Research and Initiatives

MAGPI Initiatives

• International High Speed Video Conferencing
• Distributed and Online Health Care
• Bridging K-12 to HigherEd
• Applications and Collaborations Coordination
• Regional Workforce Development

MAGPI Research and Applications

The Chester County World Tour
The Chester County World Tour is a project of the Chester County Intermediate Unit to use IP-based video conferencing to develop language and cultural exchange for students in Chester County. As part of this initiative students and teachers in Chester County, PA have connected with Chile, France, Northern Ireland, Israel, and elsewhere to share language and cultural exchanges and professional development opportunities.

Computer-Assisted Communications Program (CACP)
The Computer-Assisted Communications Program is a means to dynamically link the human resources from the Clinical Epidemiology Centers at the Universities of Pennsylvania and North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the USA and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Javeriana's R-CERTC) at Santafe de Bogota, Columbia. This initiative is aimed at providing support for the production and dissemination of knowledge in Clinical Epidemiology and related disciplines. In particular, the CACP is in place to facilitate easy, inexpensive and timely contact and interaction among scholars, faculty, researchers, and students from the participant institutions. In addition, CACP offers a variety of Internet-based tools for the dissemination of the principles and methods of rational thinking in health sciences and Evidence-Based Medicine, ranging from descriptive documents and scientific papers made available through the World Wide Web, to distance learning computer-assisted tutorials and courses, to Internet-based bi-directional communication channels including Chat, IP-based telephone, videotelephone, and videoconferencing. For more information, see the CCAP website.

International High-Performance Distributed Education Project
The International High-Performance Distributed Education Project is an initiative between University of Pennsylvania students at Wharton's Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies and students at the Ecole Superieure des Affaires, Universite Pierre Mendes-France, Grenoble and has been made possible by the efforts of faculty, curriculum developers, and information technology specialists across units at both universities. There were four videoconferences between France and the US and all used Penn's high-speed network connection, Internet2, and the French high-speed network, Renater2. The videoconferences served to facilitate the students' project to determine the viability of a fast food franchise in Grenoble. These videoconferences were believed to be the first integration of Internet2-based international conferencing into university coursework and has generated interest for educators worldwide. For a look at a brief video highlight of the project, click here.

Medical Simulation Models over Internet2
The Center for Excellence in Remote and Medically Underserved Areas (CERMUSA) at Saint Francis University has been working with the Uniformed Services of the Health Sciences (USUHS) and the MAGPI GigaPoP to develop advanced methods of medical education using Internet2. These three organizations have completed 2 years of work combining medical simulation models, Internet2 and Physician Assistant students in collaborative education.

National Digital Mammography Archive (NDMA)
Funded by the National Library of Medicine under the Bio-Medical Applications for the Next Generation Internet program, the National Digital Mammography Archive synchronizes nationwide databases from hospitals at research universities including University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, University of North Carolina, and University of Toronto to achieve digital storage, search and retrieval of mammography archives. The project is a working testbed to demonstrate the feasibility of a national breast imaging archive and network infrastructure to support digital mammography using Internet2 technologies. It aims to improve access and performance of breast cancer screening with an imaging archive that supports storage, retrieval and distribution of breast images for clinical and research purposes and ensures privacy and confidentiality with multilevel security embedded throughout the system. For more information see the NDMA website.

National Tele-Immersion Initiative (NTII)
Tele-Immersion will enable users at geographically distributed sites to collaborate in real time in a shared environment, as if they were in the same physical room. This new paradigm for human-computer interaction is the ultimate synthesis of networking and media technologies and, as such, it is the greatest technical challenge for Internet2. The GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania is a part of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative (NTII). The GRASP Laboratory is actively collaborating with Jaron Lanier, the lead scientist of the Initiative, and the Tele-immersion groups at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Brown University. Tele-Immersion is generously sponsored by Advanced Network and Services, Inc and the National Science Foundation. For more information, see Penn's Tele-Immersion website.

National Scalable Cluster Project (NCSP)
The National Scalable Cluster Project began as a collaboration between research groups at the University of Pennsylvania (Hollebeek), the University of Illinois at Chicago (Grossman), and the University of Maryland at College Park (Baden), together with partners from other universities and companies. The project's goal is two-fold: first, to develop and demonstrate technological innovation in geographically distributed clusters of computing facilities, providing scalable access to computing and data management resources and second, to develop and demonstrate the capacity of broad-band high-performance networks. Success in the latter area is best demonstrated by vBNS, which uses ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) protocols to achieve transfer speeds, sufficient to link nodes in local and wide are computing clusters, with the power to transfer Terabytes of data within minutes. Some applications which will be possible due to this data-intense high-speed technology lie in the field of what is now called "medical supercomputing." The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania turned to the NSCP to figure out how to create an efficient system for storing massive amounts of radiology images. The database/archive created by NSCP to solve this problem is called RadAr (Radiology Archive). NSCP supplies the tools for multi-state educational technology including data mining, data archiving and parallel processing. The NSCP has already begun a k12 curriculum standards document (for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and mathematics) available as searchable html for the State of Pennsylvania. The parallel processing power of the NSCP over Internet2 technologies also supports the research of Jin Yu, graduate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, in the study of Functional Connectivity in the Motor Cortex of the resting brain. Low-frequency fluctuations in the resting brain are being studied, using EPI (Echo Planar Magnet Resonance Imaging), and the results suggest that fluctuations in the resting brain from regions of the primary sensory motor cortex associated with hand movements are strongly correlated both within and across brain hemispheres. The analysis uses MPL/MPI to provide parallel processing, and images are handled as C++ objects. For 100 images of 256x256 pixels, the execution time is about 10 seconds. This combination of processing power and speed makes it possible to actually survey the entire brain for this kind of functional connectivity within reasonable computer time. For more information, see the NCSP website.

Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES)
NEES is a national, networked collaboration of geographically-distributed, shared-use experimental research equipment sites. Each site has teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, computer models and physical test specimens, which will transform the environment for earthquake engineering. nees@lehigh is an equipment site specializing in real-time multi-directional (RTMD) testing for earthquake simulation of large-scale structural systems. The Lehigh University facility located in the ATLSS Research Center (IMBT Laboratory) allows for multi-directional real-time seismic testing, combined with real-time analytical simulations, to investigate the seismic behavior of large-scale structural components, structural sub assemblages, and super assemblages (systems). For more information, see Lehigh's NEES website.

If you're a MAGPI partner and your research or application initiative is not listed here and should be, send email to the Applications Coordinator.