The philosophy of creating a distributed visual computing environment is in part the philosopy of the Advanced Communication and Information Technology Center ( ACITC): to empower researchers and educators not just on-campus but off-campus as well by using information technology across high speed networks. There are other Java development activities on campus not associated with the SMVC: 1. CHITRA, 2. Javamatic, 3. SWAN, 4. NSF-NIE

Four Projects:

• NSF Proposal, "Combined Research and Curriculum Development: Computer Simulation of Material Behavior -- From Atomistic to the Continuum Level" / (Project Summary). Computing has had a tremendous impact on research in the sciences, but much of this knowledge remains to be transferred into the classroom. This project will focus on developing Java applications so that undergraduate students can access and learn about recent advances in mechanics of failure of engineering materials by using high speed computer networks and Java enabaling web interfaces. With these tools students can interactively create and parametrically design material systems.

• Arturo Falck's ESM4984 / visualization project in collaboration with VNI was acknowledged by Marc Andreessen at the first Netscape Developers Conference, by viewing the following "QuickTime" Movies from Virginia Tech server. This project first targeted an application for the Atomistic Computer Simulation Laboratory to facilitate access to information by creating a standardized and friendly interface that researchers and students in materials science used to submit batch jobs to supercomputers and visually interpret results as a VRML-1 file. Arturo completed a project for SUN-VNI where he has created a Network Programming Interface Builder using Java ( NPI-Builder) running on a web brower. Dennis Seay of the Distributed Information Systems Group continued with the development of Builder with JDK 1.1 and made it part of the Web Publishing Toolkit With the NPI-Builder researchers and educators can now more conveniently create Java-web interfaces using a network data flow philosophy. The latest version of NPIB was written by Randy Levensalor for the NSF/VNI/SUN CRCD project where it is being used routinely as originally intended. The latest version of NPIB is the result of a major rewrite where download/installation/tutorials are available under the "tools" section of the CRCD Web pages. NPIB is under evaluation by the NSF National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) consulting group to create a tool that will minimize errors in submitting batch jobs to NCSA's supercomputers (contact: John Towns, NCSA). Virginia is an alliance member of NSF's NCSA Partnership in Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI).

• Francois Coupleux' s 1996 summer project allows researchers & educators to access Java interface development without programming in Java. A viscoelasticity project (ESM 5654) was selected to demonstrate how the "Visualizer Language" could be used to create useful Java interfaces without programming in Java. The Visualizer Language is a simple HTML-like language that is easily learned (the user's manual is less than 10 pages) by scientists and engineers who are already familar HTML. Hence users can easily create a Java interface within their discipline. Francois now works in the Web Division for VNI in Boulder, Colorado.

• Differential -- Inferential -- Graphical STATiStical (DIGSTATS) analysis of experimental data is a collaborative K-12 educational project with the Central Virginia Governors School, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), the Virginia Tech Institute for Connecting Science and Research in the Classroom (ICSR). The DIGSTATS's 3D Slicer Java applet was designed to be part of DIGSTATS's graphical analysis. The first 3D Slicer applet was created by Elsa Laughlin, NSF-SURP-1996. An improved 3D-Slicer applet was created by Nathan Hamblen (Slicer-II) and Tim Terriberry (Slicer-III) which was funded by ICSR. Slicer-III was incorporated into the Central Virginia Governors School DIGSTATS project and is used routinely in the curriculum.