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Thursday, August 09, 2001

By Stephanie Franken, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Technology often gets blamed for dehumanizing people -- by isolating workers at their desktop computers, or forcing teleconference participants to reach a meeting of the minds when they can't speak face-to-face.

	A battlefield simulation is projected behind Maya Viz Ltd. founder Steven Roth. (Bob Donaldson/Post-Gazette)

At South Side software start-up Maya Viz Ltd., nobody disputes the disorienting and sometimes creepy aspects of life in the high-tech era. Its own Web site has a slightly eerie quality: It features smiling, disembodied heads talking into the void, demonstrating how the company's technology can be used.

Maya Viz employees joke about those floating heads -- which are ageless and perpetually cheerful -- but they are serious about the potential of technology to improve human interaction as much as it may have impeded it in the past.

The start-up, an affiliate of the South Side's Maya Group LP, has developed software that narrows the gap between people and automation through its "decision communities."

Maya Viz attacks a common problem experienced by colleagues who can communicate via phone or e-mail but not visually. It marries complex data with user-friendly images that travel the Web, said company Vice President Michael Guidry.

"Communication begins with the need to see information and share it with others," Guidry said. People don't want rows of indecipherable data or wordy explanations; they prefer bar charts, maps and diagrams -- and they want to draw arrows or scribble on these images as they try to solve problems, he said.

Maya Viz brings those qualities to the Web.

Founded in 1998 by former Carnegie Mellon University professor Steven Roth, the 30-employee company has no debt and no venture-capital funding. "It was our vision to grow sensibly, deliberately and conservatively," said Roth, who is president and chief executive officer. The company aims to earn $5 million in revenue this year.

Its research has been funded through a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is using Maya Viz to improve communication and decision making among Marine commanders and personnel who work out battle plans together.

Called "Command Post of the Future," the DARPA project aims to give commanders a more sophisticated mode of communication across continents than radio, said Ward Page, program manager for the project. "Commanders tend to think in visual terms," said Page. "So the goal is to take an image from one commander's mind and transfer it to another commander's mind, which is what Maya is doing for us."

Maya Viz believes the technology that helps Marines map out battle plans can be useful in nonmilitary settings, in industries ranging from health care to manufacturing to financial services.

At a hospital, for instance, a cancer patient usually has a small army of doctors who must work together to treat her: an oncologist, an internist, a radiologist, a surgeon and a pathologist. The doctors must share information -- such as the date of her first diagnosis, her reaction to chemotherapy, and the duration of her remission before symptoms reappeared -- in order to reach consensus about the best course of treatment.

But these doctors may not work at the same hospitals. And even if they do, it's hard to find time to meet and examine the patient's medical history that is recorded in databases, on X-rays and in notes jotted on files, said Roth.

So one doctor can't easily show the rest a particular trouble spot he just has noticed on an x-ray -- a single step that could alter other doctors' opinions and change the course of the patient's treatment.

With Maya Viz software, which is called Comotion, the doctor could put an image of that troubling X-ray on the Web and draw a circle around the problem spot -- as others watched from their own computers. And if somebody missed the meeting, that circled image, along with other doctors' comments, would be accessible on his Web site at any time.

The technology caught the attention of the Cancer Treatment Center at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Its director put together a five-year grant proposal that would use Maya Viz's software to help doctors diagnose patients more quickly.

The technology works by digging deep into databases and condensing this data into pictures and graphs that can travel the Web as "U-Forms," or uniquely identified forms. "The U-Form is the lowest common denominator for data," said Roth. "Like a URL or a byte, it's important because it makes it possible for information to travel through a modem."

So even a scribble or an exclamation point can pop up on the Web instantaneously.

Even if the underlying process is hard to understand, its affect is simple, said Beth Friel, the company's chief financial officer. "It provides a visual representation of an abstract world. It puts people back into the process of using technology."