Research Projects at ISS

Environmental Sensing

The scientific goal of this proposed project is to develop a Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System (LASOIS) that will enhance astronauts’ spatial orientation capability and reduce sensorimotor risks during manned and landed lunar mission operations. The objectives of this project are to investigate methods for removal and/or alleviation of astronaut disorientation in a lunar surface operations setting by using integrated information technology, and psychological and cognitive research on spatial orientation and navigation, to develop the Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System; and to train astronauts to enhance their spatial orientation capability in a LASOIS-supported simulated lunar environment (http://shoreline.ceegs.ohio-state.edu/research/nsbri_08/nsbri.html).

Integration of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) and Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) Data for Near Real-time Precision Lunar Topographic Mapping and Landing Site Assessment.

This Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Participating Scientists (PS) project proposes to integrate Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) with Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) data to provide the first high-accuracy 3D lunar cartographic maps along with an assessment of potential landing sites for future lunar landed missions at a high level of precision (submeter) (http://shoreline.ceegs.ohio-state.edu/research/lro_2008/lro.html).

Biologically and Geometrically Inspired Approach for Target Recognition for Multispectral/Hyperspectral and Multiplatform Image Analysis.

(http://shoreline.ceegs.ohio-state.edu/research/nga_nuri/nganuri.html)

The objectives of this research project are to develop a biologically inspired and extended algorithm of S-LEGION (Spatial LEGION) to quickly analyze and extract information from multispectral/hyperspectral remote sensing images covering large areas, develop a new vector geometric active contour (GAC) model for target boundary extraction, refinement and shape reconstruction in interest areas extracted by S-LEGION, research on a memory-based target recognition method based on S-LEGION that can perform the final recognition of interested targets considering spectral, contextual, and geometric patterns, and establish an integrated multi-sensor (satellite, airborne, descent, and ground) model for scale and rotationally variant object extraction and target recognition across multiple platforms to support the biologically and geometrically inspired approach.

NASA AISR.

This deals with the Integration of Orbital, Descent and Ground Imagery for Topographic Capability Analysis in Mars Landed Missions http://shoreline.ceegs.ohio-state.edu/research.htm

For more information on the above researches contact Professor Rongxing Li, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science at li.282 (at) osu.edu.

Ubiquitous Sensing

PeopleNet.

This is a mobility testbed under development, consisting of 35 Cellphone-TMote pairs. The testbed provides infrastructure to conduct experiments with 802.15.4 radios .  (http://kansei.cse.ohio-state.edu/peoplenet/index.php)

Kansei.

Kansei is a testbed of 210 Extreme Scale Motes (XSM) hooked individually onto 210 Extreme Scale Stargates (XSS). The stargates are connected using both wired and wireless ethernet. Kansei provides a testbed infrastructure to conduct experiments with 802.11b networking and XSMs (http://kansei.cse.ohio-state.edu/peoplenet/info.php).

For more information on PeopleNet and Kansei, contact Professor Anish Arora, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at arora.9 (at) osu.edu.

Automated Highway Systems.

The DARPA Grand Challenge: For more information on the Autonomous City Transport challenge project, for which OSU was a semi-finalist, see: http://www.ece.osu.edu/osuact.

Intersection Analysis: The underlying goal of this project is to minimize the severity of a side impact collision occurring at a standard right angle intersection. See http://www.ece.osu.edu/citr/current_intersection.html for more details.

RASER: Registration and Multi-Layer Sensing. The Ohio State University for Revolutionary Automatic Target Recognition and SEnsor Research (RASER) has developed an information-theoretic matching algorithm: Robust Data Alignment (RDA). For more information, click http://www.ece.osu.edu/~jwas/OSU_RASER.html

Related research in this area includes large-scale, intelligent systems modeling and optimization, hybrid systems, decentralized control, automotive (ABS, active suspension, integrated vehicle dynamics), and transportation systems (optimal routing and relation to signalization) and all aspects of ITS. The link to the corresponding control systems laboratory is http://www.ece.osu.edu/~umit/ee757.htm

 For more information contact Professor Ümit Özgüner, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at umit (at) ece.osu.edu, or see his homepage is http://www.ece.osu.edu/~umit/

Sensor Networks

 
Time-varying Wireless Networks.

