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January was the month of the webinar! We held two release webinars, one for CMake and one for Midas, and an exciting Introduction to ITK course. If you missed any of these, they are available on our website, and we have more intro courses scheduled through this spring. We're also gearing up for some events. Right now, we're in San Diego for SPIE Medical Imaging and we will be at the RPI Career Fair on Wednesday. If you're attending either of these, we would be happy to meet up with you to discuss collaboration or our open positions - we're always looking for good people! - The Kitware Communications Team
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 Open Chemistry Funding Win
Computational Chemistry Grows at Kitware
 Kitware recently announced $730,000 in new funding from the U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) to further develop Open Chemistry, an end-to-end workbench solution designed for chemists. Led by Marcus Hanwell, this is an exciting opportunity for Kitware to expand into a growing field and help transform computational chemistry into an accessible, digital, and collaborative discipline.Open Chemistry is an open-source suite of applications and libraries that will empower chemists to work collaboratively, while providing improved visualization, exploration of chemical structures and analysis of chemical data. As an open-source framework, Open Chemistry will enable chemists to access the leading chemistry applications in a user-friendly, scalable, and adaptable manner, designed to be incorporated into a variety of workflows. Moreover, Open Chemistry will be an ideal tool for training future generations of chemists, as it allows them to view, explore, and interact with chemical data in ways that are not yet possible. |
Winning with LEGO
Kitware Coaches Students in FIRST LEGO Tournament Win
The  Tenja Food Fighters from Orenda Elementary School in Clifton Park, NY recently took home first place in the FIRST LEGO League Robotics Regional Qualifying Tournament, held at RPI in Troy, NY. The team was led by Kitware's Naomi Hoffman and will be competing in the state-wide competition in two weeks. Several Kitware team members, including Naomi and Bill Hoffman, Chuck Atkins, and David Stoup, have been volunteering at Orenda since 2009, teaching the students and inspiring an early interest in technology.The student teams competed in the Food Factor Challenge, which required them to program an autonomous robot to navigate a themed playing field. The goal was to use technology to develop ways of making food safer to eat. The topics included safe transportation and preparation of food, exploring pest control, food temperatures, and pollution as it relates to food production and distribution.Congratulations to the Tenja Food Fighters! We hope this is the first step of an exciting journey and wish them the best of luck in the state championship!
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| VES Source Code Release
VES and KiwiViewer Source Code Ready for Community Review
 In January, Kitware announced the source code release for VES and KiwiViewer. The VES toolkit provides mobile app developers with robust scientific and medical visualization capabilities. KiwiViewer is the corresponding application, built on VES, that enables users to explore geometric datasets on their mobile devices. VES brings an extensive set of VTK algorithms to mobile developers, creating opportunities for new, cutting-edge visualization apps. KiwiViewer provides a foundation for embedding visualization windows into apps by bundling the required components into a convenient set of interfaces.
The source code release is the next step in making VES and KiwiViewer fully open-source projects, and is critical to truly engaging the community in future development efforts. Kitware looks forward to collaborating with the community on this endeavor and encourages your participation.
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| Football: A CV Challenge
Computer vision team tackles football's complexity
 Eran Swears presented the paper "Learning and Recognizing Complex Multi-Agent Activities with Applications to American Football Plays" at the IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) in January. The paper was jointly written by Eran and Anthony Hoogs, and the basic research stems from the DARPA CARVE program.
The research focuses on whether or not it is possible to automatically detect pre-planned coordinated activities using computed and fragmented video. Football provides a scenario similar to that of analyzing reconnaissance video, as both involve difficult tracking, interacting people, high variability within the same setup type, and active deception. This work could be readily adapted to other video types and has potential in a variety of fields. The full paper will be published electronically in the IEEE WACV Proceedings.
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New Collaboration with NREL
NREL's Radiance Project to Use CMake
 Kitware announced a new collaborative effort with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on implementing our software process for the Radiance Project. The Radiance project, developed at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL), provides lighting engineers and researchers with simulation tools for varying types of analysis, including day light, electrical light, and building energy analysis.As NREL incorporated Radiance-based simulation capabilities within OpenStudio (their own open-source suite), they worked with Kitware to integrate CMake as part of the build process. By using CMake, Radiance now has nightly builds and tests with readily-accessible results in the dashboard, making it easier to manage code and implement quality software development practices. |
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