Institution: The City College of New York
Department: Computer Science
Proposed research ideas:
Our objective is to allow the creation of visual analysis applications, particularly in urban science, to be more accessible to data enthusiasts and domain experts, in a similar way that game engines are made available to independent developers. Simply put, if a media design student can create a game in a week, the same student should be able to build an application to support decision making in urban science in the same amount of time given that she has a capable game engine. We propose an open-source, native plug-in for Unity3D, the leading game engine, to facilitate the management, analysis and visualization of spatio-temporal data sets including 3D geometries and scientific data. Once completed, our plugin will be equipped with a set of powerful, yet scalable, constructs that allows users at various levels of expertise to create and deploy interactive applications rapidly. In addition, we will provide connectors for integrating the system with popular mapping and big data platforms, ranging from traditional framework such as MPI or CUDA to Spark and Hadoop.
Motivation:
A research direction that I would like to pursue is developing scalable algorithms for big data visualization and analysis that carefully take into account advantages of big data management techniques, as well as their constraints in the domain. An approach to this would be aligning my research with domain applications where a strong integration of both areas is a must for practical purposes. Through this program, I’m hoping to bring my research, or expertise in visualization and big data computing closer to the core science research offered through this program. On the other hand, this will also create an immense opportunity to train our top students as the next generation computational researchers.