GeoDec: Enabling Geospatial Decision Making

The vision of GeoDec is to enable an information-rich and realistic 3-dimensional visualization and/or simulation of a geographical location (e.g., a city), rapidly and accurately. The idea is not just to allow navigation through a 3-D model, but to be able to ask queries and get information about the area seamlessly and effortlessly. The main challenge is: How to quickly and cheaply integrate, visualize, and simulate all aspects of a geographic region. The ability to create high-fidelity information-rich models of cities is critical for a wide variety of decision makers. For example, in the United States, GeoDec can be used by city managers, city planners, emergency response planners, and first responders.

In this talk, I will first motivate GeoDec and explain its vision. Next, I will briefly discuss our current activities in the following areas towards the realization of GeoDec:

Rapid construction of accurate 3-D models of buildings from two aerial images with minimum user’s interactions.

Visualization and accurate rendering of static and dynamic (i.e., [live] video) textures on the constructed 3-D models.

Automatic integration and accurate fusion of various geospatial (e.g., maps, road-networks) and geospatially-related (e.g., web yellowpages) data into the models.

Finally, I will conclude with a demonstration of the current prototype of GeoDec.

Speaker Details

Cyrus Shahabi is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also a Research Area Director at the NSF’s Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. He is also the CTO of Geosemble Technologies. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. His B.S. degree is in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. He has two books and more than hundred articles, book chapters, and conference papers in the areas of databases and multimedia. Dr. Shahabi’s current research interests include Peer-to-Peer Systems, Streaming Architectures, Geospatial Data Integration and Multidimensional Data Analysis. He is currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) and on the editorial board of ACM Computers in Entertainment magazine. He is also the program committee chair of ICDE NetDB 2005 and ACM GIS 2005. He serves on many conference program committees such as IEEE ICDE 2006, ACM CIKM 2005, SSTD 2005 and ACM SIGMOD 2004.Dr. Shahabi is the recipient of the 2002 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and 2003 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). In 2001, he also received an award from the Okawa Foundations.

Date:
Speakers:
Cyrus Shahabi
Affiliation:
University of Southern California