US-Egypt Cooperative Research: Knowledge Discovery in Large Virtual Environments: Towards a New Approach for Solving Wayfinding Problem

该奖项旨在支持肯塔基州路易斯维尔大学计算机工程和计算机科学系的Mehmed Kantardzic博士和埃及亚历山大市穆巴拉克科学研究城的Walaa Sheta博士之间的合作研究项目。研究人员将开展研究，利用空间数据中的知识发现技术来处理大规模虚拟环境中的空间信息，这是最近研究中备受关注的问题。大型或高度遮挡的虚拟环境(VE)的用户经常在虚拟世界中保持其空间定向(位置和方向感)方面遇到困难。一般来说，VE不会提供物理环境中的距离、运动和方向的丰富提示集。此外，使用头戴式显示器(HMD)的沉浸式显示器通常视场较小，进一步减少了用于保持空间方向的视觉提示。从虚拟环境数据库和用户导航模式挖掘中提取的知识和发现的新模式，对于理解空间信息、捕捉空间信息与非空间信息之间的内在关系、重组空间信息以适应数据语义并实现高性能具有重要作用。范围：虚拟环境正在朝着更现实、更复杂的应用方向发展，如漫游、医疗和教育系统，需要巨大的场景数据库。知识发现技术的应用对于理解空间数据、发现空间数据与非空间数据之间的空间关系具有重要意义。数据挖掘或数据库中的知识发现(KDD)是从大型数据库中发现感兴趣的、隐含的和以前未知的知识的一个新的研究领域。这些PI将产生一个系统来挖掘大量的虚拟环境空间数据。双方在虚拟现实系统和知识发现方法方面有互补的经验。Sheta的研究重点是虚拟环境和知识发现，而Kantardzic的研究重点是大型虚拟环境及其对象数据库。该项目将互惠互利，并将使双方能够解决在大型虚拟环境中寻找路线的难题。它将涉及埃及亚历山大市的两名初级科学家。该项目得到了美国-埃及联合基金计划的支持，该计划为两国的科学家和工程师提供资助，以开展这些合作活动。

0318128KantardzicDescription: This award is to support a cooperative research project between Dr. Mehmed Kantardzic, Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky and Dr. Walaa Sheta, Mubarak City for Scientific Research, Alexandria, Egypt. The investigators will conduct research to address the problem of dealing with spatial information in large-scale virtual environment using Knowledge Discovery Techniques in spatial data, which attracted attention in recent research. Users of large or highly occluded virtual environments (VEs) often experience difficulty in maintaining their spatial orientation (sense of position and orientation) within the virtual world. VEs do not in general provide the same rich set of cues for distance, motion, and direction found in the physical environment. Also, immersive VEs using head-mounted displays (HMDs) generally have a small field of view, further reducing the visual cues used to maintain spatial orientation. The knowledge extracted and new patterns discovered from mining both virtual environment database and user navigation patterns may play an important role in understanding spatial information, capturing intrinsic relationships between spatial and non spatial information, reorganizing spatial information to accommodate data semantics and achieve high performance.Scope: Virtual environments are moving toward more realistic and complex applications, such as walkthrough, medical and educational systems, requiring huge scene databases. Application of knowledge discovery techniques is important for understanding spatial data and discovering spatial relationships between spatial and non-spatial data. Data mining or knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is a new research field for discovery of interesting, implicit, and previously unknown knowledge from large databases. The PIs will produce a system to mine a large virtual environment spatial data. The two sides have complementary experience in virtual reality systems and knowledge discovery methods. Sheta's research is focused on virtual environment and knowledge discovery while Kantardzic's is focused on large virtual environment and its object database. This project will have mutual benefit and will allow the two sides to solve the difficult problem of dealing with wayfinding in large virtual environment. It will involve two junior scientists in Alexandria, Egypt. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities.