all while being careful not to affect adversely the classroom experience.
At the April 14 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Janet Temos, Director of OIT’s Educational Technologies Center, Stan Katz and Dan Kurtzer two of the faculty involved in the pilot, and Trevor Dawes, Circulation Director at the University Library reviewed the findings of the Princeton e-reader pilot and shared their experiences.
Temos reported that the pilot did indeed reduce students’ desire to print.
Students judged the screen size, image resolution, device weight and storage capacity to be excellent. Highlighting, annotating, navigating within and between books, and the dictionary features achieved much less positive evaluations. Overall, Temos reported, the students thought that the devices had promise, the reason they said at the end that none opted out.
Kurtzer noted that, in his graduate seminar, all of the students were expected to read the course material before coming to class. And so, while they may have experienced some challenges with navigation, those did not occur in class. He reported that all of the students liked the fact that they could carry all of their reading around all of the time.
Many of Kurtzer’s students have recently downloaded material from current classes to maintain the experience. Main criticisms included highlighting, keeping track of bookmark references, and moving between and among passages from different books.
One problem that the pilot addressed was the difficulty of working with pdf documents because you can’t enlarge the type size. The only surprise in the data, reported Kurtzer, was that the pilot appears only to cut down 50% of the students’ printing.
Use of the Library’s eReserve system has grown exponentially, Dawes commented. The pilot provided a good opportunity to test the use of the eReserves system on an eReader platform. For this project, the processing was different in that it was required to scan the pages individually, trimmed, and processed further by OIT staff. Early on, we discovered that the Kindle could not read pdf documents in their native format. The amount of staff time involved was large and, he concluded, would not be sustainable for the device. We will continue to monitor progress to see if new devices will be able to accommodate pdf’s more efficiently.
Professor Katz’s course involved 23 books. He emphasized that the device is superbly ideal to accompany travel, and he and students agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. That said, it was wholly inappropriate for the close textual work involved in the course.
Classroom discussion required that all students be looking at the same passages, and they were expected to annotate those passages. Annotations collapse into footnotes, the keyboard is tough to use, and the Kindle had built-in limits on the amount of text that could be highlighted and annotated. The tedious nature of finding passages caused consistent classroom confusion. All that said, he is off to San Francisco for a dissertation review. “I will load it into the Kindle, said Katz, “and love it once again.”
Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.
Daniel C. Kurtzer retired from the U.S. Foreign Service with the rank of Career-Minister. From 2001-2005 he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and from 1997-2001 as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. He served as a political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, Deputy Director of the Office of Egyptian Affairs, speechwriter on the Policy Planning Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. Kurtzer was a member of the American delegation to the Israel-Palestinian autonomy negotiations (1979-1982), helped negotiate the creation of the Multinational Force and Observers (1981-1982), negotiated and oversaw the successful arbitration of the Taba border dispute between Israel and Egypt, crafted the 1988 peace initiative of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and in 1991 served as a member of the U.S. peace team that brought about the Madrid Peace Conference. Subsequently, he served as coordinator of the multilateral peace negotiations and as the U.S. Representative in the Multilateral Refugee Working Group. Kurtzer received several of the U.S. Government’s most prestigious awards, including the President’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State Distinguished Service Award, the National Intelligence Community’s Award for Achievement, and the Director General of the Foreign Service Award for Political Reporting. Ph.D. Columbia University.
Stanley Katz is president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He is also a commentator on higher education policy. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Katz is a scholar of American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. He is the editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States and of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Legal History (OUP, 2009). The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History and as vice president of the Research Division of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library, the Copyright Clearance Center and numerous other institutions. He is a commissioner of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission. He also currently serves as chair of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba. Katz is a member of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians; a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and an academico correspondiente of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has honorary degrees from several universities. Ph.D. Harvard University. Katz is director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
Trevor A. Dawes is the Circulation Services Director at the Princeton University Library, where he is responsible for the circulation, reserve, current periodicals, stack, remote storage and Borrow Direct operations in the library. He previously held several positions at the Columbia University Libraries. Mr. Dawes earned his MLS from Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, and has two additional Masters Degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an active member of the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries.
The podcast and presentation are available.
Princeton University has created a cyberinfrastructure, says Curt Hillegas, the Director of Princeton's TIGRESS High Performance Computing and Visualization Center, itself a collaboration between the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE). Developed within the past decade, this cyberinfrastructure consists of computational systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and advanced networks to improve scholarly productivity and enable knowledge breakthroughs and discoveries not otherwise possible.
