IMSC Awarded Microsoft Grant to Advance Digital Geographics

Stay tuned for the next generation of online maps. They’re likely to dazzle everyone.
A team of computer scientists at USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), led by Cyrus Shahabi, is conducting basic research in advanced geographical visualization and data management systems for “Virtual Earth.”The technology is being developed in a project called GeoDec

Shahabi received one of eight highly competitive Microsoft research grants to conduct the research, which is also supported by a recent grant from Google.   GeoDec is designed to enable an information-rich and realistic 3-D visualization and/or simulation of geographical locations, such as cities or states, rapidly and accurately.

Shahabi is an associate professor of computer science and specializes in databases and information management.

He says GeoDec programming applications are needed for data mining and management as high-powered interactive mapping tools like “Virtual Earth,” “Google Earth,” and “MapPoint” come online. These mapping tools are hints of what’s to come in commercial mapping and local search platforms that will enable users to harness state-of-the-art capabilities.

"This award from an industry leader in online mapping provides us with an incredible opportunity to work with high-caliber scientists at Microsoft Research and to help advance the state-of-the-art in online mapping," says Shahabi.  “We would like to extend the query and data analysis utilities of ‘Virtual Earth’ so it can be used in more application scenarios, such as in emergency-response, urban planning, and intelligence applications.”

USC’s GeoDec research includes a family of interactive, highly accurate, 3D visualization tools ranging from rapid modeling to the depiction of live dynamic data, including live video. Led by Shahabi, the project is part of IMSC’s Decision Support Research Area, which is devoted to research on presenting massive amounts of data in real-time in forms and displays that can be quickly understood.

These interactive mapping capabilities have already been sought out, Shahabi added. For example, GeoDec has also received funding from USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication to support an urban renewal project that is under way in downtown Los Angeles. IMSC researchers are developing programming interfaces that will allow urban planners to redesign the city and create digital blueprints for a proposed $1.8 billion redevelopment project. .

“In our proposal, we showed that we can build more accurate 3-D models in a relatively short time,” said Shahabi. “We also showed that we can map images and live video textures to the models to make them even more realistic.”

In addition, GeoDec can automatically and accurately integrate a variety of spatial and temporal data, such as road networks and GPS data, into a model to make it ready for sophisticated spatio-temporal data analysis.

The ability to create high fidelity, information-rich models of cities, states or countries is critical for a wide variety of decision makers, Shahabi said. For example, in the United States, city managers, urban planners, emergency response planners, and first responders can use GeoDec. Inmilitary operations, these capabilities will be useful to urban operations planners, psychological operation planners,and training systems for soldiers in the field.

Co-principal investigators on the GeoDec project include USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) researchers Craig Knoblock, who specializes in databases and artificial intelligence, and Ram Nevatia, an expert in computer vision; and IMSC researchers Ulrich Neumann and Suya You, who will focus on graphics.

More information aboutIMSC’s GeoDec project is available at http://infolab.usc.edu/projects/geodec/index.jsp.