NGA awards research grants
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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has announced its grant awards for the fiscal 2008 NGA University Research Initiative program.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has announced its grant awards for the fiscal 2008 NGA University Research Initiative program.
Each year, NGA makes the awards to encourage and support research in selected areas of geospatial science that are considered critical to U.S. national security. Initial awards are for two years and have a value of about $300,000. As many as three one-year extensions are also possible, up to a value of about $150,000 per year.
This year's four topic areas, recipients of the awards and their project descriptions are:
1. Research on the geopotential of gravity and the magnetic field.
Award recipients:
- Dmitry Budker, University of California-Berkeley; for his project, "Spaceborne Magnetic Gradiometry after Swarm: Novel Approaches to Mapping the Earth's Magnetic Field Employing Nonlinear Magneto-Optical Rotation sensors' and
- Victor Isakov, Wichita State University, for his project, "Innovative Mathematical Methods for Gravimetric and Magnetometric Prospecting."
2. Research on developing efficient target detection and tracking techniques using image data from multiple sources.
Award recipients:
- Meyer Pesenson, California Institute of Technology, for "A Framework for Regularizing Hyperspectral Images-Image Processing, Spectral Domain Dimension Reduction, Visualization and Quality Assessment'
- John Benedetto, University of Maryland, for 'Frame Theoretic Methodology for Spectral Domain Dimension Reduction'
- James E. Fowler, Mississippi State University, for "Random Projections for Dimensionality Reduction of Hyperspectral Data"
- Trevor Darrell, University of California-Berkeley, for 'Probabilistic Discriminative Latent Spaces for High-Dimensional Image Data" and
- Jieping Ye, Arizona State University, "Integrated Spectral Dimensionality Reduction"
3. Research on improving techniques for automatically extracting features from remotely sensed imagery using contextual cues, implementing algorithms based upon biological models, and providing estimates of the causes of visual scenes.
Award recipients:
- Joseph Mundy, Brown University, "A Probabilistic Framework for Relation-Based Registration'
- Bruno A. Olshausen, University of California-Berkeley, "Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Structure in Multi-Band Imagery."
- Marshall Tappen, University of Central Florida, "Data and Algorithms for Estimating Scene Causes from Real World Images."
4. Research to develop analytic tools and techniques that track, monitor and predict natural or anthropogenic activities, and to provide estimates of the causes of visual scenes.
Award recipients:
- James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, "Spatio-Temporal Tracking of Entities: Determining Object Location from Image and Text Data."
- James Keller, University of Missouri, "Linguistic Spatial Reasoning."
- Steven Dean Prager, University of Wyoming, "Biologically Inspired Approaches for Reasoning on Complex Functional Networks."
- Shashi Shekhar, University of Minnesota, "Purpose-Aware Dynamic Graph Models for Representing and Reasoning about Networks."
- Puneet Singla, State University of New York at Buffalo, "A Multiresolution Approach for Modeling and Forecasting of Geospatial Activities."
- David Bennett, University of Iowa, "Simulating Spatiotemporal Interactions of Mobile Entities."
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