The Kitware Blog

American Football Plays Paper Presented

Katie Osterdahl — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:16:58 -0500

Eran Swears presented a paper at the WACV conference in Breckenridge Colorado on January 11 entitled: Learning and Recognizing Complex Multi-Agent Activities with Applications to American Football Plays. The paper, authored by Eran Swears and Anthony Hoogs, will be published in the Workshop IEEE Publication.

The basic research, which stems from the DARPA CARVE program, seeks to determine if we can automatically detect pre-planned or scripted coordinated activities using automatically computed and highly fragmented tracks from video. American football was chosen as a surrogate problem domain as it shares many of the difficulties of reconnaissance video, including difficult tracking, interacting agents (players), high variability within the same play type, and active deception.

The approach pushes the model complexity onto the observations by using a multi-variate kernel density while maintaining a simple HMM model. The temporal interactions of objects are captured by coupling the kernel observation distributions with a time-varying state-transition matrix, producing a Non-Stationary Kernel HMM (NSK-HMM). This modeling philosophy specifically addresses several issues that plague the more complex stationary models with simple observations, i.e. Dynamic Multi-Linked HMM (DML-HMM) and the Time-Delayed Probabilistic Graphical Model (TDPGM). These include: smaller training datasets, sensitivity to intra class variability and/or dense uninformative clutter tracks. Experiments are performed in the American football video domain, where the offensive plays are the activities. Comparisons are made to the DML-HMM and an extension of the TDPGM to DBNs (TDDBN). The NSK-HMM achieves a 57.7% classification accuracy across seven activities, while the DML-HMM is 26.7% and the TDDBN is 21.3%. When tested on four activities the NSK-HMM achieves a 76.0% accuracy.

Open Access: Stop the Research Works Act!

Luis Ibanez — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:28:31 -0500

The "Research Works Act" is a proposed legislation that will forbid
US Federal Agencies from requiring the public dissemination of the
results of Publicly funded research.

If passed, this legislation will destroy the NIH Public Access policy,
and preclude the adoption of similar Public Access policies by other
Federal Agencies.

More here at the Association of Research Libraries:

http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/blog/12-0106.shtml

A new bill, The Research Works Act (H.R.3699), designed to roll back the NIH Public Access Policy and block the development of similar policies at other federal agencies has been introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives. Co-sponsored by Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), it was introduced on December 16, 2011, and referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online.

The bill text is short and to the point. The main point reads:

"No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that -- (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work."

Supporters of public access to the results of publicly funded research need to speak out against this proposed legislation. Contact Congress to express your opposition today, or as soon as possible.

It has been clarified that the bill interprets "private-sector research" to include all the papers that institutions produce under Federal funding support.

The proposed bill is backed by the Association of American Publishers,

however, several members of the association have indicated that they
do not support this Act.

In particular

You can join in opposing the Act

by signing the following Petition:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/207/support-the-open-access-movement-stop-the-research-works-act/

VES and Kiwi Open Source Release Now Available!

Aashish Chaudhary — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:10:24 -0500

We are pleased to announce the open-source release of VES. We have spent the last few months working hard to create a lightweight platform for building interactive visualizations on mobile platforms by leveraging visualization algorithms offered by VTK and rendering capabilities offered by current mobile hardware.

VES is a standalone, open project and framework for creating visualizations on mobile platforms. The VES framework contains a rendering library built on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, an application framework library for developing interactive visualization applications, and lightweight viewer for iOS, Android, and Linux platforms. VES is optimized for performance and provides an easy-to-use API. For more information on VES, please visit the VES wiki.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed to VES. We are hoping that other developers will come forward and use VES to create some really cool mobile visualizations. Please contact us at ves@public.kitware.com if you have any questions or need help getting started with VES.

References:

What's New in VES: http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/185

VES Development in Iterations: http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/user/174

WIKIPEDIA Blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA

Luis Ibanez — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:14:35 -0500

From:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_to_go_dark

<quote>

On January 18, 2012, in an unprecedented decision, the Wikipedia community has chosen to blackout the English version of Wikipedia for 24 hours, in protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PROTECTIP (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States.

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a "blackout" of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

“Today Wikipedians from around the world have spoken about their opposition to this destructive legislation," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. "This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world."

