Notebook: January 22, 1997
NEW COURSE LINKS UNIVERSITY AND CALIFORNIA
Videoconferencing brings students together to learn how people can interact with computers
Students at Princeton took a course with students at Stanford and San Jose State universities in California, thanks to an innovative videoconferencing network.
The course, HumanComputer Interface Technology, taught here by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Perry Raymond Cook, was offered at Princeton and the California institutions for the first time this fall. The Princeton students met for their twiceweekly lectures at noon, while their classmates on the opposite coast attended at 9 a.m. A faculty member of one of the institutions lectured to all the students, who could see each other, engage in discussion, and question the lecturer. "Since the system is interactive," said Cook, "we've even been able to have lecturers from two different campuses in the same session."
Just before the lectures started, Cook said, "the three campuses, using ISDN [integrated services digital network] lines, dialed into a Pacific Bell 'bridge' that knows how to switch between the different campuses, depending on who is talking."
The bicoastal course dealt with the technology of human-computer interfacing (HCI), that is, how people and computers interact with each other. The most common human-computer interface is still the keyboard or the mouse, said Cook, but he and others in HCI are seeking to design devices that will allow people to operate a computer in different ways-inputing information through voice, handwriting, or gestures, for example. The course examined such problems as technologies that assist handicapped persons in using computerized devices and technologies that allow creative artists to input and output illustrations, graphics, and music, for instance.
The videoconferencing system itself, Cook noted, contains a number of humancomputer interfaces, "since it's just a computer with cameras, monitors, and various control devices attached to it."
The multisite, videoconferenced course, said Cook, aims "to make research in HCI available to undergraduates and to enable students to create new interfaces of their own, collaborating with students and faculty from all the sites."
Participating in the course were the Department of Computer Science, San Jose's Department of Electrical Engineering, and the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Other schools are expected to join the network. Princeton students enrolled in the course were mostly computer scientists and electrical engineers, while Stanford's students were geared to music and expression, and San Jose's worked with a veteran's hospital and focused on assistive technology.
Lectures were shared, and course readings were posted on the World Wide Web. There are as yet no HCI textbooks that cover the issues dealt with in the course: the devices and software needed to build systems that use new interfaces. While the course was administered through the Web, complete uniformity is impossible, said Cook, because institutional regulations and academic schedules vary. While all schools did the same labs, some questions were specific to music students, electrical engineers, or computer scientists, he said.
Students also worked on individual projects, exploring either their own ideas or problems suggested by the faculty. For example, many people suffer from repetitive-strain injury because their jobs require constant fine movements. One suggested project was to "create a robotic arm controller that will cause the robotic arm to perform fine movements in response to the user's much larger gestures," explained Cook. Students were urged to collaborate with those at other institutions and to seek advice from distant as well as nearby faculty members.
The advantages of the multisite network are many, said Cook. Students benefited from attending lectures by experts on diverse topics. Cook himself delivered three lectures during the semester. His area of expertise is physicallybased sound-synthesis models, with an emphasis on singing-voice synthesis. Another advantage, he said, was the size of the class. Although about 75 people took the course at the three universities, Princeton's class had just 45 students.
Multisite videoconferencing is not without its problems, however. Once, according to Cook, "one of the lectures flamed out because the phone lines didn't work." All lectures were taped in case of just such an emergency.
-Caroline Moseley
HONOR CODE UPDATE, CHANGES ENACTED
The honor code constitution was amended in November when the Undergraduate Student Government voted in favor of changes that will exclude administrators and faculty members from acting as defense advocates, limiting that role to students; establish a rule of confidentiality for all cases; and deemphasize the role of the individual who reports an alleged violation. These were the first substantive changes since 1994.
In December the student body voted down a referendum that would have established a periodic reratification of the Honor Code. To pass, the amendment needed 75 percent of the vote, but it garnered only 57 percent. The proposed amendment would have provided students an opportunity every four years to reaffirm the Honor Code. Under the amendment, if two-thirds of voters chose not to reratify the code, it would remain in existence until the end of the next academic year. During that time, the code would be reviewed by a committee, possibly revised, and put to a second vote. If it failed to be reaffirmed a second time, the Honor Code would be rescinded.
CLASS ACT: SKY CAMERAS AND SOCCER BALLS
"Measuring the Structure of the Universe," a freshman seminar taught last fall by Professor of Astrophysical Sciences Gillian R. Knapp, acquainted 16 students with the enormity and complexity of the millions of stars, star clusters, and galaxies that surround our planet. The course also introduced them to some of the engineering and administrative challenges typical of scientific research projects, as Knapp gave the class an insider's look at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the project she is currently working on. "In principle, doing this survey is easy," she says. "You just aim yourself at the sky and look at it." Upon investigation, however, the freshmen discovered that "just looking" at the sky is much more involved than simply gazing at the Milky Way.
