Howard D. Wactlar
Vice
Provost for Research Computing
Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science
Scientific Director, Quality of Life Engineering Research Center
Director, Informedia Digital Video Library Project
Previously Division Director, Information and Intelligent Systems, CISE/IIS,
National Science Foundation
School of Computer Science
5000 Forbes Avenue
9011 Gates-Hillman Center
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412.268-2571, fax 412.268-5576
wactlar@cmu.edu
Biography
Research
Publications
Assistant:
Melissa Keaton
412.268-7932
updated:10/27/2014
. . . . . . .
Biography
Howard Wactlar serves as Vice Provost for Research Computing, Associate Dean in the School of Computer Science, and Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science.Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has most recently been on extended leave from his university duties to serve as the Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems in the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He has served CMU in various research, technical and administrative capacities, including most recently, that of Scientific Director for the NSF Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Engineering Research Center. He graduated in Physics from the University of Maryland and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was primary architect and served as project director of the Informedia Digital Video Library, one of the original U.S. NSF Digital Library Initiative projects. He has been the principal investigator for a number of defense and intelligence agency research projects on automated video analysis and information integration, and multiple NSF and NIH-funded CareMedia-related projects in machine understanding of human health and behavior. He was a co-founder and Associate Director of the DoD-funded Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Director of the joint CMU/IBM Information Technology Center that pioneered ubiquitous campus computing. He holds basic patents for processes related to automated video library creation and video search and summarization, and is co-inventor of a pending patent for automated video capture and analysis of human behavior. He co-founded MediaSite, organized to commercialize video information extraction and search technology. He has been active in establishing video information research programs in the U.S., Europe and China through joint initiatives with multiple foreign partners. His current research centers on multimedia information systems, machine learning and intelligent systems, and their application to improving health care.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .
Research Interests
Research interests are in information retrieval systems, multimedia, speech/image/natural
language understanding and distributed systems. Emphasis has been in multidisciplinary
projects which led to the current large project, The Informedia
Digital Video Library, which integrates several CS areas from AI to
systems.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .
Quality of Life Technology Center >>
The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) for creating intelligent systems to support the independence of people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability. The Center’s agenda is broad, ranging from basic research through the development and deployment of systems and devices in the community and transitioning them to clinical practice and commercial manufacture. It is a unique partnership between Carnegie Mellon roboticists and computer scientists with the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Health and Rehabilitation clinicians and engineers and the UPMC Institute of Aging physicians and social scientists. The research thrusts include mobility and manipulation for humans to humanoids, perception and awareness to aid and understand the individual and their environment, human systems interaction encompassing device interfaces and cognitive aids, and person and society which seeks to measure the need, effectiveness and uptake of our products.
Informedia
Digital Video Library >>
Vast
collections of video and audio recordings which have captured events of
the last century remain a largely untapped resource of historical and
scientific value. The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University
has pioneered new approaches for automated video and audio indexing, navigation,
visualization, search and retrieval and embedded them in a system for
use in education, information and entertainment environments. This project
was initiated in 1994 as one of six Digital Library Initiative (DLI) projects
funded jointly by NSF, DARPA and NASA, and was the only one focused on
the video medium. We continue the fundamental goal of enabling for video
all the functionality and capability existing for textual information
retrieval, while leveraging its temporal and visual qualities for richer
information delivery. Informedia-II establishes an era focused for the
user as we introduce new paradigms for video information access and understanding.
We aggregate and integrate video content on-demand to enable summarization
and visualization that provides responses to queries in a useful broader
context, perhaps with historic or geographic perspectives.
Research efforts underway apply Informedia technology to the domains of
education, health care, defense intelligence and the coordination and
understanding of human activity. Informedia also has international digital
library collaborations in Europe and Asia that have produced multilingual, multi-cultural and
cross-lingual versions.
