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与计算机科学系的mohammed Kantardzic博士与埃及亚历山大市穆巴拉克市科学研究中心的Walaa Sheta博士之间的合作研究项目。研究人员将研究利用空间数据中的知识发现技术处理大规模虚拟环境中的空间信息的问题，这是近年来研究的热点。大型或高度闭塞的虚拟环境（ve）的用户经常在保持虚拟世界中的空间方向（位置和方向感）方面遇到困难。在物理环境中，虚拟现实通常不会提供与之相同的距离、运动和方向的丰富线索。此外，使用头戴式显示器（hmd）的沉浸式虚拟现实通常具有较小的视野，进一步减少了用于保持空间方向的视觉线索。从虚拟环境数据库挖掘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和实现高性能具有重要作用。范围：虚拟环境正朝着更现实和复杂的应用方向发展，比如演练、医疗和教育系统，这些都需要庞大的场景数据库。知识发现技术的应用对于理解空间数据和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有趣的、隐含的和以前未知的知识的一个新的研究领域。pi将产生一个系统来挖掘一个大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经验互补。Sheta的研究重点是虚拟环境和知识发现，Kantardzic的研究重点是大型虚拟环境及其对象数据库。这个项目将是互惠互利的，并将使双方解决在大型虚拟环境中处理寻路的难题。它将涉及埃及亚历山大的两名初级科学家。该项目得到了美国-埃及联合基金项目的支持，该项目向两国的科学家和工程师提供赠款，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.