At the April 8 Lunch 'n Learn seminar, Hillegas noted that the University's research computing activity has grown to keep pace with and to provide leadership for this international trend. Tigress maintains a vast hardware and storage infrastructure. And staff provide support for programming and for the new visualization facilities within the Lewis Science library.
The effort, of course, also involves faculty across many disciplines and departments. This session highlighted the work of two University faculty: Professor Annabella Selloni from Chemistry and Professor Clarence Rowley from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The session demonstrated how computational science and engineering is enabling and accelerating scientific discovery.
Annabella Selloni’s research activity is aimed at obtaining a microscopic understanding of the property of materials with specific emphasis on surface and interface phenomena. At the Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, she discussed the quest to discover an efficient and perhaps less expensive alternative to platinum as a catalyst for the production of hydrogen. Princeton’s high performance computing systems have permitted her to model and to manipulate functionalized electrodes. At the seminar, she played simulations that illustrate how small surface changes can have a significant effect in the production of hydrogen.
Professor Clarence Rowley is modeling flows past a cavity, as would occur with a sun roof or an aircraft wheel well or weapons bay. Although his efforts have employed the processing power of a supercomputer, his aim has been to achieve workable results and a control design with a much more limited number of equations. Full systems require as many as 2,000,000 equations. Rowley now has control designs based upon just two equations. With such active control, it may be possible, for example, to mimic the fluid dynamics of insects and small birds and to design a controller to stabilize the leading edge of aircraft wings.
Hillegas concluded by inviting prospective users to apply to use the Tigress HPC resources. Users will find all the information needed to select the resources they need as well as information about applying for an account and time on the systems.
About the speakers:
After undergraduate studies at the University La Sapienza, Roma (Italy), Annabella Selloni graduated from the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne-Switzerland (1979). This was followed by a postdoctoral position at IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights (1980-1982). She has been Assistant Professor at the University La Sapienza in Roma (1982-1988), Associate Professor at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy (1988-1995), and Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1996-1999). In 1999 she joined the Dept of Chemistry of Princeton University, initially as Senior Research Staff and Lecturer, and as a full Professor (since 2009). Her research interests are in theoretical and computational condensed matter physics and chemistry, with particular focus on the use of first principles electronic structure and molecular dynamics methods to obtain an atomic scale understanding of the structural and electronic properties of surfaces and interfaces, including organic-inorganic and solid-liquid interfaces, surface reactions and catalysis, photochemistry and photocatalysis. Prof. Selloni has over 160 publications in the area of theoretical / computational chemical physics. She is part of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Chemical Physics and Surface Science.
Professor Clarence Rowley received his B.S.E degree from Princeton University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2001, and he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an Associated faculty member in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. His research interests involve modeling and control of complex systems, particularly fluids systems with specific areas of interest including modeling and model reduction for bifurcation analysis and control; numerical methods, both for fluids simulations, and analysis of dynamical systems; and applications of geometric methods in fluid mechanics.
Curt Hillegas received his B.S. in Chemistry from Lehigh University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton University. Curt is the Director of Princeton’s TIGRESS High Performance Computing and Visualization Center, a collaboration between the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering and the Office of Information Technology. He has helped to build a centrally managed research computing infrastructure that includes 65 TFLOPS of computational systems and 1 PB of shared storage as well as staffing for system administration, programming, and visualization support. He also serves on the Steering Committee for the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure working group. Curt’s past work at Princeton includes managing the enterprise Unix group, architecting enterprise server and storage solutions, designing and managing central email infrastructure, and general Unix system administration.
The podcast and presentations are available.
Imagine harnessing the power of the sun within a magnetic bottle. Unlike hydrogen bombs, which are essentially uncontrolled fusion reactions, scientists for decades have been pursuing the peaceful challenge of safely harnessing fusion energy, a potentially efficient and environmentally attractive energy source. Progress in addressing this scientific grand challenge, suggested William Tang, the Director of the Fusion Simulation Program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has benefited substantially from advances in super-computing. At the March 10 Lunch 'n Learn, Tang noted that such capabilities continue to progress at a remarkable rate, from tera-to-petascale today, and to exascale in the near future.
If we can create the conditions for fusion to occur, says Tang, bringing deuterium and tritium together at very high temperatures, the reaction produces alpha particles, fast neutrons, and an energy multiplication of 450:1. It would then be possible to use that energy to heat the burning plasma in a self-sustaining reaction.
The Federal Government recognizes the importance of the effort, as evident, for example, in the Department of Energy document, “Facilities for the Future: A Twenty-Year Outlook.” Current Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren has commented that it is important to shrink the time scale for achieving fusion energy deployment by increasing appropriate investments in fusion research and development.
