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Janice (Jan) Richmond Lourie (July 9, 1930) is an American polymath: computer scientist, graphic artist, musician, hand weaver, and author. In the late 1960’s she was a pioneer in CAD/CAM (computer-aided design and manufacturing tools) for the textile industry. She is best known for inventing a set of software tools that facilitate the textile production stream from artist to manufacturer. For this process, GRAPHICAL DESIGN OF TEXTILES she was granted  a patent which is IBM’s first software patent. Other projects, in differing disciplines, share the focus on graphic representation. She returns throughout an ongoing career to the stacked two dimensional tabular arrays of textiles and computer graphics, and the topological structures of interrelated data. THIS SENTENCE HAS BEEN ADDED TO KEEP PAGES PRESENT.

Early Life and Education
Janice studied music theory and history at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge Massachusetts. Rosario Mazzeo was her clarinet teacher. She performed in chamber music concerts in the tapestry gallery series at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and with amateur orchestras and chamber music groups in the Boston area. In 1954 she became a founding member of the Camerata of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her instruments were the tenor shawm and psaltery from the museum collection[ref 1] [ref 2] and contemporary Dolmetsch recorders.

When she received her AB degree in philosophy from Tufts University she was employed as a technical editor at Parke Mathematical Laboratories[ref 3] in Concord Massachusetts. Her interest in the material she edited led to work at the MIT Whirlwind computer which she combined with basic mathematics courses. She returned to school and received a master’s degree in mathematics from Boston University[note 1].

IBM
Janice was recruited by IBM. In 1957 it was common for IBM and other computer manufacturers to hire musicians as programmers because of their focus on structure. Her first assignment was to assist Dr. John (Giampiero) Rossoni, in charge of the IBM part of the Operation Moonwatch Project then being conducted at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory [note 2]..

Operations Research
Her first major project, in Operations Research, was to implement an algorithm by Abraham Charnes [ref 4] to solve the machine loading problem -- a generalization of the transportation problem. In 1958 a software solution to the transportation problem was a staple operations research tool. The solution determines the pattern of delivery of one type of goods from multiple sources to multiple destinations satisfying all requirements at a minimum cost.

The generalized problem, expressed as machine loading, states that all the products may be different and may be produced on different machines. The variability of sources and destinations in this model has a drastic effect on the topological structure underlying the solution[note 3]. The topology of each stage of an iterative solution, in the transportation problem, is a tree structure. In the generalized transportation problem the topological structure of the evolving iterative solution is a set of disconnected loops each with attached branched side chains (trees).

The resulting paper, "The topology and computation of the generalized transportation problem," graphically represents the case analysis[pub 1]. The interest in this paper[ref 5][ref 6][ref 7] comes from the graphic representations of the original transportation problem in the stepping stone and simplex method formulations. The corresponding IBM program [pub 2] released in 1959, utilized efficient list processing (tree tracing) techniques combined with a bookkeeping system for managing the loops. (At the time LISP was being developed at MIT by John McCarthy).

Textile Graphics/ Computer-Aided
Janice’s interest in weaving began at age seven when she saw an exhibit of traveling weavers from Berea, Kentucky. As an adult she studied fabric construction with Kate Van Cleve[ref 8] in Boston and design with Lili Blumenau [ref 9] and tapestry with Maria Mundal [ref 10] in New York City. Her own weaving was exhibited in New York at the Pen and Brush and with Artist Craftsmen of New York from 1962 to 1982.

In 1964 she made a proposal to IBM management, which was accepted, to develop a working system to translate artists’ designs into loom control information, and to develop the hardware and software to control the loom. Her first article, "The textile designer of the future",[pub 3] explained how working with a computer would give increased freedom to textile designers. "On-line textile designing"[pub 4], reviewed past attempts at automating the designing process and set forth reasons why the advent of interactive tools now made this goal feasible.

Jan then spent a year in three diverse textile manufacturing facilities, working alongside designers, to learn the aesthetic judgments and technical skills needed to transform artwork to point paper, the preliminary representation of production control. She also learned all aspects of the production cycle, becoming top-down immersed in the process.

Jan then conceived a new way to design woven Jacquard fabrics and have the computer automatically produce the loom control information. Instead of the laborious process of creating a point paper representation of the artist’s design to produce the loom control information,(DISAMBIGUATION FROM WIKI POSSIBLE HERE ..we could use a ftnote here to the traditional way but the wiki page is the fabric.questional????) the artist would use a drawing tablet and a cathode ray tube to free-hand draw and controlthe design directly into the computer. The computer would then automatically produce the loom control information,a set of punched cards which control each interlacing of the fabric. She designed and specified the “art work to machine control” software.The program became known internally in IBM as GRITS (GRaphic Interactive Textile Design). At that time most textile manufacturing in the US took place in the southern states. The name paid homage to the food with the same name popular in that region.This work is documented in the paper "On-line textile designing"[pub 13]presented at the 1966 ACM National Conference.

