Center for Distributed and
Intelligent Computation
Director:
MISSION and OBJECTIVES
The Distributed and Intelligent Computation (DIC) Center focuses on the design, development, and implementation
of distributed and intelligent systems. The scientific, engineering and
technological thrust is at the interface between computing, sensors, networks,
and learning, for applications related to biometrics and forensics, C4I,
edutainment (education, entertainment, graphics, and game technology),
e-science and web services, high-performance computing, homeland security,
human-computer interaction (HCI), mobile and wireless communications,
simulation, virtual reality, and scientific visualization, and their
combination there of. The unifying and quite unique theme for the DIC Center
is to make computing adaptive, aware and self-healing, efficient,
human-centered, and secure. The activities the Center has been engaged in are
multidisciplinary and they cross departmental and school boundaries.
The DIC Center advances the research mission of
GMU by addressing challenges relevant to intelligent and secure processing and
communication of information and knowledge. Academic / scientific, industrial,
and business organizations require now high bandwidth and secure knowledge
highways for communication and collaboration. One of the NSF initiatives on
knowledge and distributed intelligence (KDI) in the information age has
recognized how “recent advances in computer power and connectivity are
reshaping relationships among people and organizations, and transforming the
process of discovery, learning and communication. These advances create
unprecedented opportunities for providing more rapid and effective access to
enormous amounts of information; for transforming this information into
knowledge by combining, classifying, and analyzing it in new ways; for studying
vastly more complex systems that was hitherto possible; and for increasing in
fundamental ways our understanding of learning and intelligence in living and
engineering systems.”
The DIC
Center supports among
others Homeland Security. Our
expertise on biometrics and forensics, with an emphasis on face recognition and
performance evaluation, is world wide recognized. Additional biometric efforts
are focused on video surveillance and monitoring (VSAM). The goal for VSAM is
to develop video understanding technology for use in urban and battlefield
surveillance applications, where human visual monitoring is too costly, too
dangerous, or otherwise impractical.
Novel image understanding technologies developed under VSAM will enable
a single human operator to monitor activities over a large, complex area using
a distributed network of video sensors.
Sample applications include building security, monitoring restricted
access areas in airports, scanning battle zones for sniper activity, and
performing reconnaissance on the battlefield.
The DIC center is also involved in pervasive communication and computing, to provide users constant
and easy access to information and computation using mobile, smart, and
wireless computing devices. The use of such devices require network management,
and self-organization and adaptation technologies in order to create a more
secure and versatile environment for human activity. Human-centered design is
problem-driven, activity-centered, and context-bound, and it employs computing
technology as a tool for the user, not as a substitute. Thus, the emphasis is
to support human activity using intelligent system tools subject to the
constraints, goals, and principles of human-centered design, rather than to
build (fully) autonomous systems that mimic humans. One approach to a
human-centered use of intelligent system technology seeks to make such systems
“team players” in the context of human activity, where people and technology
interact to achieve a common purpose.
Our goal is to expand on the human perceptual, intellectual, and motor
activities, and on the way to help disabled people as well. Towards that end we
have shown how gesture recognition can be used as an intelligent remote control
device for TV based on users’ profiles and preferences.
RESEARCH LABORATORIES.
1. Biometrics
and Forensics Laboratory
http://cs.gmu.edu/~wechsler/FORENSIC/index.html
2. Computer Graphics Laboratory
3. Computer
Vision and Robotics Laboratory
http://cs.gmu.edu/~kosecka/Vision-Robotics/vision-robotics.html