Collaborative Analytic Computing

There is an acute need for better facilities to seamlessly and efficiently collect, analyze, annotate, filter and store semi-structured information from multiple sources, such as documents, presentations, diagrams, numerical data, images, and maps. Today’s personal computer desktop tools and user interfaces fall far short of meeting this requirement. Market forces have led to an over-emphasis on the needs of office workers and business users, resulting in a “suite of tools” approach focused on managing business artifacts. While some recent versions have added collaborative facilities, they are an afterthought and do not support collaboration as a primary activity.

At BRL we envisage the development of a new generation of collaborative facilities, user interfaces and tools for highly skilled knowledge workers, with application to areas such as financial analysis, market research and military intelligence. Building on the foundation provided by next generation collaboration and knowledge management facilities, we intend to integrate high performance computing engines such as search, vector computation, text manipulation and image processing. This work follows in the spirit of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering efforts to develop computing environments which truly augment the intellectual capabilities of their users.