Collaborative IIC Projects

These are IIC projects to which AM members contribute by sharing interdisciplinary expertise.

Please see our general projects page for an overview.

The Scientists' Discovery Room

The Scientists' Discovery Room (SDR) is working to develop for scientists, professors and students a new genre of interactive and visual capabilities to navigate, explore, examine, and carry out detailed investigation and analysis of multi-dimensional information. Collaborative research by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, the IIC, and Harvard teaching faculty will focus on the design, construction, implementation and evaluation of an intuitive digital environment that integrates the unique properties of advanced large visual displays, emerging multi-touch, multi-user tabletop surfaces, and novel human-computer interaction techniques. The outcome will be a next-generation digital virtual lab that scientists and students alike can walk up and use, tackling the daily challenges of scientific discovery and learning with interaction and visualization tools and methods that are most conducive to the task at hand.

The AM project has been working with SDR to develop interactive and collaborative environments geared toward astronomy research. Specifically developing applications like LivOlay which allows the intuitive and robust overlaying of multiple images and the WeSpace environment for scientific collaboration across laptops, touch table, and a visualization wall. AM's astronomy and visualization expertise has worked to enhance the testing and development of SDR's interactive environments, and assisted in AM's astronomy research.

SDR Collaborators: Chia Shen (MERL/IIC), Hao Jiang (MERL/Tsinghua Univ.), Daniel Wigdor (MERL), and Clifton Forlines (MERL).

AM Collaborators: Michelle Borkin (IIC), Jens Kauffmann (IIC/CfA), and Alyssa Goodman (CfA).

The Space Time Machine Consortium

The Space Time Machine Consortium (STM) enables humans to travel through outer space, and through time, to understand the origins of our Universe. It provides live access for professionals, amateurs and students of the Universe to the most up-to-date online astronomical data available, as well as to historical astronomical data sets, some of which extend back more than 100 years. The STM consortium's work at present represents the union of three efforts: the DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard) project, the Time Series Center (TSC), and the World Wide Telescope (WWT) project at Microsoft Research.

The AM team has been collaborating primarily with the WWT and in-development WWT Pro research groups. The AM team's expertise in both astronomy imaging and computer visualization has been complimentary to working with WWT to test their products and brainstorm on future developments.

SDR Collaborators: Chia Shen (MERL/IIC), Hao Jiang (MERL/Tsinghua Univ.), Daniel Wigdor (MERL), and Clifton Forlines (MERL).

AM Collaborators: Michelle Borkin (IIC), Jens Kauffmann (IIC/CfA), and Alyssa Goodman (CfA).

The Data Intensive Science Consortium

The Data Intensive Science Consortium (DISC) has the long-term goal of enablign cutting-edge science while, focusing on common design, HPC systems, storage architectures and toolkits that will enhance the Research Computing capabilities at Harvard as a whole. Typically, technologies developed and/or tested at IIC for DISC projects are deployed more widely within a few months of their proven stability. Current projects include collaborations with Pan-Starrs (an optical wavelength, time-domain, all-sky survey telescope); the Murchison Widefield Array (a radio wavelength sky survey and early-universe telescope); the Large Hadron Collider (the next-generation TeV particle-physics facility at CERN); DASCH ("Digital Access to a Sky Century", digitizing 500,000 images of 100 years of sky from the Harvard Plate Stacks); the Connectome (imaging and analysis to map the "wiring diagram" of the brain), and several projects involving chemical databases.

The AM project has been working with DISC in the planning of HPC facilities for MWA, Connectome, and TSC among others. AM members have also consulted on algorithms, implementation, and performance tuning of ITK-based image processing for large astronomical data sets.

DISC Collaborators: Lincoln J. Greenhill (FAS/Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), Randall B. Wayth (SAO), and Daniel A. Mitchell (Univ. of Sydney).

AM Collaborators: Douglas Alan (IIC), and Michael Halle (SPL/IIC).