IBM filed for a software patent for the GRITS design in 1966. Entitled GRAPHICAL DESIGN OF TEXTILES,it was granted patent status in 1970[pub 4]. It was IBM's first software patent. PUT BOOK IN HERE

Printed Fabrics
Jan’s curiosity led her to explore other methods of fabric production. In 1967 The Textile Graphics Project undertook the natural extension to printed fabrics. In this application the artist design for both traceable and non-traceable patterns is inputted using the drawing tablet. Additional control information such as color or effects, size of fabric, etc. is inputted with the function key pad. The software then creates color separations for each color on thefabric.It also creates the position and repeats of the design, eliminating the need for a “step and repeat” machine. Finally it prints, for each color, a “long film” in the appropriate size which is used to etch the copper roller which lays the color on the fabric."Textile graphics applied to textile printing"[pub 8],describing this process, appeared in theAFIPS '67 (Fall) Proceedings.

Hemisfair
When preparation was underway for the 1968 San Antonio HemisFair, IBM chose the Textile Graphics system for its Durango pavilion. Visitors were able to draw the design on the screen using a lightpen and receive a swatch of woven fabric within three minutes. [ref 11]. The complete system is described in[pub 11]. The visibility of both the process and the product made a clear statement of CAD/CAM. In his book, Computer History from Pascal to von Neumann, Herman Goldstine comments on the significance of this application [ref 12].

The Painting Application
Today there are a number of tools allowing a PC user to “paint” closed areas of a design with color or patterns. GRITS was a precursor of their development. The “GRITS patent” subsumes the capability for the computer to recognize all the pixels within a closed area. Her 1969 paper, "Computation of connected regions in interactive graphics"[pub 5],  addresses the problem of automatically identifying and labeling the connected regions formed by sets of closed curves. This is a general problem encountered in interactive computer graphics, where an arbitrary pattern is transmitted via a digitizing device such as a data tablet and a stylus, or CRT and light pen. Two patents, the PROCESSING OF MULTILAYER WEAVE DESIGN DATA US Patent 3,634,827[pub 6] and a METHOD OF IDENTIFYING CONNECTED REGIONS IN A LARGE SEGMENTED PATTERNUS3644935[pub 7]followed. pub 7 is the patent version of the connected regions paper

Fabrics From the Dobby Loom
mention jans earlier paper...THIS COMES AFTER A SECTION ON JARVEY AND FIRST COURSE.

The Metasystem
Late in 1973, Jan’s colleague Nitta Dooner returned to IBM, this time to the T. J. Watson Research Center. The other members of the FIT Computation Center team had also dispersed to other companies. In 1974 the five colleagues reassembled to produce "Metasystem: A hierarchically structured graphic tool" [pub 18]. The Metasystem paper describes the first system (footnotes here from paper to your pubs) for generating programmed systems for computer-aided textile design. It is based on real-life experience building systems for the design and production of fabric in the woven Jacquard, woven dobby, printed and knitted textile industry. The system was developed at FIT, is an extension of work done at IBM, and portions of the system were running at FIT at that time. The Metasysem is composed of two hierarchically designed systems (one subsuming the other): a control system (The Metasystem) which permits the selection of elements in the Object System, and the Object System which the designer actually uses to design and control the fabrication of the fabric. The variety of elements in the Object System were made possible because of strict rules governing homogeneity of the design and specification of the worker modules.

Software Engineering
In the 1970’s Janice taught a course in Systems Theory at the IBM Systems Science Institute in New York City. Outgrowth of experience with the FIT course and student involvement led to two collaborative efforts on software and graphic systems design tools with Janice at IBM SSI and Nitta Dooner at IBM Watson Reearch Center[pub 18][pub 19]. The development of the tools was used as teaching material in the systems theory course.

In the early 1970’s Jan joined the IBM Systems Science Institute in New York City, a group devoted to teaching current software development methodologies to IBM customers. Jan’s lifelong work was rooted, as her publications show, in an interest in the architecture and structure of data and software. At the Institute Jan taught a number of courses focusing on hierarchical structuring of programs using Top-down Development and Structured Programming (needs Mills footnotes).

This paper is a bridge between Jan’s publications on the Textile Graphics Project and her work in Software Engineering. Jan’s next paper "The application software engineering tool" (ASET) [pub 19] (ASET) describes a software engineering tool which is several levels of abstraction above the Metasystem. This is a tool for the software developer. The prototype ASET Environment was built on the IBM 370 MODEL 168 virtual machine at the T. J. Watson Research Center and used the IBM 3270 graphic terminal equipped with alpha-numeric keyboard, function keyboard and light pen. Like all her previous systems, the deigner (this time, software designer) is presented with an interactive face on the now “black box” computer. This system focuses the application designer’s energy on structuring the problem solution around the application, not around procedural hardware and software concerns. The “black box” computer is presented as two sets of functions: the Operative Functions, which are the problem solutions, and the Manipulative Functions which enable the designer to act upon the Operative Functions. The ASET Environment assists the designer in selecting the appropriate Operative Functions, or in building new Constructed Functions from fundamental (Leaf) Operative Functions and noun/verb combinations stored in the ASET Library. Newly constructed functions become “leaves” to a higher level of the hierarchy. After the design is complete, the Generate Function produces structured PL/I code. This generation is possible because the functions are highly independent of each other, each having a specific task. They have minimal coupling containing only data. Switches are only passed to designate type of data, never control information. In 1980 Jan further elaborated on these ideas in "Data tracking" (pub 20).