The quality of wireless communication can vary significantly over time due to factors such as  multipath propagation, mobility and time-varying multiuser interference. In the following papers, they analyze the impact of channel variability on wireless network performance and show how multihop routing should be done in the presence of short and long term channel variability.

Koksal C. E. and Balakrishnan H., "Quality Aware Routing in Time-Varying Wireless Networks," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communication Special Issue on Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks,  Volume 24,  Issue 11,  Nov. 2006 Page:1984 - 1994

Koksal C. E., Thiran P., Telatar E and Jamieson K., "Impacts of Channel Variability on Link-Level Throughput in Wireless Networks,'' Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance 2006

Transmission scheduling in wireless sensor networks.

One of the main issues in the design of sensor networks is energy efficient communication of time-critical data. Energy wastage can be caused by failed packet transmission attempts at each node due to channel dynamics and interference. The following papers analyzes the basic limitations of transmission schedulers and give simple schedulers with close to optimal performances.

Liu S., Srivastava R., Koksal C. E. and Sinha Prasun, "A Hidden Markov Model-Based Scheme for Energy Efficient Data Transmission in Sensor Networks,"Ad Hoc Networks Journal, October 2008

Liu S., Srivastava R., Koksal C. E. and Sinha P., "Achieving Energy Efficiency with Transmission Pushbacks in Sensor Networks," Proceedings of IEEE IWQoS 2008
 
Multi radio diversity.

One can improve the performance of wireless LANs by exploiting path diversity. The following papers provide and analyze simple systems in which packets associated received by multiple receivers that work in coordination are (hard) combined to improve loss resilience:

Miu A., Balakrishnan H. and Koksal C. E., "Multi-Radio Diversity in Wireless Networks,'' Wireless Networks Journal, Springer, October 2006
Miu A., Balakrishnan H. and Koksal C. E., "Improving Loss Resilience with Multi-Radio Diversity in Wireless Networks,'' Proceedings of ACM MOBICOM 2005

Adaptive communication.

In this following paper, a practical technique that adjusts transmission rate to maximize the rate of reliable communication over a flat-fading wireless channel is proposed:

Aggarwal R., Schniter P. and Koksal C. E., "Rate Adaptation via ARQ-Feedback for Goodput Maximization over Time-Varying Channels," Proceedings of IEEE CISS 2008

For more information, contact Professor Can Emre Koksal, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at koksal (at) ece.osu.edu (http://www.ece.osu.edu/~koksal/ ).

Parallel and fault tolerant architectures.

This research utilizes the capabilities of the circuit-switched communication to present reconfiguration schemes to make multiprocessors based on the hypercube, the k-ary n-cube, and the k-ary tree operational in the presence of faulty processor nodes and/or faulty communication links (http://www.ece.osu.edu/~ozguner/ft.html).

Heterogeneous distributed computing.

The research in heterogeneous computing began as a novel technique for increasing the performance of a large, coupled structural analysis application. The application in question consists of a number of dissimilar analysis modules, which share data (http://www.ece.osu.edu/~ozguner/hetero.html).

For more information on the above and Wireless mobile and sensor networks, Interprocessor communication in parallel architectures , Real-time parallel and distributed computing, Parallel algorithm design, particularly for Computer-Aided Design of VLSI circuits; contact Professor Füsun Özgüner, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at ozguner (at) ece.osu.edu (http://www.ece.osu.edu/~ozguner/ozguner-f.html and http://www.ece.osu.edu/~ozguner/pubs.html )

Sensing Devices and Signal Processing

Machine Perception.

The research specifically deals in biologically plausible neural computation for auditory and visual information processing. To achieve this, this research program seeks to uncover computational principles for auditory and visual analysis, including segmentation, recognition and generation. This research is on the basis of psychological/neurobiological data from human and animal perception and computational considerations." 

