Dr. Gennady Andrienko (http://geoanalytics.net/)
Fraunhofer Institute Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems ( http://www.iais.fraunhofer.de)
Abstract.
Thanks to the recent progress in positioning and tracking technologies, data about various mobile objects or agents are currently collected in growing amounts. Analysis of such data can yield valuable knowledge about the movement behaviors of the objects and about the environment in which they move. Since movement data by themselves lack semantics (essentially, the records consist of coordinates and time stamps), their analysis requires the involvement of a human expert, who can interpret the data on the basis of his/her knowledge. This includes the general knowledge of the (geographic) space, time, and movement as well as territory- and domain-specific knowledge.
In order to enable human interpretation of movement data, it is necessary to represent the data in a proper, i.e. visual, way. However, traditional approaches to visualization and interactive exploration of movement data cannot cope with the large amounts of movement data. There is a pressing need in adequate analysis methods. A general approach to handling large datasets includes aggregation and summarization. Aggregation means putting together data items that are close and/or similar. Summarization means deriving characteristics of so formed aggregates (i.e. groups of data items) from the characteristics of their members.
Bio. Gennady Andrienko received his Master degrees in Computer Science from Kiev State
University in 1986, and Ph.D. equivalent in Computer Science from Moscow State University
in 1992. He undertook research on knowledge-based systems at the Mathematics Institute of
Moldavian Academy of Sciences (Kishinev, Moldova), then at the Institute on Mathematical
Problems of Biology of Russian Academy of Science (Pushchino Research Center, Russia).
Since 1997 Dr. Andrienko has a research position at GMD, now Fraunhofer Institute for
intelligent Analysis- and Information Systems (IAIS).
He is a co-author of the monograph "Exploratory Analysis of Spatial and Temporal Data",
30+ peer-reviewed journal papers, 10+ book chapters, and 100+ papers in conference
proceedings. He has been involved in numerous international research projects. His
research interests include geovisualization, information visualization with a focus on
spatial and temporal data, visual analytics, interactive knowledge discovery and data
mining, spatial decision support and optimization.
Prof. Franz Leberl
Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology (http://www.icg.tugraz.at)
Abstract
In March 2005, at the occasion of his 50th birthday, Bill Gates went public with his "Virtual Earth Vision" for local search in the Internet and stated:
"You'll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise. Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough."
This implies an enormous advance in computing power, communications bandwidth, miniaturization of computing, increase of storage capacity and in the ability to model the human habitat (the Earth) in great detail in 3 dimensions, with photographic realism and at very low cost per data unit. Action followed this declaration by Bill Gates, and the transition of a then-10-year old Microsoft business segment called "Map Point" into a new Virtual Earth Business Unit was kicked off.
The Microsoft initiative can serve as an example and actually also as a driver for the future of computing and of computational thinking. Research in the complete automatic creation of 3D models of urban spaces has become greatly inspired and now is a very active field of research. The level of automation in creating 3D city models has benefited from an increase in the redundancy of the source data in the form of highly overlapping imagery either from the air or from the street.
The talk will "evangelize" the current capabilities of the Virtual Earth system, point to some pieces of new science in the analysis of imagery of the human habitat, and of "Visual Computing", and set the stage for an educated speculation about the future of computing.
Bio.
Prof. Franz Leberl received the degrees from Vienna University of Technology (Dipl.-Ing., 1967; Dr.techn., 1972). He worked in the Netherlands, California, Minnesota, Colorado and Austria. Today he is a chaired professor of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology.
As a business man, he formed Vexcel Corporation in Boulder (Colorado, 1985) and Vexcel Imaging GmbH (Austria, 1993, manufacturer of the UltraCam Digital Large Format Aerial Camera). As a research manager, he was CEO of the Austrian Research Centers (1996-1998) with 1000 employees.
His current outlook on life is defined by the sale of Vexcel Corp. and Vexcel Imaging GmbH to Microsoft Corp. (USA) in mid-2006, resulting in a position as a Director of Microsoft Virtual Earth. That ended in November 2007, so that he can now serve as Dean of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology (2008-2011).
Dr. Shi Kuo Chang
Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh (www.cs.pitt.edu)
Space can be seen in many different ways. When an architect and a computer scientist look at Space they see very different things and yet sometimes they make surprisingly similar discoveries. As a computer scientist with strong research interests in visual languages I learned many things from the theory and practice of architecture. This talk on virtual spaces begins by discussing the origins of architectural pleasure and how the space of a dwelling can be divided into refuge and prospect according to Grant Hildebrand. This decomposition of space leads us naturally to consider spatial relations and patterns. On the pragmatic side we illustrate patterns by the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. On the theoretical side we consider Christopher Alexander's theory of patterns and its relationship to the theory of visual languages. After a discussion of William Mitchell's e-topia as an example of the V-topia, the virtual cities of the past, the present and the future are surveyed. An important ingredient of the virtual city is the interactive map. We can make an interactive map even more powerful by introducing the concept of the sentient map.
Bio. Dr. Chang is a distinguished scientist, an educator with vision and an accomplished novelist. His scientific contributions include the reconstruction of images from projections, the theory of symbolic projection, and theory of icons for visual languages. His papers are widely cited by researchers in image information systems and visual languages. He also developed the first picture grammar and the phonetic phrase Chinese input method, and co-founded the Chinese Language Computer Society .
In 1978, Dr. Chang founded Knowledge Systems Institute , which is a graduate school dedicated to advanced education of computer and information sciences. In 2002 KSI was rated by U.S. News as one of the engineering schools offering accredited online graduate programs together with such top schools as Stanford University, Columbia University, Purdue University, etc.
Dr. Chang is currently Professor and Director of the Center for Parallel, Distributed and Intelligent Systems, University of Pittsburgh.
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