IAD Industry Collaborations

- SmartSpace -

The smart space group is comprised of a interdisciplinary team of professionals with diverse computing skills. We are part of the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), located in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

In line with NIST's overall mission, we seek "to strengthen the U. S. economy and improve the quality of life by working with the IT industry to develop and apply technology, measurements and standards. " We are engaged in this work because of the numerous measurement and interoperability challenges facing industry.

In next generation of computer interfaces, humans should be able to use their machines in a more natural way. It is becoming increasingly feasible for the computer to perceive its users via sound and sight, as microprocessor cost/performance continues to improve. Along with the current arrangement of buttons and keys, we refer to these enhanced systems as perceptive interfaces. We anticipate that the computer of the future will become an active an helpful participant in collaborative work groups by engaging in a:

• Sense
• Recognize
• Respond

cycle, rather than the current passive interface that waits for keys to be pressed.

The lab aims to work with other research centers to investigate ways to augment work spaces, with a combination of sensors and classifiers, turning them into Smart Space environments. We hope to aid developers of these technologies with demonstration projects resulting in reference implementations of tools, algorithms and data sets. We are seeking additional industrial advisors to guide us in the design and selection of these projects.
(Point of Contact:Vince Stanford)

- Text REtrieval Conference -

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was started in 1992 as part of the TIPSTER Text program. Its purpose was to support research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies. In particular, the TREC workshop series has the following goals:

• to encourage research in information retrieval based on large test collections;
• to increase communication among industry, academia, and government by creating
• an open forum for the exchange of research ideas;
• to speed the transfer of technology from research labs into commercial products by demonstrating substantial improvements in retrieval methodologies on real-world problems; and
• to increase the availability of appropriate evaluation techniques for use by industry and academia, including development of new evaluation techniques more applicable to current systems.

- CIFter -

The CIFter Project was created to promote the investigation and development of ways to evaluate and benchmark methodologies for assessing the usability of websites. CIFter is a compound acronym. The CIF is the Common Industry Format for reporting the results of usability studies with users. The "ter" refers to the "Testing of usability Evaluation Reports".

There are two goals for the project:

• To identify web usability practices that are efficient, economical, and effective base onevaluations of test websites.
• To use the results of the evaluations to create a benchmarks against which future evaluations of a CIFter test website can be compared.

The first CIFter study was created in collaboration with Wayne Gray of George Mason University and The Motley Fool. The CIFter test website is a frozen-in-time version of The Motley Fool website. Participant evaluators have volunteered to evaluate the site by conducting a summative evaluation of the frozen website contained on the CD. The testing methodology and the test results will be reported using the Common Industry Format (CIF).
(Point of Contact:Emile Morse)

- Small Business Innovation Research Program -

The SBIR program was originally established in 1982 by the Small Business Innovation Development Act (P.L. 97-219), based on a successful pilot program at the National Science Foundation and the recommendation of a White House Conference on Small Business, then expanded by the Small Business R&D Enhancement Act of 1992, extending the program to the year 2000. The SBIR's goals are:

• to increase private sector commercialization of innovations derived from federal R & D;
• to use small business to meet federal research and development (R & D) needs;
• to stimulate small business innovation in technology; and
• to foster and encourage participation by minority and disadvantaged persons in technological innovation.

SBIR supports creative advanced research in scientific and engineering areas that encourages the conversion of Government-funded research into a commercial application. SBIR awards lead to new technology, major breakthroughs, innovative new products, and next-generation products or processes. Small Business Innovation Research