One afternoon, Knapp began the seminar by placing a red-and-white, leather soccer ball on the table in front of her. She told the students to imagine the Earth at the center of the ball and themselves standing on the Earth looking out. The ball represented the infinite space around the Earth; the Sloan project will take pictures of some of this space using digital photometry and spectroscopy. Knapp explained how the ball's curved surface, a complex pattern of pentagons and hexagons, demonstrates the difficulties of translating a two-dimensional surface (the leather cover) into a three-dimensional volume (the ball), which astrophysicists must do when they study maps of the universe. Her students explored solutions to the translation problem, using principles of geometry and calculus.
Knapp then turned her attention to the "camera" that the SDSS will use to survey a section of the northern sky, the Northern Galactic Cap. The camera-actually an optical scanner, consisting of an array of charge-coupled devices (CCDs), that can translate a picture of a star field into digital information-was built by a team of scientists in the basement of Peyton Hall. She unrolled a large, colorful circuit diagram showing the design of the camera and its components.
Because CCDs record data digitally, not chemically as film does, scientists don't have to worry about things like exposure times, film speeds, or distortion of relative star positions due to stretching of negatives or prints, according to Knapp. But if data is to be recorded clearly, CCDs must be kept in a vacuum at a temperature of minus-80 degrees Celsius. The camera, explained Knapp, will be mounted to the back of a telescope and will begin to scan the sky this month from a vantage point near Sunspot, New Mexico.
Once complete, the study will provide a superior look at the contents and structure of the universe. The digital data gathered by the SDSS will be processed by computer software designed by Knapp and put into a huge database. She is using advanced computer and database-design technology to organize all the digital information, which she estimates will be 12 terabytes in size (each terabyte is over one trillion bytes, the equivalent of approximately 785 million floppy discs).
Scientists will use the database to construct a three-dimensional map that will be far larger in volume and far more precise than maps in current use (such as the 30-year-old Palomar Sky Survey, a photographic map of the cosmos). Knapp and her partners in the project-a team assembled from six institutions, including Princeton, the Japan Promotion Group, the University of Chicago, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory-expect the map to provide new insights into the structure and origins of the universe. As part of the seminar, the professor asked students to explore either one of these topics or some other issue of interest to astronomers, and prepare papers and class presentations. Students investigated the lives of stars, the nature of black holes, developments in telescope technology, and the interactions of society and astronomy, among other subjects.
Knapp, a native of the United Kingdom who earned her bachelor of science in physics at the University of Edinburgh and her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Maryland, praises the intelligence and curiosity of her students and seems surprised by their facility and enthusiasm. "The pure insight shown by them all was a continuous delight," she says. "I hoped the students . . . might get some idea of how science is actually done." Quoting from writer Richard Preston *83, Knapp said she also wanted to show them that science is "surprising, amusing, and passionate."
In the hands of an imaginative teacher, even a simple soccer ball can reveal cosmic secrets.
-Paul Hagar '91
COSMOLOGY AND COSMOGONY
A reading list by Professor Gillian R. Knapp
The Origin and Evolution of the Universe, by Ben Zuckerman and Matthew Malkan, eds. (Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 1996)-An excellent recent discussion of the current state of astrophysics.
First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, by Richard Preston *83 (Random House, 1996)-Considered by many to be the best book about astronomy ever written, Preston's account of the hows and whys of the work of two great scientific teams is extremely well written, illuminating, and highly educational.
"Primordial Deuterium and the Big Bang," by Craig Hogan, Scientific American 275 (December 1996): 68-This article describes how abundances of the light elements (e.g. helium, deuterium, hydrogen) were determined by conditions in the early universe, and describes new observations of very distant quasars using the Keck telescope.
The First Three Minutes, by Steven Weinberg *57 (Basic Books, 1977)-Weinberg's classic discussion of the formation of the universe.
"The Sloan Digital Sky Survey," by J. E. Gunn and G. R. Knapp, Astronomical Surveys, by B. T. Soifer, ed. (Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1993)-A short summary of the SDSS project.
A Digital Sky Survey of the Northern Galactic Cap, by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey research group, available online at http://www.astro.princeton.edu/GBOOK/-A proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation and a description of the SDSS. The text is technical, but the abstract is straightforward.