Dr. Joseph C. Jacob

Senior Staff
Information Systems and Computer Science 

phone: 818-354-0673
fax: 818-393-6141
email:Joseph.Jacob@jpl.nasa.gov

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Mail Stop: 126-104
Pasadena, CA 91109-8099 

Publications

Current Tasks

High-Performance Cornerstone Technologies for the National Virtual Observatory

My Role: Co-Investigator, JPL Task Manager
Designing and developing production level, data-agile, Grid-aware, and science quality astronomical image mosaicking and serving capabilities for the National Virtual Observatory. Sponsored by NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), Computational Technologies (CT) Project.

Earth Observing System (EOS) Data Visualization

My Role: Co-Investigator
Designing and developing an interactive system, including state of the art data mining algorithms, for the analysis and visualization of high-dimensional data from NASA's EOS instruments. Sponsored by JPL Research and Technology Development.

Information Power Grid Applications

My Role: NVO Application Area Task Manager
Demonstrating the suitability of the Information Power Grid (IPG), NASA's high performance computational grid, for NVO data access and mosaicking, one of JPL's most demanding science applications.

OurOcean Portal

My Role: Co-Investigator
Designing and developing OurOcean, a web-based client/server tool for flexible, interactive access to ocean data, models, and visualizations. Sponsored by JPL Research and Technology Development.

Digital Sky Virtual Observatory

My Role: Principal Investigator
Implementing high performance tools for visualization and analysis of digital sky data sets within the framework of the National Virtual Observatory. For example, see our custom astronomical image mosaicking server at yourSky. Sponsored by NASA Office of Space Science, Space Science Applications of Information Technology (SAIT) Program.

Recent Highlights

June 1, 2003

J. Jacob, yourSky: Custom Sky-Image Mosaics via the Internet, NPO-30556, NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 27, No. 6, June 2003, p. 45.

May 13, 2003

J. C. Jacob, Virtual Observatories: How Modern Technology is Reshaping Research in Astronomy (slides: PDF), presented at JPL as part of Section 367's lunch-time all-lab lecture series.

February 10-13, 2003

J. C. Jacob and D. W. Curkendall, yourSky as a Prototype for the National Virtual Observatory Component Architecture, presented at SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE03), San Diego, CA.

November 4, 2002

J. C. Jacob, D. W. Curkendall, and G. Block, Toward the National Virtual Observatory (slides: HTML, MS Powerpoint) presented at the JPL Information Technology Symposium 2002, sponsored by Center for Space Mission Information and Software Systems (CSMISS), Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.

October 13-16, 2002

J. C. Jacob, G. Block, and D. W. Curkendall, Architecture for All-Sky Browsing of Astronomical Datasets (slides: HTML, MS Powerpoint; paper: PDF, Postscript (gzipped)) presented at Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) XII, Baltimore, MD.

October 1-3, 2002

J. C. Jacob, D. W. Curkendall, and G. Block, Digital Sky Virtual Observatory (slides: HTML, MS Powerpoint) presented at the Applied Information Systems Research Program (AISRP) 2002 PI Workshop, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA.

August 25-26, 2002

J. C. Jacob, R. Brunner, D. W. Curkendall, S. G. Djorgovski, J. C. Good, L. Husman, G. Kremenek, and A. Mahabal, yourSky: Rapid Desktop Access to Custom Astronomical Image Mosaics (slides: HTML, MS Powerpoint; paper: PDF, Postscript (gzipped), MS Word) presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation: Virtual Observatories Conference, Waikoloa, HI.

March 1, 2002

J. Jacob, Multi-Screen Image and Catalog Viewing Program, NPO-30133, NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 26, No. 3, March, 2002, pp. 12a-13a.

December 4-5, 2001

National Virtual Observatory (slides: HTML, PDF) presented at the Third IPG Workshop, Palo Alto, CA.

