Texas Norman Hackerman Advanced Research Program award for Distributed Surveillance: May 2008
Prof. Kakadiaris, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor, and Prof. Shah, Assistant Professor, in collaboration with Prof. Jejelowo (Texas Southern University) received an ARP award of $149,944 for two years for their proposal "Video-Based Surveillance in Distributed Environments".
DURIP award for collaborative computer vision research: May 2008
A Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant from the Army Research Office has been recently awarded to a team of UH researchers led by the Principal Investigator Prof. Shishir Shah, Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Co-PIs for this award are Assistant Professors Edgar Gabriel and Rong Zheng and Professor Marc Garbey. The $140,000 award will be used to purchase mobile robots with vision capabilities, static cameras, compute nodes, and storage servers for processing, analyzing, storing and retrieving the data streams produced by multiple cameras, and wireless communication devices for video transmission and monitoring.
The automated interpretation of images to detect, track, recognize, and understand the trajectories of objects in a timely manner is crucial in vision tasks, especially in various activities of the Department of Defense, including automatic target detection and recognition (ATD/R), surveillance and monitoring, autonomous navigation for smart weapons, and industrial robotics for manufacturing and deployment of weapon systems, among others. Within a realistic environment, scene understanding and imaging of objects is a distributed act that requires interpretation of the image data based on a highly scalable and collaborative mechanism.
The equipment purchased through this award will be utilized to further research efforts in the area of distributed and high performance mobile multi-modal smart camera system for scene sensing and vision tasks related to object detection, tracking, and recognition. Research enabled by this award will be the key enabler to real-time monitoring of the environment and information processing needed for mission critical assessment of friend/foe targets.
“We expect the equipment purchased through this award to be a pivotal capability for distributed and high performance vision research in at least five areas: evidence-based object recognition, multi-modality disparate view-based object recognition, spatial pattern analysis and wide-area monitoring, real-time resource allocation and distributed computing, and quality-of-service aware wireless communication”, said Prof. Shah.
The award is one of 210 DURIP awards announced by the Department of Defense in March 2008 and the first ever to be awarded to the University of Houston. DURIP awards support the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research. They enable DoD-supported university researchers to purchase scientific equipment costing $50,000 or more.
Invited Lecture at The University of Texas at Austin: Mar 2008
Dr. Shah was invited to give a talk at The University of Texas at Austin as part of the ECE Seminar Series. He presented results of his recent work in the area of Learning Systems in Computer Vision and discussed future directions. Abstract of his talk can be seen at ECE Seminar Series page.
Multispectral Cytology at USCAP 2008: Jan 2008
Research being pursued at QIL in the area of multispectral imaging and chemical profiling for image cytology will be presented at the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, 2008. The work will highlight the imaging system built at QIL and present results of a pilot study in thyroid cancer screening. This research is being pursued in collaboration with The Methodist Hospital.
QIL Member wins Poster Competition: Dec. 2007
The Winners of the poster competition conducted at the OPEN HOUSE on Saturday, October 20, 2007 were announced. Mr. James Thigpen, pursuing his M.S. in Computer Science, wins 2nd place for his poster "Vision beyond Sight". He is pursuing research in the area of Multispectral Microscopy and Image Analysis under the supervision of Prof. Shishir Shah.
CS Open House 2007: Oct. 2007
The Computer Science Department Open House is scheduled for Saturday, October 20 from 10 AM to 5:30 PM in Philip G. Hoffman Hall. High school students, community college students, university students, and the community at large are invited to explore the exciting adventure of computer science. Twenty plus interactive demonstrations of current research including "Life is a Game…Play It," "Your Face is Your Passport," and "Racing Games" will challenge your imagination. Attendees will participate in a "Science in Action" contest based on the demonstrations to enter a drawing for prizes including a laptop and two iPods touch. One of the sponsors, Microsoft, will sponsor a Halo3 party for attendees. Directions and parking information are available at Open House Directions. Special Open House events include a Programming Contest for high school students. Advance registration is required. Cash prizes for the winning teams include $1,200 for first place, $800 for second place, and $400 for third place. All members of the winning teams will be awarded $1,000 scholarships if they join the UH computer science program. Another special event is a Poster Contest for current UH computer science students with cash prizes for the winners. The posters will be judged by faculty and Open House attendees.
In the News: Spring 2006
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Shishir Shah and his UH colleagues in the Quantitative Imaging Laboratory are working with collaborators at The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston to develop new technology to rapidly image, analyze, and identify abnormal cells. Read the article here.