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News Editor's note:
Members of the media who register for SC2002 are welcome to participate
in the IntelliBadge project. Advance registration ends Friday, Oct. 25.
IntelliBadge Demonstration
to Create a 'Smarter' SC2002 Conference BALTIMORE, October
24, 2002--A demonstration of "smart" technology called IntelliBadgeČ
will allow participants in SC2002 to track people with similar interests,
monitor conference events, view conference statistics, and view visualizations
of patterns of people flowing through the conference. SC2002, with the theme
"From Terabytes to Insights," takes place Nov. 16-22 at the
Baltimore Convention Center. The IntelliBadge demonstration at SC2002
is being developed by the Experimental Technologies group at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. This group developed the interactive database that will
provide real-time information for the project. "IntelliBadge will show us how technologies like remote sensors and real-time visualization systems can create a richer conference experience for the participant," said Roscoe Giles, chair of SC2002 and deputy director of Boston University's High Performance Computing Center. "We want people to have fun with the IntelliBadges, but also to gain value from them." "We hope to build
new communities, reinforce existing communities, and enrich the conference
experience," added Dan Reed, director of NCSA who, as chair of the
SC2002 technical program committee, launched the IntelliBadge project.
"By participating and sharing their interests with the IntelliBadge
system, conference attendees will be able to identify participants and
conference events matching their interests. Through real-time visualizations,
participants will also be able to see where their community fits into
the larger group of people attending SC." Attendees who choose
to participate in the IntelliBadge project will receive Savi Technologies'
600 Series RFID tags in addition to their regular SC registration badges.
Using a variety of display technologies, IntelliBadge participants will
be able to: see a playback of the conference's history; view the distribution
of attendees by their interests; track conference statistics, such as
miles walked; play interactive games; locate and join groups; and find
useful information, including the distance to restaurants that cater to
the wearer's tastes. An IntelliBadge website, will allow anyone--including
nonparticipants--to view the conference at a glance. In addition the project
will feature an electronic participant: the NCSA "IntelliBot,"
a smart robot that will roam the convention center, talk, and interact
with IntelliBadge systems. IntelliBadge technology
and display systems will be scattered throughout the convention center
and will include the following:
The project also will
feature a playful visualization of the conference as a growing and shrinking
flower garden, showing the changing distribution of program events and
categories of participants. Supporting the IntelliBadge
project will be seven networked Savi EchoPoint readers, which detect badge
wearers within 300 feet, and 20 Savi EchoPoint signposts, which activate
tags up to 8-feet away to provide exact participant location within the
conference center. Two readers and five signposts will be donated by Savi. The IntelliBadge project
is open to technical program participants and members of the media. Participants
can sign up at the IntelliBadge registration kiosk beginning Saturday,
Nov. 16. No advance registration will be offered. About SC2002 About NCSA Media contacts: Karen Green, kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
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