Information, Technology, and Society
Information, Technology, and Society
The emergence of information and communication technologies since 2000 has made it possible to connect with the common and invisible man and women all over the world including Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The amazing evolution has made it financially and technologically viable to reach all sections of the society creating the most significant global power shift in human civilization since Industrial Revolution. More to come!
4D Next Generation GeoSpatial Visualization
I am interested in creating a 4-dimensional space-time visualization of geospatial data and intelligence associated with the environment. This task requires intelligent collection of data using various sensors including a variety of cameras, LIDAR data, and multispectral imagery in all kinds of frequenecy bands. I am creating a spatio-temporal GIS (Geographic Information System) visualization system bringing together several layers of information including terrain data, street maps, buildings, environment data, aerial images, and mobile objects data.
The information will be collected by mobile agents (both humans and robots) roaming in the environment. The agents will be able to interact with the data in a multi-modal manner using vision, text, graphics, annotations, speech, sound, gesture, and haptics. An important step is extract and visualize time-critical information and present it to the user in a hierarchical uncluttered way. Support for quantifying and visualizing uncertainty will be provided for decision-making.
Multi-Modal Scientific and Information Visualization
My research interests include multi-modal scientific visualization (use of vision, sound and haptics to understand scientific data). I have used text, graphics, images, 3D models, natural sounds, synthesized sounds, musical sounds, text, skin sensation and force feedback to interact and understand scientific data from several disciplines including computational fluid dynamics, aeronautics, meteorology, oceanography, geology, cartography, bioinformatics, web documents, medicine and geometric design. I am investigating feature preservation and simplification algorithms (such as terrain and vector field topology) for scalar and vector data.
Uncertainty Computation, Visualization, and Validation
My current research interests include computation, visualization and validation of uncertainty representations. Almost all scientific data have errors associated with them. Yet, till recently, little has been done to incorporate these errors in the visualization. There are many sources of errors as different forms of uncertainty are introduced as the data are derived, transformed, interpolated, and finally rendered.
My research devises both qualitative and quantitative metrics for characetrizing this uncertainty and mapping the uncertainty to different modalities (visual, audio and haptic) to convey uncertainty to the user. We also conduct user evaluation studies to validate the uncertainty representations using human users appropriate to the applications and tasks at hand.
Computer Aided Geometric Design
My research (including PhD Thesis) focuses on the development of fast and efficient algorithms for conversion between and computing with different geometric data structures including algebraic and parametric representations. My interestes include many different types of representations and techniques including NURBS, many different types of splines, cubic/quadric surfaces, radial basis functions, subdivison surfaces, and wavelets.
In addition, I advise UCSC students with interests in Multi-Modal (vision and sound) Computer Art and Graphics and those interested in South Asian Studies (especially India). I am a fellow of Porter College that has traditionally attracted artists.