For more information on this research contact Professor DeLiang Wang, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering and Cognitive Science at dwang (at) cse.ohio-state.edu http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~dwang/

 EPR Imaging.

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) oximetry provides a direct, minimally invasive measure of oxygen concentration. Oximetry is useful in predicting the response of tumors to different treatment options and in understanding the pathophysiology of cardiac recovery following injury due to cardiovascular disease. However, weak signal strength and long data acquisition times prohibit widespread use of EPR oximetry. The objective of this project is to develop signal processing methods that accelerate data acquisition. The approach fully accesses all observable signal energy in the radio frequency resonance signal and exploits the inherent sparseness of newly developed particulate spin probes. Preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of reducing acquisition time from tens of minutes to tens of seconds. The link to this is:http://www.heartlung.osu.edu/epr/5608.cfm

For more information on EPR Imaging contact Professor. Lee C Potter, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at potter (at) ece.osu.edu

Surface Reconstruction.

In this research, they take input point clouds generated by sensing devices. A shape is recreated from a set of points that are acquired from the shape by sensing devices. The challenge lies in reconstructing surface which should be topologically equivalent to the sampled surface and also geometrically close.  For point clouds, a Voronoi based algorithm  called  COCONE is used. The Surface reconstruction pages are:  http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~tamaldey/surfrecon.htm and http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~tamaldey/cocone.html

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Pronunciation models for speech recognition and Computational Linguistics (particularly computational phonology).

Related research work is in Statistical investigations of linguistic phenomena in large corpora, Spoken dialogue system design; spoken human-computer interface issues, Natural language generation for spoken dialogue systems, Prediction of errors in ASR systems, Multi-stream large-vocabulary decoding and Spoken information retrieval. Also, natural language processing, ASR language modeling. The link to this research page is http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~fosler/research.html

For more information contact Professor Eric Fosler Lussier , Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, at fosler (at) cse.ohio-state.edu http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~fosler/publications.html

Machine Learning.

Pattern Recognition and Statistical Analysis of Natural Data, Manifold and spectral methods, algorithms for semi-supervised learning and clustering, understanding the value of unlabeled data in pattern recognition and applications to computer vision and other areas with abundant unlabeled data.

For more information, contact Professor Mikhail Belkin, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at mbelkin(at)cse.ohio-state.edu http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~mbelkin/papers/papers.html and http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~mbelkin/

Information Theory.

The Ohio State University for Revolutionary Automatic Target Recognition and SEnsor Research (RASER) has developed an information-theoretic matching algorithm: Robust Data Alignment (RDA) a new approach to data fusion for automatic recognition, surveillance, and tracking research areas in intelligent transportation systems. For more information see: http://www.ece.osu.edu/~jwas/OSU_RASER.html.

For more information on research in Coding Theory, Wireless Communication; and DNA Self Assembly  contact Professor Hesham El Gamal, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at helgamal(at)ece.osu.edu ( http://www.ece.osu.edu/~helgamal/publications.html) who is also a Senior Member of the IEEE and currently serves as an Associate Editor for "Space-Time Coding and Spread Spectrum'' for the IEEE Transactions on Communications.

Wireless Communication (with applications to Sensor Networks and Radar Systems).

Statistical Signal Processing, Distributed and Sequential Detection, Design of Wireless Sensor Networks and RFID Systems at Battelle.

The related research page is http://www.ece.osu.edu/~ertine/research.htm. For more information contact Professor Emre Ertin, Department of Electrical Engineering at ertin.1(at)osu.edu

Robust Language Technology.

This research group comprises CLLT Computational Linguistics and Language Technology at Ohio State, LAOS Logicians at Ohio State, Association for Computational Linguistics, Linguistic Society of America and Association for Computing Machinery. 

For more information on Robust Language Technology, contact Professor Christopher Brew, Linguistics and Cognitive Science and Computer Science and Engineering at brew.2(at)osu.edu http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~cbrew/