Robert Thibadeau Home Page

Robert Thibadeau
Residence Poster

rhtAT-THINGIEcs.cmu.edu
This is the form of my original home page posted in 1993: Please excuse the antique appearance!

I am currently Adjunct Professor in ISR and Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at Wave Systems Corp.

rthibadeauAT-THINGIEwavesys.com and phone 412 370 1245.

More detail is on my LinkedIn Page

1993 World Wide Web Poem

Movie Downloads

Physics of Light Movie
Visualizing Relativity Movie

Contents

  • Internet Systems Laboratory
  • Trusted Computing Group
  • Random Observations
  • Privacy Server Protocol
  • Computer Security
  • Historical New York Times Project
  • Universal Library
  • Automatic Document Conversion
  • Television Computing
  • OnTV Pittsburgh, L.P.
  • Place-ifieds
  • PaperSight Image Server
  • Action Perception
  • Metafire
  • Space Time Simulation

    • Internet Systems Laboratory

    Using the Internet to run experiments on the world. There is probably a new science lurking here.

    Trusted Computing Group

    I am on the Board of Directors, the Technical Committee and Chair of the Storage Workgroup of this non-profit industry consortium. Other board representatives are from IBM, Microsoft, HP, Intel, AMD, Sun, Lenovo, Wave Systems, and Infineon. We are taking the hardware steps to secure our own personal and corporate devices from malevolent use over the Internet. See R. Thibadeau, "Trusted Computing for Disk Drives and Other Peripherals" in IEEE Security and Privacy, Vol4(5), Sept/Oct 2006.

    Random Sunday Afternoons

    Why white cars are 40 degrees cooler than any other
    Fleeting Consciousness: A Short Treatise
    A Tutorial on the Relationship between Inflation and Stock Price with an inflation calculator for investments back to 1914
    Comet Impact on Jupiter This shows Comet Shoemaker-Levy Impact on Jupiter July 16, 1994 as a GIF movie and with relative size of Earth. It also has picture of the guy who made these photographs from Africa.
    Tutorial on the Rotary Voice Coil Actuator A very interesting piece of modern disc drives. This includes an image of Alexander Graham Bell's original invention scribbled on a sheet of paper in 1876.
    Password Generator Generates good passwords for the entropy impaired. Also gives exact probabilities of guessing.

    Privacy Server Protocol

    Negotiated bilateral privacy. Results in signed contracts that the parties each have a copy of: there is no root storage authority. Includes papers. The code was the original basis for the European Union's open source Java reference platform.

    Computer Security

    Place-ifieds

    A commercial experiment: Place-ifieds provides classified advertising when location counts. All advertising is free and never expires unless the advertiser removes the ad. If an ad works, and someone wants to make contact with the advertiser, there is a small fee. Includes street level map of USA.

    PaperSight Image Server

    An server-side image server coaxed along to handle large images on the web.

    Historical New York Times Project

    Free-to-Read and Fee-to-Search. See Fee and Free and the Privacy Server Protocol.

    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 papers, see

    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 project was taken over by the American Bible Society who has changed the location to www.forministry.com. The original conception of requires seeking methods of enhancing bulletin information value by marking up the bulletins for useful search. We had over 100,000 churches with editors.

    A development of the Houses of Worship project has been a fully implemented XML system (www.w3.org/xml) that can now be seen at http://www.xmlforall.com. A description of the architecture of this system is here.


    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.