John Martirano

This multi-layered communications infrastructure has been chiefly utilized for its real-time multi-channel media processing and transport layers. The architecture of the system is multi-pier, trading off on the benefits of UDP, TCP and RTP/RTCP protocols for a very powerful media transport framework. The transport layer abstracts RTP, UDP and TCP transport mechanisms to simplify application integration. The application layer allows multi-channel real-time media processing applications to be built by linking together modules into graph structures (The application layer is similar to D2K in this respect). This project was the result of various lines of development while at NCSA beginning with my remote augmented reality work with Motorola and continuing with my work on collaborative video avatars embedded in the virtual reality space of Virtual Director.

“IntelliBadgeâ„¢, an NCSA experimental technology, is an academic experiment that uses smart technology to track participants at major public events. IntelliBadgeâ„¢ was first publicly showcased at SC-2002, the world’s premier supercomputing conference, in the Baltimore Convention Center. This was the first time that radio frequency tracking technology, database management/mining, real-time information visualizations and interactive web/kiosk application technologies fused into operational integrated system and production at a major public conference.”

I was involved in this project at myriad levels, including setup and administration of linux machines, integration of my collaborative video streaming software, multi-threading the application, mirroring code for this P2P architecture, and developing post-conference data analytics with custom Java-based software.

• http://intellibadge.ncsa.illinois.edu/
• A chapter in this book is devoted to Intellibadge.
• http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/software-development/tracking-real-time-conference-participation-at-sc02

I was the orginal architect and author of this 100% Java data-mining system.  Once known as D2K (Data to Knowledge), this system was most fundamentally a model for designing custom data-mining solutions.  It was as well a rapid application development environment for the development of those solutions with a powerful run-time environment. I wrote the original prototype for D2K while working for the Automated Learning Group at NCSA.  Tom Redman (from the Mosaic project) would soon join the team to create the interface and RAD component of the system.  David Tcheng’s ideas were the intellectual foundations of many of the algorithms implemented within the system.  I did 2 more major rewrites of the infrastructure during my time in the ALG during which time this small research group grew from 3 to well more than a dozen people increasingly focused on some aspect of D2K.  D2K quickly turned into a flagship effort of NCSA and certainly of ALG and subsequently become the central tool for a startup company specializing in real-time analytics: River Glass.  There is now a project underway to develop a next generation evolution of this software, a semantic-driven system called Meandre of which I am only an interested observer.

• An article about some work done in D2K.