Robert Thibadeau
Residence Poster

rht@cs.cmu.edu

Contents

  • Universal Library
  • Automatic Document Conversion
  • Television Computing
  • OnTV Pittsburgh, L.P.
  • Action Perception
  • Metafire
  • Space Time Simulation

    • Universal Library

    Principle:

    The Universal Library Project seeks to facilitate the transport of all authored works to the Internet and to find ways to provide free or nearly free access to these works by anyone in the world.

    For recent papers, see

    Also see old books in full color at Antique Books.

    A recent Universal Library project is to have every Church in North America, and later the world, put up their weekly church bulletins on the web. This requires seeking methods of enhancing bulletin information value by marking up the bulletins for useful search. We have over 43,000 churches with editors now, but this is only 15% of the way.

    A development of the Houses of Worship project has been a fully implemented XML system (www.w3.org/xml) that can be seen at http://butter.visus.com/~hwml/hwml1.cgi. A description of the architecture of this system is in www.hows.net/howsarchitecture.pdf.


    Automatic Document Conversion

    Principle:

  • No, it's interesting. The stuff on paper is the stuff of communication between people that have varying knowledge about each other and the knowledge they share implicitly. Automatic document conversion is therefore, in principle, impossible to accomplish without solving the robot problem. Even then, you would probably be left with the problem of becoming omniscient and omnipresent.

    • Stuff:

  • Direct: Feature Center
  • Feature Center Paper
  • Chinese Character Recognition
  • Imaging Systems Lab Home Page We found that even identifying railroad cars is susceptible to changing shared knowledge.
    Full color line-scan of car at 20MPH:
    25%
    100%

    Television Computing

    Principle:

  • The television, sitting back a few feet, broadcasts to everybody watching. Best to have television do those things that you want to enjoy. Television computing is computing by the couch-potato computer.
    • LOS ANGELES -- (Associated Press 1973) -- Vladimir Zworykin, who invented the television picture tube 50 years ago, says his favorite part of a TV set is the switch.
    Zworykin, who was 85 yesterday, deplores the number of crime and murder stories on TV.
    "When broadcasting began to develop, I hoped TV would be used for educational purposes, especially so that different cultures could learn to understand each other. Instead, most of the times when I turn on the TV -- bang, bang, bang." Zworykin said during a pre-birthday celebration at a local restaurant Monday night.
    He lists wildlife shows, political debates, and news programs as his favorite TV fare.
    The Russian-born inventor was working at Westinghouse Laboratories when he demonstrated the first workable TV model in 1923.
    "When the head of Westinghouse saw the first TV he said, 'Put that guy to work on something more profitable," Zworykin recalled.
  • RTF File: A Universal Infrared Remote Control
  • RTF File: Television as a Robot Servant
  • SHORT RTF File: Television as a Robot Servant
  • RTF File: A Standard Software Platform for Digital Interactive Television
  • SHORT Direct: Where Technology Ends and the Law Begins
  • RTF File: Where Technology Ends and the Law Begins
  • HTML : The Protection of Soft Property
  • The Television Computer
  • Television Computer's hyperstamps

    • OnTV Pittsburgh, L.P.

    Principle:

  • The first Internet appliances for the home must overcome the pc nightmare somehow. OnTV Pittsburgh is an experiment in giving average people (actually couch potatoes) fun stuff and maybe a lot of economic opportunity, too.

    • Action Perception

    Principle:

    People see the continuity in clausal pulses. Movie Montage, the art of "the shot," its when one action ends another begins. It's how people put the interpretation on the multidimensional continuity that is impossible to interpret. Eisenstein wondered in the 1920s: 'Why aren't people completely disoriented when we cut from camera angle to camera angle, from scene to scene -- they can't be watching the continuity!'

    Worry is a Waste of Imagination.

    ...the sign on a boarded up motel...circa 1991...

    I wonder what the world would look like
    if I could ride a beam of light    .
    --Albert Einstein.

    .99 Lightspeed approach to Cubic Grid:
    :Near Lightspeed approach to Pittsburgh.

    Click for Color Doppler Effect animated GIF - Warning: 1.8 Megabytes!

    See Hsiung, P.K., Thibadeau, R., Dunn, R.H.P., "Ray-Tracing Relativity" ACM Pixel, 1(1), 1990.