DARPA CPOF SI Support Information
Co-PIs:
Ken Forbus
Brian M. Dennis
Nemesis, the CPOF Scripting Environment
One key goal is supporting the rapid prototyping and development of applications that take advantage of the technologies described above. We believe the best way to validate our research decisions regarding those technologies is to quickly get the software into an experimental situation, interact with the technology, evaluate its effectiveness, revise the software, and repeat the cycle. Towards this end we will provide a domain specific programming environment that easily interconnects multi-modal interaction, sketch understanding, analogical processing, and multi-dimensional presentation in CPOF applications. This environment is entitled Nemesis, Northwestern's extensible multimedia environment for scripting intelligent systems.
Nemesis will incorporate a number of technologies that are disparately present in the software community but have not been integrated for the specific goals of the CPOF:
- A semi-structured database with many of the features of a relational database.
- High performance, high quality multimedia presentation up to the output capabilities of the device the scripting engine is running upon.
- Significant support for Web based communication and collaboration between scripted applications distributed throughout the CPOF. As much as possible, distributed applications will rely on open Internet protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, XML and SMIL.
- Significant support for interprocess communication of the underlying operating systems and programmatic coordination of applications.
- A multi-language programming environment supporting a number of different high level languages that can access the CPOF scripting environment services.
- An integrated development environment for the scripting engine based upon the notion of outlines to represent structured documents.
For this element of the proposal, there are two deliverables. First, the source code, design documents, and manual for a language implementation that can be used to build high level applications in an environment typical of the CPOF. This language implementation must provide, either through primitive support or libraries, the construction of sophisticated distributed applications that run in the CPOF environment. This language implementation must execute programs efficiently enough for control and interaction with multimedia output and devices.
Second, we will deliver an integrated development environment for this language implementation that makes it relatively easy and straightforward to build sophisticated CPOF applications that connect analogical processing, sketch understanding, and multi-modal input, with multi-dimensional presentation.