We urge Wikipedia readers to make your voices heard. If you live in the United States, find your elected representative in Washington (https://www.eff.org/sopacall). If you live outside the United States, contact your State Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs or similar branch of government. Tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and want the internet to remain open and free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action#Summary_and_conclusion

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2012/01/more-opponents-for-pipa-and-sopa-emerge-on-the-right.html

SPIE Medical Imaging Conference: Live demonstrations workshop

Stephen Aylward — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:38:57 -0500

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
SPIE Medical Imaging 2012: Live Demonstrations Workshop

Kitware is proud to continue its support of the SPIE Medical Imaging Live Demonstrations Workshop for 2012. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for systems and algorithms developers to show off their creations. The intent is for the audience to be inspired to conduct derivative research, for the demonstrators to receive feedback and find new collaborators, and for all to learn about the rapidly evolving field of medical imaging. Last year's workshop attracted well over 100 attendees and hosted multitude of demonstrations and discussions.

The 2012 Live Demonstration Workshop will be held as part of the 2012 SPIE Medical Imaging Conference (February 4 - 9, San Diego, California, USA). The workshop is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, 7 February 2012, 5:00 – 7:00 pm.

This year, the Live Demonstration Workshop has been expanded to encourage participation from all of the conferences that comprise the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference. Previously the workshop featured CAD demonstrations. This year we are encouraging the PACS, Perception, Physics, Visualization, and all other conferences to participate.

This workshop will feature interactive demonstrations that are complementary to the oral and poster presentations of SPIE Medical Imaging. During this event, authors of SPIE MI papers will be hosting samples, systems, and software demonstrations that depict the implementation, operation, and utility of their research.

The workshop will start with a short overview of the participating teams and systems. Next, the audience can interact with the teams during live demonstrations of the systems.

Submitting a demonstration

Those interested in giving a demonstration are invited to send an e-mail to Stephen R. Aylward (stephen.aylward@kitware.com) and Heang-Ping Chan (chanhp@umich.edu) and provide the following information:

Title of the demo
Names and affiliations (name of institute, city, country) of the demonstrators
Short description of the demo, one paragraph minimum. Make sure it clearly describes the technology and application area of the demo. You may cite or include a paper describing the demo.
Optionally, describe the public data used in the development or evaluation of the system. Include a link to the data or to a page that describes how to access that data.

Important Dates

January 20, 2012: Deadline for submitting proposals.

January 25, 2012: Notification of acceptance.

February 2, 2012: Deadline for submitting two summary slides for the opening presentation.

More information

For more information, including instructions on proposing a live demonstration, visit the workshop website at:

http://www.kitware.com/workshops/SPIE_CAD_2012.html

NASA Open Source Portal

Luis Ibanez — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:17:09 -0500

NASA Just deployed its own Open Source Portal.

http://code.nasa.gov/

Another Federal Agency embracing the practices of Open Source.

Software, being the ultimate "Public Good" (non-rival and non-excludable), it is a natural match for infrastructure projects that are funded by public resources. This is emphasized in the case of Federal Agencies whose mission is to foster the state of scientific research.

From their announcement:

"Today we are launching code.nasa.gov, the latest member of the open NASA web family. Through this website, we will continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution."

They start they approach the right way by welcoming the involvement of the public at large:

"Ultimately, our goal is to create a highly visible community hub that will imbue open concepts into the formulation stages of new hardware and software projects, and help existing projects transition to open modes of development and operation. We are going to need your help to get there! Please use “Share your Ideas,” comment on this post, or email us at opengov@nasa.gov to let us know how code can help you, where you would like to see the site go, and how we might best fulfill our purpose."

NASA Certainly has big plans for Open Source:

We believe that tomorrow’s space and science systems will be built in the open, and that code.nasa.gov will play a big part in getting us there. Will your code someday escape our solar system or land on an alien planet? We’re working to make it happen, and with your help, it will.

More at:

http://code.nasa.gov/

The National Alliance for Medical Image Computing's All-Hands Meeting

Stephen Aylward — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:08:05 -0500

Several Kitwareans are attending the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing's (NA-MIC's) All-Hands Meeting in Salt Lake City. At this meeting, we are promoting Slicer 4.0.1, the open-source medical image analysis and visualization platform that we released with other NA-MIC developers last week.

Over 100 attendees are at the NA-MIC meeting and using Slicer4 for traumatic brain injury assessment, image-guided surgery, head and neck radiation therapy planning, atrial fibrillation analysis, and more. Our developments in Qt, Python, and image analysis algorithms have been very well received. For more information on the event, the projects, and the attendees from academia and industry, follow this link.

On-going highlights from the meeting include the following:

Julien Finet and Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin have done an outstanding job presenting Slicer4 and working with users to created new modules and to apply them to challenging medical imaging problems:

Danielle Pace is supporting and extending our sliding-organ registration research and TubeTK, finding new collaborators, and working with UCLA on traumatic brain injury applications.
Benjamin Long presented his work on automated GUI testing using Qt and Python. The work is derived from the methods developed by the ParaView team.
Stephen Aylward is working on TubeTK and giving a presentation on "NA-MIC Software Processes and Future Plans" to the NA-MIC External Advisory Board and representatives from the NIH. He is also seeking out new collaborations and applications.

