Mar 12,1997
Marc Najork, DEC Systems Research Lab
Oblets and Collaborative Active Textbooks

Speaker: Marc Najork

Title: Oblets and Collaborative Active Textbooks

Abstract:

Many Web browsers now offer some form of active objects, written in a variety of languages, and the number and types of active objects are growing daily in interesting and innovative ways. This talk describes our work on Oblets, active objects that are distributed over multiple machines. Oblets are written in Obliq, an object-oriented scripting language for distributed computation. The high-level support provided by Oblets makes it easy to write collaborative and distributed applications.

Oblets form the basis of CAT, a Web-based algorithm animation system. CAT augments the expressive power of Web pages for publishing passive multimedia information with a full-fledged interactive algorithm animation system. It improves on previous Web-based algorithm animations by providing a framework that makes it easy to construct new animations, including those that involve multiple views. Because views of the same running algorithm may reside on different machines, CAT is particularly well-suited for electronic classrooms.

Biography:

Marc Najork is a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, located in Palo Alto. His current research focuses on 3D animation, information visualization, algorithm animation, and Web-based distributed applications. Dr. Najork received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1994, where he developed Cube, a 3D visual programming language.

Contact:

Marc Najork
Systems Research Center
Digital Equipment Corporation
130 Lytton Avenue
Palo Alto CA 94301
najork@pa.dec.com

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