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Last updated: February 22, 2010

Glenn Pearson, with Aquilent, Inc., is a computer scientist with particular interest in man-machine interfaces. He is currently building a prototype tool based on Google Maps/AJAX/C# to screen specific healthcare resources.

Among other work for CEB, he has built several C++/MFC software modules for the second generation of NLM's "MARS" project. MARS applies image processing and artificial intelligence to input biomedical journal abstracts and citations into NLM’s renowned MedLine database. These SQL Server/ADO clients run under Windows XP. The most significant two are "CheckIn" and "PROD". CheckIn, the start of the MARS document workflow, fetches XML data for a particular journal issue from upstream library systems and creates the initial local database record. PROD, a high-performance multi-threaded daemon, interfaces a 5-engine OCR engine to the MARS image repository and database.

Glenn has also been involved in NLM’s analysis of video technology regarding streaming, indexing, digitalization, and preservation of library assets.

Prior to NLM, Glenn was a senior computer scientist at Civilized Software, Inc. (Bethesda, MD) from 1988 to 1996. He extended the company’s "MLAB" mathematical modeling software, wrote numerous successful grant proposals, and directed or participated in a number of scientific software/hardware projects. Earlier software development experience included work at Lever Brothers Research (Edgewater, NJ) and EIC, Inc (Newton, MA).

Glenn received his Computer Science Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1988. His undergraduate degree is in chemistry.

Current Projects

Screening of Nursing Homes: Dr. Pearson, at NLM’s Communications Engineering Branch (CEB), conceived and is currently prototyping a web site to allow rapid consumer screening of candidate nursing homes. The implementation is as a Google map with Ajax-style controls, using C#, Javascript, and a database backend (namely Access for the prototype).

Long-Term Preservations of Biomedical Audio/Video Holdings: CEB has provided guidance about the preservation of and user access to NLM’s biomedical audio, film, and video holdings. Pursuant to that, during 2005-6, Dr. Pearson authored draft documents, suggesting a meta-standard for long-term digital video preservation, based upon lossless JPEG 2000 frame compression, with either Motion JPEG 2000 or Media eXchange Format (MXF) wrappers. This work was an outgrowth of an August, 2005 workshop organized by Dr. Pearson and others at NLM, that attracted 50 video archivists and technologists. Concurrently, code was contributed for basic metadata support in the Motion JPEG 2000 encoder/decoder of the Open JPEG 2000 Project.

Medical Article Record System (MARS): CEB’s Medical Article Record System II (MARS) is an advanced document flow system for scanner- and optical character recognition (OCR)-based entry of journal abstracts and citations into MEDLINE. Dr. Pearson has contributed substantially to its design and construction. Major accomplishments include a number of modules, Windows applications built in the Visual Studio environment (now VS.NET) with Visual C++ and MS Foundation Classes (MFC), plus ADO to work with the database.

Turning The Pages (TTP): Another initiative extended the Turning the Pages (TTP) kiosk product, which portrays select pages from rare books in a novel manner. Initially, two such presentations, developed jointly by NLM and the British Library using Macromedia Director and other tools, were available. These were extended with a global index, rapid-flip positioning, and time-out warning. "Elizabeth Blackwell’s Herbal" also got further information about selected plants, while for "Vesalius’ Anatomy", four "Tales" were scripted and added, short multimedia segments that flip the book to particular pages and bring in complementary images, movies, animations, narration, and text crawls. Subsequently, NLM has developed historic works as TTP independent of the British Library.