[vtkusers] Letters of Support for VTK proposal

[Will Schroeder]

*Dear VTK Community-Kitware is submitting a VTK development grant proposal
to the NIH in early July, and we’d like you to send us a letter of support
for that proposal. This four year proposal aims to make significant
improvements to VTK including rendering enhancements (VR and AR), better
support for the web (such as VTK.js), improved data integration (supporting
deep learning systems and federated, distributed databases, for example),
and updated mechanisms for community support (improving the software and
contribution process, documentation).We are very excited about the proposal
since it will make a very positive impact on VTK, its community, and the
many applications that use VTK. Several years ago we received a similar
award and were able to revamp our rendering support (OpenGL), improve our
software processes, and lay the foundation for VTK.js (among other
achievements). Now, we can really use your help with our follow-on
proposal. Part of the strategy of our proposal is to demonstrate to the
reviewers that VTK plays a critical part in medical innovation. Along this
line, we want to hear from the developers and users of VTK, so that they
can indicate their support for VTK and our proposal.If you’d like to help,
we have included three example letters.  Please modify one of them to fit
your circumstances, copy it to your letterhead, sign it, and then send it
(a scanned pdf is fine) directly to me by June 30. These letters in no way
obligate you or your employer, they simply state “VTK is great and
important to my work.” Also, don’t worry if you are not doing biomedical
research, we want to hear from everybody. Note that this information (i.e.,
the names of endorsers) is considered private, only the writers of the VTK
proposal and the NIH review team will see this information.If you have any
questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly. Thanks and
we hope to hear from you (by June 30). Feel free to forward this to friends
and family.Sincerely,Will SchroederStephen AylwardKen MartinExample support
letters follow:Example 1=========Dr. Ken MartinKitware, Inc.28 Corporate
DriveClifton Park, NY 12065, USADear Dr. Martin,I am writing to indicate my
support for your NIH proposal for the continued development of VTK. The VTK
standards and software are absolutely critical to my lab, the ___ Lab at
___ University, and to my collaborators around the world. Even as we speak,
I am working on a project involving complex visualizations using 3D Slicer,
Osirix, ParaView, and ITKSnap (which are largely built on VTK). Several of
my students also use VTK software libraries to write customized user
interfaces and visualizations for my scientific and clinical collaborators.
Our most recent application was for a physiologist who wanted to explore
very specialized data related to the movement of the tongue in speech after
glossectomy surgery.There are many worthy software projects under
development around the world, but very few who can claim to be
foundational. VTK can claim this, and I'm certain it can claim to be at the
core of hundreds of software products that will be used by many biomedical
researchers and thousands more that will be developed and used in-house.
The complexity of visualization tasks has continued to grow with the volume
of data and its connections across scales and from anatomy to function and
from individuals to populations. VTK is keeping up with the demand—leading
the rest, in fact—and should be a high priority for continued
funding.Example 2=========Dr. William J. SchroederKitware, Inc.28 Corporate
DriveClifton Park, NY 12065, USADear Dr. Schroeder,I enthusiastically
endorse your proposed effort to support and improve VTK. We use this open
source software in our work and have found it extremely helpful as we
create new technological solutions. We have developed a software
application that is currently being used by around the world for scientific
data visualization to gain new insights. Your Visualization Toolkit has
provided the software tools needed to develop that application that has
satisfied the needs of a very diverse customer base. We definitely would be
interested in your proposed VR/AR enhancements and improved integration
with web services. VTK fills a vital role in the international community’s
scientific computing infrastructure; additional developments along the
lines that you propose will certainly accelerate innovation.Example
3=========Dr. Stephen R. AylwardKitware, Inc.101 East Weaver St, Ste
G4Carrboro, NC  27510, USADear Dr. Aylward,I am writing in ardent support
of your NIH proposal to continue the development, enhancement, and
dissemination of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). Not only do I use it in
several projects myself, but I have found that it fosters the dissemination
and extension of research by allowing the community to efficiently
reproduce research, to easily combine contributions in unexpected ways, and
to transfer research into production. Developing and maintaining a project
as large and complex as VTK while fostering such an active community is a
breathtaking achievement, and I hope Kitware obtains the funding it needs
to keep this work up. *


-- 
William J. Schroeder, PhD
Kitware, Inc. - Building the World's Technical Computing Software
28 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065
will.schroeder at kitware.com
http://www.kitware.com
(518) 881-4902
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