Kitware Trains Students for FIRST LEGO Robotics Tournament, WIN

Katie Sharkey — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:51:14 -0500

On Saturday, December 10th, more than 120 students from school districts across the New York’s Tech Valley region gathered for the FIRST LEGO® League Robotics Regional Qualifying Tournament at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. The tournament was organized by the Hudson Valley FIRST® LEGO® League (HVFLL) and sponsored by RPI’s Center for Initiatives in Pre-College Education and Time Warner Cable.

Fourteen teams competed under the Food Factor™ challenge, which required teams to use science and technology to develop ways of making food safer to eat. Teams of up to 10 children and at least one adult coach had to respond to the challenge by programming an autonomous robot to score points on a themed playing field, and developing a solution to a particular food-related problem they’d identified. Topics included safe transportation and preparation of food, exploring pest control, food temperatures, and pollution as it relates to food production and distribution.

Students were provided with a list of tasks (missions) for their robots to perform on September 1st, allowing for considerable preparation time. At the competition, teams were given three, 2.5 minute attempts at the competition table to complete as many missions as possible. They additionally had three presentations followed by question-and-answer sessions with the judges, which required the students to not only describe how their robots were designed and programmed, but also to describe their research project and solution to their food-related problem.

The Tenja Food Fighters from Orenda Elementary School in Clifton Park, led by Naomi Hoffman, Compliance Officer at Kitware, were the tournament champions and will be heading to the New York state-wide Championship tournament in Poughkeepsie on February 25. This win comes after several years of volunteering efforts from Kitware employees Naomi and Bill Hoffman, Chuck Atkins, and Dave Stoup, who have been teaching LEGO robotics after school at Orenda two hours a week for two six-week sessions since 2009.

“I could not be more proud of our team,” said Naomi Hoffman, leader of the Tenja Food Fighters. “It’s important that they’re learning these skills at such a young age. Hopefully it will inspire these kids to go on and make even greater contributions in technology.”

Congratulations to the Tenja Food Fighters and the Kitware folks who participated in the FIRST LEGO® tournament; best of luck at the state competition in February!

Additional Reading:
Students Learn Ins, Outs of Science, Math at FIRST LEGO Tourney at RPI
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Time Warner Cable Set to Host FIRST LEGO® League Robotics Tournament for Local Middle Schools
FIRST LEGO League

Inscight Podcast - RFI response on Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Luis Ibanez — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:44:19 -0500

The Inscight Podcast

http://inscight.org/

just posted a new episode:

http://inscight.org/2012/01/08/episode-22-public-access-to-federally-funded-research/

On the response to two Request for Information (RFI) that the
US Office of Science and Technology Policy has posted in order
to gather feedback on how to improve Public Access to the Data
and Peer-Reviewed publications resulting from Federally Funded Research.

We talked recently about these RFI in our previous blog post:
http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/220

The RFIs are due on January 12th.

We will be wrapping up our public open response
on January 10th, by the end of the day.

This Podcast episode included the participation of:

Alan Ruttemberg (special guest)
Cameron Neylon (special guest)
Marcus Hanwell
Luis Ibanez (moderator)

The discussion touched very interesting topics, including:

Public funding of scientific research
Licensing of scientific articles and data
Career incentives for researchers
The culture of scientific research

Background

Alan Ruttenberg is Director of Clinical and Translational Data Exchange at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Until recently he was Principal Scientist at Creative Commons, working on the Science Commons, where he developed the Neurocommons, a large scale Semantic Web knowledge base of biological information. He co-chaired the (Web Ontology Language) OWL Working Group, and is a coordinating editor of the (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) OBO Foundry, helping coordinate efforts to enable web scale data integration across the whole of biomedical science.

Cameron Neylon is a biophysicist and well known advocate of opening up the process of research. He is a co-author of the Panton Principles for open data in science, Founding Editor in Chiefof Open Research Computation as well as being an academic editor for PLoS ONE. He was named as a SPARC Innovator in July 2010 and is a proud recipient of the Blue Obelisk for contributions to open data. He writes regularly at his blog, Science in the Open(http://cameronneylon.net).

Marcus Hanwell is a R&D Engineer at Kitware, where he leads the Open Chemistry project. He is involved in the development of open source, cross platform scientific visualization and analysis software. Marcus is a strong believer in open science, open data and open source and proud member of Blue Obelisk. He works on Avogadro, Titan, VTK, ParaView, CMake, KDE and several other large open source projects.

