Brief article from the Chronicle of Higher Education

[Barbara A. Kucera]

Thought this article might be of interest to some of you.

Barbara
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Much-Improved Digital Video Is Demonstrated at Internet2 Meeting
By FLORENCE OLSEN 
Washington 
Imagine sitting in a public-policy classroom and being able, instantly, to set
up a brief video conference with Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican,
to discuss a proposed constitutional amendment protecting the flag. Or being
able to do a quick search using the key words "flag" and "Senator Lott" to
retrieve C-Span video clips of Mr. Lott's previous public statements on the
amendment. 

Neither of those things can be done on the Internet today. But on experimental
high-speed networks supported by the Internet2 consortium, researchers are
making rapid progress in using high-resolution digital video as a teaching and
research tool. 
"This stuff is coming along very fast," said Joel J. Mambretti, director of the
International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mambretti announced that the research center would work with
C-Span, the IBM Corporation, and Internet2 to build an experimental
indexing-and-retrieval system for a large-scale, digital archive of C-Span's
broadcasts. 

The same partners are also contributing to an experimental digital-video
"portal" site where students and researchers will be able to look up any
archived C-Span broadcast they want -- quickly. "It's a nice tool for
education," Mr. Mambretti said. 

The C-Span project is part of a larger Internet2 effort to create a national
digital-video network for higher education, he said. 

The archive is being developed by Internet2 researchers using a technique that
automatically finds major scene changes in digitized versions of C-Span
footage. Special software developed by IBM converts the audio portion of the
video to text -- and creates "pointers" back to the video scenes for indexing
purposes. 

"You don't want to spool through the whole video to see what's on it," Mr.
Mambretti said. 
At the Spring 2000 Internet2 meeting that ended here Wednesday, Mr. Mambretti
showed just how far Internet2 researchers have come in transforming digital
video, which produces a disappointingly small and jerky picture on the regular
Internet but can appear as a large and vivid movie when transmitted on a
high-speed digital research network. 

Viewers at the conference watched a live C-Span2 news conference -- Mr. Lott
was speaking in a Senate hallway -- that was being broadcast over two
high-speed digital networks, the Internet2 Abilene network and the Metropolitan
Research and Education Network. 
"Just as good as viewed over cable," Mr. Mambretti observed. The quality will
get even better, he said, when a new encoding technology -- called MPEG-2 --
replaces MPEG-1, which was used in Tuesday's demonstration. All of
Northwestern's dormitories, he said, are getting new high-speed connections for
displaying high-resolution digital video. 

Mr. Mambretti said that C-Span "is interested in all of this, because they
understand that the digital world is an important part of their future."
Digital video on the Internet, he said, is going to be much easier to use, and
more accessible, than "the old analog media." 
It remains to be seen how quickly Internet2 researchers can solve the problems
of "scalability" that he said are bound to arise when not just a few but 10,000
or 100,000 students try to access the archive simultaneously. "Those standards
haven't been finished yet," but many people are working on them, he said. 

Digital-video conferencing is technically demanding in a different way than
digital-video archiving, Mr. Mambretti said. Just as students and faculty
members today have individual e-mail addresses, in the future they will have
their own video-conferencing addresses stored, with their e-mail addresses and
telephone numbers, in a central campus directory. 
Mr. Mambretti, who is chairman of the Internet2 digital-video steering
committee, said that a prototype for such an addressing scheme was being
developed. He also predicted that everyday use of digital-video conferencing
for spontaneous communication -- using handheld, wireless Internet devices --
was not far off. 

As a footnote, members of the Internet2 consortium learned Wednesday that a
team of researchers from the University of Washington, the University of
Southern California Information Sciences Institute, Microsoft Corporation, and
Qwest Communications International Inc. had the winning entry in the first
Internet2 "land-speed record" contest. 
Internet2 officials said the team had set a new transcontinental-speed record
for the Internet protocol by transferring 8.4 gigabytes of data from Redmond,
Wash., to Arlington, Va., in less than 82 seconds over a Defense Department
high-speed network. At that rate -- 823 megabits per second -- the data was
transferred 15,000 times faster than would be possible using a typical computer
modem, they said. 

Background articles from The Chronicle: 
··Internet2 Spurs Equipment Upgrades, but Use in Research Remains Limited
(8/13/1999) 
··In Global Contest to Build Networks, Does the Race Go to the Swiftest?
(7/30/1999 ) 

________________
Barbara A. Kucera
Alliance/EPSCoR Liaison
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(217) 244-0131 * Fax (217) 244-2909

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their 
lives by altering their attitudes of mind." - William James


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