CareMedia:
Automated Video and Sensor Analysis for Geriatric Care >>
From a comprehensive audio/video patient record, this research creates
a meaningful, manageable information resource that enables more complete
and accurate assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation of behavioral
problems for the elderly. Through activity and environmental monitoring
in a skilled nursing facility, a continuous, voluminous audio and video
record is captured. Through work in information extraction, behavior analysis
and synthesis, this record is transformed into an information asset whose
efficient, secure presentation empowers geriatric care specialists with
greater insights into problems, effectiveness of treatments, and determination
of environmental and social influences on patient behavior. The resulting
system will detect and present emerging symptoms longitudinally, and will
assist clinical decision-making, enable earlier interventions, and provide
new measures of their effectiveness. CareMedia will also explore and address
societal and ethical implications of technologies that capture personally
identifiable data.
Informedia
Contexture: Analyzing and Synthesizing Video and Verbal Context for Intelligence
Analysis Dialogues >>
This research will develop tools and techniques to automatically process
and extract evidence from multimedia source content to understand questions,
find answers, and to organize and present the answers as "contextures"
supporting the intelligence analysts' activities. We define Contexture
as the weaving or assembling of multimedia parts into a coherent whole
in order to provide a more complete "picture" or information
structure to both questions and answers. The major innovation of this
research is the automatic delivery of contextures serving as context-rich
presentations that organize and summarize answers, while encouraging and
facilitating review and refinement of the answer space through analyst
interaction. Such contextures function more as a questioning expert human
colleague than like an illustrated encyclopedic resource. The
resulting system will: interpret and communicate an associated visual
and verbal context to information; determine how to query unstructured
video and spoken language information sources; understand video perspectives;
and develop a capability for applying and interpreting verbal, visual
and modal queries that may contain language, imagery and gestures
ENVIE:
Extensible News Video Information Exploitation >>
This project will develop systems and tools to automatically detect, extract,
and report high interest people, patterns, and trends in visual content
from foreign news. These broadcasts can provide highly valuable information,
but are currently not sufficiently exploited for intelligence purposes
due to the costs of analyzing such data manually. This project will increase
the breadth and quality of core-level visual processing components for
automatic detection of features such as speakers, logos and locations.
Through integration of the core-level detectors working in multiple modalities,
the project will identify people and object relationships across time
and place, leading to the derivation of comprehensive video events. The
automatic extraction and fusion of foreign news features will be packaged
in video browsing and summarization interfaces facilitating efficient,
effective access to material meeting the intelligence analysts' needs.
This project will build an innovative analyst extensible system for foreign
broadcast news exploitation that puts the intelligence analyst in control
to better accommodate novel situations and source material.
CCRHE:
Capturing, Coordinating and Remembering Human Experience >>
This project will develop algorithms and systems enabling people to query
and communicate a synthesized record of human experiences derived from
individual perspectives captured during selected personal and group activities.
CCRHE will transform this record into a meaningful, accessible information
resource, available contemporaneously and retrospectively. It will prototype
personal experience capture units to record audio, video, location and
sensory data, and electronic communications. Each constituent unit captures,
manages, secures and associates information from its unique point of view.
Each operates as a portable, interoperable, information system, allowing
search and retrieval by both its human operator and remote collaborating
systems. The integration of multiple points of view provides more comprehensive
coverage of an event, especially when coupled with support for vastly
improving the memory from each perspective. This work moves well beyond
a digital video library into new information spaces composed of unedited
personal experience video augmented with additional sensory and position
data. Tools will be created to analyze large amounts of continuously captured
digital experience data in order to extract salient features, describe
scenes and characterize events. The research will address summarization
and collaboration of multiple simultaneous experiences integrated across
time, space and people.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .
“Intelligent Assistive Technology Applications to Dementia Care: Current Capabilities, Limitations and Future Challenges”, Bharucha, A.J., Anand, V., Forlizzi, J., Dew, M.A., Reynolds III, C.F., Stevens, S., and Wactlar, H., American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. 17(2), pp. 88-104, 2009. Published, DOI: 10.1097/JGP.0b013e318187dde5