The Center for Advanced Engineering Environments (CAEE) is seeking individuals and organizations who are interested in performing on short-term tasks and projects as independent contractors or subcontractors. Future needs are anticipated in a number of areas:

I. Programming for Virtual Reality and Advanced Displays (CAEE Visualization Facilities)

• Tasks include
• Open GL and C/C++ Programming for engineering and other applications
• Programming applications for Virtual Environments using EON Reality software

II. Three-dimensional modeling and animations

• Tasks include using animation programs such as Lightwave 3D to create 3D models from photos and blueprints and animating them for presentations in immersive VR and other advanced displays

III. Intelligent question / answering - information retrieval tasks (an improvement over the current CAEE prototype posted on http://www.aee.odu.edu/qasystem).

The initial tasks are listed subsequently. Each of these tasks involves combining several free, online facilities, and designing an elaborate web interface to facilitate the use of the new capability.

It is desirable to perform several of the subtasks involved in each task in parallel, to have near real-time response. (Skills suggested include PHP, Perl/CGI, XML, XSLT, Java and AJAX)

• Improved answers to questions - using concept-based search engines, question / answering systems, and iterative improvement (using dialogue based) facility for disambiguation.
• List of categories of information available on the web, related to the question in (1), using several clusterizers
• Several visual displays of the categories of information in (2), and the associated URLs
• Images and videos (from several search engines) related to the question in (1)
• Summary of available information on the web, related to the question in (1) (using web summarization facilities)

IV. Vision-based system to identify the affective state of the users. The task involves using neural networks, fuzzy logic and other facilities to enhance the affective state estimation from facial images

Interested parties should submit information regarding their interest, areas of expertise and qualifications to:

or via e-mail to the center director:
Professor Ahmed K. Noor