Tang pointed out that major progress achieved over the years in magnetic fusion research has led to ITER - a multi-billion dollar burning plasma experiment currently under construction in Cadarache, France. Seven governments (EU, Japan, US, China, Korea, Russia, and India) that represent over half of the world’s population are collaborating on this international effort led by the EU. Up to the present, laboratory experiments have produced 10 megawatts of power for approximately 1 second. The goal for ITER is to produce 500 million Watts of heat from fusion reactions for more than 400 seconds. A successful ITER experiment would demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of magnetic fusion energy.
Tang emphasized that the burning plasma experiment is a truly dramatic step forward in that the fusion fuel will be sustained at high temperature by the fusion reactions themselves. Worldwide experimental data and computational projections indicate that ITER can likely achieve its design performance. Indeed, notes Tang, temperatures in existing experiments have already exceeded what is needed for ITER.
Tang expressed the hope that American investments in Fusion Energy development will be able to keep pace with those of foreign countries and that it will be possible to deal effectively with political and associated financial constraints to achieve the kind of sustained support that the highly challenging research efforts will require. This will be essential for attracting, training, and assimilating bright young people that are needed to move the program forward.
The ITER effort will clearly require strong research and development efforts to harvest the scientific knowledge, which Tang pointed out entails a proper integration of advanced computation with experimental data acquisition and analysis together with fundamental plasma theory. Progress will be significantly aided by the accelerated development of computational tools and techniques to support the acquisition of the scientific understanding needed to develop predictive models which can prove superior to empirical extrapolations of experimental results. This provides the key motivation for the Fusion Simulation Program (FSP) - a new U.S. Department of Energy initiative supported by its Offices of Fusion Energy Science and Advanced Scientific Computing Research — that is currently in the program definition/planning phase.
Tang expects that the FSP will make unique contributions to the fusion program by addressing the integration challenges for multi-scale physics problems that are currently being mostly treated in isolation. The FSP approach will involve carrying out a rigorous and systematic validation program — that would enhance confidence in the reliability of the associated predictive models developed to improve our capabilities for reliable scenario modeling for ITER and for future devices.
Tang added that even more powerful super-computers at the “exascale” range and beyond will help meet the formidable future challenges of designing a demonstration fusion reactor (DEMO) after ITER. With ITER and leadership class computing being two of the most prominent current missions of the U.S. Department of Energy, whole device integrated modeling, which can achieve the highest possible physics fidelity, is a most worthy exascale-relevant project for producing a world-leading realistic predictive capability for fusion. This should prove to be of major benefit to U.S. strategic considerations for Energy, Ecological Sustainability, and Global Security.
William Tang is the Director of the Fusion Simulation Program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the U. S. Department of Energy (DoE) national laboratory for fusion research. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and on October 15, 2005, he received the Chinese Institute of Engineers-USA (CIE-USA) Distinguished Achievement Award. The CIE-USA, which is the oldest and most widely recognized Chinese-American Professional Society in North America, honored him “for his outstanding leadership in fusion research and contributions to fundamentals of plasma science.” He has been a Principal Research Physicist at PPPL and Lecturer with Rank & Title of Professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences since 1979, served as Head of the PPPL Theory Department from 1992 through 2004, and was the Chief Scientist at PPPL from 1997 until 2009. He also played a prominent national leadership role in the formulation and development of the DoE’s multi-disciplinary program in advanced scientific computing applications, SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing). For the next two years he will be the PI (Principal Investigator) leading a national multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team of plasma scientists, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians from 6 national laboratories, 2 private industry companies, and 9 universities to carry out the program definition and planning of DoE’s Fusion Simulation Program (FSP).
In research activities, Dr. Tang is internationally recognized for his leading role in developing the requisite mathematical formalism as well as the associated computational applications dealing with electromagnetic kinetic plasma behavior in complex geometries. He has over 200 publications - with more than 125 peer-reviewed papers in Science, Phys. Rev. Letters, Phys. Fluids/Plasmas, Nuclear Fusion, etc. and an “h-index” or “impact factor” of 42 on the Web of Science, including over 5300 total citations. He has guided the development and application of the most widely recognized codes for realistically simulating complex transport dynamics driven by microturbulence in plasmas and is currently the Principal Investigator of a multi-institutional DoE INCITE Project on “High Resolution Global Simulations of Plasma Microturbulence.” The INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) Program promotes cutting-edge research that can only be conducted with state-of-the-art super-computers. Prof. Tang has also been a key contributor to teaching and research training in Princeton University’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences for over 30 years and has supervised numerous successful Ph.D. students, who have gone on to highly productive scientific careers. Examples include recipients of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000 and 2005.
A podcast and the presentation are available.