November 10-16, 2001

Supercomputing for the National Virtual Observatory presented at the NASA Exhibit at SC2001, Denver, CO. A summary of our demonstration is provided in the NASA Press Release. An 8.5 x 11 inch version of our poster is also available in Word format.

July 1, 2001

yourSky was featured in the SISN Newsletter: J. Jacob, yourSky: An Interface to the National Virtual Observatory Mosaicking Code (HTML), NASA Science Information Systems Newsletter, Issue 60, ed. B.J. Sword, July, 2001.

May 15, 2001

yourSky (http://yoursky.jpl.nasa.gov), a web interface to my parallel mosaicking code, is now open for beta testing. A slide showing the architecture of the yourSky mosaicking engine is available.

April 1, 2001

J. Jacob, Software for Generating Mosaics of Astronomical Images, NPO-21121, NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 25, No. 4, April, 2001, p. 16a.

March 10-17, 2001

Presentation at IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT: J.C. Jacob and L. Plesea, Fusion, Visualization and Analysis Framework for Large, Distributed Data Sets.

November 4-10, 2000

At SC2000, in Dallas, TX, I took the Digital Sky Virtual Observatory demonstration to the NASA Exhibit in the Dallas Convention Center and added ARC as a fourth image server site for a week of successful demonstrations of high performance computing, visualization, and networking. A description of the demonstration was written up in Digital Sky Virtual Observatory demonstrated at Supercomputing 2000, appearing in Issue 59 of the NASA Science Information Systems Newsletter.

August 14-16, 2000

I conducted a Digital Sky Virtual Observatory demonstration at the Gigabit Networking Workshop at Ames Research Center. In the demonstration, digital sky data sets were served from three remote sites (a 2MASS and DPOSS composite from JPL, a 2MASS center of the galaxy mosaic from Caltech, and an all sky IRAS mosaic from GSFC), and combined on the fly for live viewing at ARC. For a description of the demonstration, refer to the following articles:

• Ultra-Fast Gigabit Networking Technology Will Revolutionize Data Transmission, appearing in Issue 15 of the HPCC Insights publication.
• Tomorrow's Networking Technologies, appearing in the HPCC 2000 Brochure.
• Gigabit Networking, the End-To-End View, appearing in Issue 58 of the NASA Science Information Systems Newsletter.

June 13-16, 2000

Presentation at the Virtual Observatories of the Future Conference, Caltech: J.C. Jacob and L.E. Husman, Large Scale Visualiation of Digital Sky Surveys. This material is also published in J.C. Jacob and L.E. Husman, Large-Scale Visualization of Digital Sky Surveys, Science Information Systems Newsletter, Issue 57.

Past Tasks

Condor

My Role: Co-Investigator
Exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of using the Condor infrastructure to exploit unused computer resources at JPL.

X-33 Rendering and Visualization

My Role: Principal Investigator
Rendered (slide1 or slide2) a triple wide (3840 X 1024 pixel resolution) simulation of the first planned test flight of the X-33 spacecraft using geometric models and Landsat imagery of the western U.S. For a sampled down version of the result, here is a QuickTime(45 MB) and an MPEG(18 MB). Sponsored by NASA X-33 Program.

Virtually Distributed Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed (VDHTB)

My Role: Co-Investigator
Implemented high performance software components for a hardware-in-the-loop testbed integrating state of the art technologies for communications, remote sensing, data fusion, and discrete event simulation. Sponsored by BMDO.

Mars Movie

My Role: Co-Investigator
Performed image processing and rendering for a triple wide (3840 X 1024 pixel resolution) digital movie to commemorate the Mars Pathfinder landing.

Ocean Visualization

My Role: Co-Investigator
Rendered visualization of an Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperature model. For a sampled down version of the result, here is an MPEG(3 MB).

Global Grid

My Role: Principal Investigator
Implemented and optimized SAR terrain correction algorithms on the Cray T3D. Sponsored by BMDO.