Edited & Last Updated 6/19/2001 by jow

Recent Events

     RECENT EVENTS:

2001-06-29:   Extended Grand Rounds Live Event:  Host: The Erie County Medical Center, CenTIR Grand Rounds.  Contact:  Dr. David G. Ellis.  Presenter: Lisa Thorpe, MS, OTR, Department of Occupation Therapy, Erie County Medical Center  Topic: Driver Evaluation Programs

2001-06-07:   WNY-HPNVI Regional Meeting:  The last meeting of our regional interest and support group was on Thursday June 7th, from 10:00 AM EDT to 1:30 PM at UB in 120 Clemens Hall on the North Campus. The primary focus was on roundtable updates and regional activities and planning.  Special topics included a Sandbox demonstration and overview with appearances and demonstrations by some of our North American and European Extended Grand Rounds project collaborators, general financial and activity planning for the next 12-months, the emergence of municipal dark fiber builds in North America and discussions about what we should start to do in the region to educate ourselves and generate appropriate interest, UB's Digital Frontier Conference planned for the Fall, and presentation of a business plan for regionally shared production support facilities.  Lunch was be provided by our sponsor Veraview Inc.  

The most significant discussions and activity were related to short and long range needs for various shared regional infrastructures in order to achieve success with high performance networked video applications.  [See a related editorial, Obstacles to Regional Connectivity, for more details.]  Needs range from immediate demand for production grade H.323 and streaming video servers, Multipoint Control Units, Gatekeepers, and Gateways to long range requirements for lower cost public-benefit IP connectivity, IP Quality of Service, local peering, and carrier co-location facilities.   With little deliberation, the group decided to form a working group to seriously consider immediate options and elected Carol Kostyniac, Director of BISSNET, as chairperson.  A separate set of pages for the working group will be posted as soon as practical.  All serious principals are encouraged to actively participate.

2001-06-06:   On-Line Roundtable:  Our experience with high performance Internet video in telemedicine was  featured in an on-line roundtable discussion on June 6, hosted by the University of North Carolina.  For more information on the UNC roundtable series, see www.cavner.org/roundtable.   We captured an IP/TV MPEG-1 recording of the roundtable as we saw it and have already posted the untrimmed version to our IP/TV Content Manager for VOD reviews.  We'll trim down and post-produce the VOD file as a learning-trial with post-production and content file management as time permits.  Peter Jörgensen will be leading the post-production trial and we'll post details as soon as we get seriously started.   

2001-06-01:   2nd Live Extended Grand Rounds:    [Waiting for extracted clips]  While it did not include our collaborators at Ohio State University and SURFnet, it did include the KALEIDA Hospitals technical support group in Biomedical Engineering!  In our quest for quality, we had backed the live sites off of the 323 side but did not see the expected quality impairments.  The most serious problems experienced were violations of videoconferencing SOP and apparent ISDN connectivity issues.  ECMC was again the content host with CenTIR Grand Rounds.  We hope to have other content on-line soon from our other North American and European collaborators.

2001-05-31:   KALEIDA Hospitals Break-Out:  During the regular Thursday morning test session of the Extended Grand Rounds working group, KALEIDA Hospitals, long interested but solidly firewalled in, finally established connectivity with us.  We not only achieved Endpoint -> KALEIDA GW -> Sandbox GW -> Sandbox MCU visual contact but had success with a full MCU/MCU cascade linked through our respective GW's.

2001-05-16:   Whitlock's Chancellor's Award:  The award was based on Whitlock's work with our WNY-HPNVI and our collective successes with practical high performance networked video applications over the last five years.

2001-05-14:   ECMC MERS 25th Anniversary:  One business day later, the same ECMC systems and WNY-HPNVI Sandbox components were successfully used to support the ECMC Medical Emergency Radio Service 25th Anniversary celebration.  

2001-05-11:   First Live Extended Grand Rounds:  Our first success with the Extended Grand Rounds trial/demonstration living-laboratory was with CenTIR Grand Rounds, out of ECMC, on Friday May 11, 2001.  This event was a breakthrough milestone on the way towards a vision that's been driving a few of our hard-core visionaries for several years.  In addition to photographs, we extracted a few representative frames from the MPEG-1 recorded stream.  The draft PR Release provides details.