Collaborations and Partnerships

The NIST Smart Space project team has worked with a variety of industrial and academic research laboratories since 1998 to disseminate and improve its sensor processing and data transport infrastructure for measurements, interoperability, and standard reference data development. The focus of the work has largely been multi-modal interface research, but the system software has lately been adapted for sensors on the nano-scale and can actually support a variety of networked sensing and distributed processing applications.

We wish to thank some of our our early industrial and academic partners from the 1998-2000 timeframe who included:

• BBN
• Fuji/Xerox FX/PAL
• HP Laboratories
• The IBM Research Division
• Kaiser Permanente Research
• SRI
• National Association of Stock Dealers (NASD)

We also wish to thank the:

• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA)

with whom we worked cooperatively on a series of conferences and workshops in this area.
 

More recent collaborative efforts and user communities include:

• The EU Computer Human into the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) Project
• Oregon Health & Science University Center for Human-Computer Communication (CHCC)
• Penn State Applied Research Laboratory
• Cornel Acoustics Lab
• USC Viterbi School of Engineering
• Rutgers CAIP Center
• The IBM Research Division
• Clarifying Speech
• Intelligent Automation Incorporated
• SRI
• Hitachi Research USA

Some of our partner laboratories are integrating sensing and recognition technologies for speech recognition, speaker recognition, as well as face and gesture recognition. We are offer an infrastructure for high sensor count, high data rate multimodal processing. The data flow system has a well defined interface based on data flows and a transport abstraction to allow multiple nodes, sensors and recognition technologies to interoperate, together offering capabilities that none can offer singly via sensor fusion and large amounts of processor power. Please see the Software and Hardware Tools page for further information.

The initial version of the NIST Smart Data Flow System I (NSDFS-I) was strongly tied to the open source GNU/Linux operating system but the forthcoming NSDFS-II is written to portable libraries and is being tested on OS-X, as well as various Linux distributions. The libraries used are also cross platform and should allow the system to readily be ported to Microsoft Windows by interested laboratories.

We are actively seeking new industrial and academic research labs as either technology or requirements providers. Please feel free to contact Vincent Stanford in order to discuss possible participation.