Kitware Celebrates the Holidays

Lisa Avila — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:59:34 -0500

It is at this time of year more than any other that the growth of Kitware truly makes an impression. I don’t believe there are any photos of the 1998 or 1999 Holiday Parties (not that we were even really calling it that back then), but you can see here a picture of the 2000 get-together (complete with real “crackle” effects since I scanned the picture we’ve had hanging in the Kitware kitchen for maybe a decade...)

In 2000 we had 19 people in attendance, with nine of those being employees and four being children. Organizing the “party” was a matter of making a dinner reservation someplace big enough to fit us all in a private room (yes, we thought we were getting big back then!)

This year was quite a bit different, as you can see below. We started with our celebration in North Carolina on December 3rd, with 42 people in attendance, then wrapped up with our New York party on December 10th with 181 people in attendance. Admittedly 7 people are double-counted in those numbers as some folks from NY (and their families) traveled down to North Carolina to celebrate twice - but still, that is 216 unique party-goers. Although we did not manage a group shot at our North Carolina event, we did all try to squeeze into one photo in New York (with the waiter standing on a chair out the door of the room trying to fit us all in since no one thought to bring a wide-angle lens!)

Planning two parties of this magnitude takes just about a year of preparation - and we all must thank Kitware’s exceptional office management team, Donna, Deb, and Tami, who pulled this off. In addition to reserving the venues and negotiating the menus, they also had to arrange for sitters to keep an eye on the kids, balloon artists and magicians to entertain the kids, AV equipment for the movies and presentations, and of course all the gifts and goodies that go along with a Kitware event.

Below are a few pictures from the New York event that capture a bit of the fun we all had. All of us here at Kitware hope that you enjoyed your holiday season as much as we did, and we look forward to working with you in 2012!

Those of us responsible for the party gifts would like to think that the wonderful expressions shown in this picture were caused by the awesome Kitware espresso mugs with mini blue and green chocolates.		One of the best parts of these company events is getting a chance to see your co-workers' families.

Can you name this mystery Kitware employee?		We may need to hire an additional balloon artist next year as his creations were popular with more than just the children! Those are some mighty big ears you've got there Brian!

Rick and Will covered our accomplishments for the past year, and entertained us with pictures taken at various events and company outings.		Will had the honor this year of announcing two more employees reaching the ten years of employment milestone - congratulations Sébastien and Luis!

Another mystery employee - who knew it was a masquerade party?		Dave claims all those balloons are for his children.

Join Us: Shaping the Future of Federal Public Access Policy

Luis Ibanez — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:22:42 -0500

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is requesting public feedback to draft future policies on public access to data and peer-reviewed publications resulting from Federally Funded Scientific Research (FFSR).

To this end, OSTP has posted two Requests for Information (RFI) and responses are due by January 12, 2012.

At Kitware, we have decided to respond to both RFIs the "Open Source Way".

We have posted the draft of our responses in the two public documents below:

and we now invite you to join us in refining and extending the answers to both RFIs. The documents are open for editing by anyone with the link.

Please join us in improving the feedback that we are providing to OSTP, or if you are satisfied with the current content of the documents, please join us by signing the response at the end of each document.

If you want to suggest large changes to the document, please coordinate with others by using the annotation tools that you will find in the top menu bar.

We will close down edits on January 10th, to format the final document responses and submit them to OSTP by January 12th.

Also, watch for an upcoming inSCIght podcast on this topic, open access and federally funded research, which should be available sometime this week.

More about the Office of Science and Technology Policy:

OSTP's Mission

The mission of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is threefold:

To provide the President and his senior staff with accurate, relevant, and timely scientific and technical advice on all matters of consequence;
To ensure that the policies of the Executive Branch are informed by sound science; and
To ensure that the scientific and technical work of the Executive Branch is properly coordinated so as to provide the greatest benefit to society.

Strategic Goals and Objectives

Ensure that Federal investments in science and technology are making the greatest possible contribution to economic prosperity, public health, environmental quality, and national security.
Energize and nurture the processes by which government programs in science and technology are resourced, evaluated, and coordinated.
Sustain the core professional and scientific relationships with government officials, academics, and industry representatives that are required to understand the depth and breadth of the Nation’s scientific and technical enterprise, evaluate scientific advances, and identify potential policy proposals.
Generate a core workforce of world-class expertise capable of providing policy-relevant advice, analysis, and judgment for the President and his senior staff regarding the scientific and technical aspects of the major policies, plans, and programs of the Federal government.