IBM Systems Journal articles from September 1996

IBM Systems Journal archives from September 1996

Asparagus soup. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory)(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Many years ago in Stowe, Vermont, Tom Watson, Jr. (former IBM chairman) and Olive Watson served lunch to Jerome Wiesner (former MIT president) and his daughter. The first course was asparagus soup, which Jerry's daughter liked so much that...

Post-modern video. (digital video)(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Digital video is no longer a special-purpose curiosity, but is an integral component of all emerging computer-mediated communications systems. Moving pictures, conferencing, entertainment systems, movie production, and video sequencing are...

Media banks: entertainment and the Internet.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... There are two emerging models for delivering high-density, synchronized audiovisual presentations: video-on-demand and the Internet. The first is based on long-lived connections and guaranteed timeliness; tine second assumes short spurts of...

A society of models for video and image libraries.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... The average person with a computer will soon have access to the world's collections of digital video and images. However, unlike text that can foe alphabetized or numbers that can be ordered, image and video has no general language to aid in...

Techniques for data hiding.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Data hiding, a form of steganography, embeds data into digital media for the purpose of identification, annotation, and copyright Several constraints affect this process: the quantity of data to be hidden, the need for invariance of these data...

Multimedia based on object models: some whys and hows.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... In this paper I describe some of the design issues and research questions associated with object based video coding algorithms, as well as the new applications made possible. I propose a hardware and software strategy to cope with the...

Computational holographic bandwidth compression. (includes terms and abbreviations)(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... A novel technique to compute holographic fringe patterns for real-time display is described. Hogelvector holographic bandwidth compression, a diffraction-specific approach, treats a fringe as discretized in space and spatial frequency. By...

Enriching communities: harbingers of news in the future. (news presentation prototypes FishWrap, PLUM, The India Journal and MUSIC)(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Four prototypes of news presentation are described. These prototypes share the common view of news presentation as a service that changes the relationship between news providers and news consumers. FishWrap[TM], an electronic newspaper,...

FramerD: representing knowledge in the large.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Content-aware media applications require rich, interconnected descriptions of media content. FramerD is an object-oriented database developed at the MIT Media Laboratory to support just such descriptions in a scalable and distributed manner....

For want of a bit the user was lost: cheap user modeling. (DOPPELGANGER system)(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... The more a computer knows about a user, the better it can serve that user. But there are different styles, and even philosophies, of how to teach our computers about us--about our habits, interests, patterns, and preferences "Cheap" user...

Children's interests in news: on-line opportunities.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Children's perspectives on news are presented. The context of the discussion includes computer networks, interest research, and constructionism. Projects are categorized by their relationship to children's interests in news and other topics....

The Computer Clubhouse: preparing for life in a digital world.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... The gap between the technological "haves" and "have-nots" is widening, leading to dangerous economic and cultural rifts in our society. But access,to technology alone is not enough to bridge this gap. This paper describes a new model of a...

Programmable bricks: toys to think with.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... In this paper, we discuss the applications and implications of the Programmable Brick--a tiny, portable computer embedded inside a LEGO[R] brick' capable of Interacting with the physical world in a large variety of ways. We describe how...

Using acoustic structure in a hand-held audio playback device.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... This paper discusses issues in navigation and presentation of voice documents, and their application to a particular hand-held audio playback device, called NewsComm. It discusses situations amenable to auditory information retrieval,...

The interactive balloon: sensing, actuation, and behavior in a common object.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... In the not too distant future, new materials for sensing and actuation, together with high-density, low-power electronics and embedded computation, will bring interaction and intelligence to commonplace inanimate objects in our environment. As...

Things that blink: computationally augmented name tags.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... The conventional name tag automatically dispenses information at a time when it is useful and relevant. The name of the person wearing the tag is visible in a face-to-face encounter. The information presented on a name tag changes according to...

Experiments in digital graphic design.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Graphic design, layout, and the use of typography are among topics discussed in this essay about the collaboration between an art director at IBM and researchers at the Visible Language Workshop of the MIT Media Laboratory to produce...

Navigating large bodies of text.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... The display of information by computers does not often fulfill the promise of the computer as a visual information appliance. A design experiment is described in this paper in which a large body of text, such as the complete plays of William...

Color as a determined communication.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Although it is possible that one viewer's perception of color may be very different from another's, experimental evidence suggests that the relationships between colors are, in many respects, universal, and thus relatively free from individual...

Instructible agents: software that just keeps getting better.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Agent software is a topic of growing interest to users and developers in the computer industry. Already, agents and wizards help users automate tasks such as editing and searching for information. But just as we expect human assistants to learn...

Salient stills: process and practice.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Unlike a photograph, which represents a discrete moment of time, a salient still reflects the aggregate of the temporal changes that occur in a moving image sequence. The salient still image may have multiresolution patches, a larger field of...

Signal entropy and the thermodynamics of computation.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Electronic computers currently have many orders of magnitude more thermodynamic degrees of freedom than information-bearing ones (bits). Because of this, these levels of description are usually considered separately as hardware and software,...

Field mice: extracting hand geometry from electric field measurements.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Several members of a family of techniques called Electric Field Sensing are described. Each sensing technique can be understood as a measurement of the value of a different component in an effective circuit diagram that summarizes all possible...

Personal Area Networks: near-field intrabody communication.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... As electronic devices become smaller, lower in power requirements, and less expensive, we have begun to adorn our bodies with personal information and communication appliances. Such devices include cellular phones, personal digital assistants...

Human-powered wearable computing.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Batteries add size, weight, and inconvenience to present-day mobile computers. This paper explores the possibility of harnessing the energy expended during the user's everyday actions to generate power for his or her computer, thus eliminating...

Force transduction materials for human-technology interfaces.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... Various approaches to sensing forces and generating forces are presented in the context of building human-technology interfaces capable of communicating force Information. Addressing the need for various types of force transducers, relevant...

Inertial proprioceptive devices: self-motion-sensing toys and tools.(MIT Media Lab)
September 1, 1996... One of the current goals of technology is to redirect computation and communication capabilities from within the traditional computer and into everyday objects and devices--to make smart devices. One important function of smart devices is...