Hi 81 / Lo 61
|
Hi 81 / Lo 61 |
Student Publications
©1991-2007
Last modified:
Contact:
|
Volume 71, Issue 123,
Monday, April 10, 2006
News NSF funds UH science facility New state-of-the-art facility to acquire data to analyze human cognition and behavior by KELLY J. SANTOS
A grant by the National Science Foundation is helping UH researchers study ways to listen when the human body talks. The $900,000 grant, the largest grant ever awarded to the University by the NSF, will help five UH researchers build a state-of-the-art research and training facility, will serve interests in the areas of biosignal analysis and biocomputation, George Zouridakis, principal investigator of the grant, said. The facility will house computing systems designed to acquire, analyze, integrate, securely store and visualize large volumes of data obtained from an experimental subject, all in real time, Zouridakis said. The five researchers include Zouridakis, who is director of UH's Biomedical Imaging Lab, professor Marc Garbey, associate professors Ioannis Kakadiaris and Ioannis Pavlidis and assistant professor Ricardo Vilalta. "The whole system shares a common research focus, namely to use captured data to analyze human cognition and behavior," Zouridakis said. "The end result will extend knowledge about how humans learn and how to help them learn better, how to monitor human physiology continuously and non-intrusively, and how to better detect illness or unusual behavior," he said. The grant will help fund the equipment used by the researchers, including a new 64-channel infrared brain scanner that measures the electrical activity of the brain. The new scanner, with the existing 256-channel scanner, will be capable of recording spatiotemporal profiles of neural activation and brain flow simultaneously. This system, combined with thermal and optical cameras and clusters of computational nodes, will be the facility's centerpiece Zouridakis said. Each of the five researchers brings their own research specialty to the project. Zouridakis' research involves using scanners like the new infrared brain scanner to capture and analyze brain activity. The research aims to understand brain function and behavior, human learning and cognitive impairment. Garbey, the chair of the computer science department, focuses on computational life sciences and high-performance computing. His research involves vein graft failure and neurovascular diseases. The founder and director of the Computational Biomedicine Lab, Kakadiaris, worked with a team that has developed new technology to better detect and one day prevent heart attacks. The group of researchers has also developed a new way to obtain a unique biometric signature of a person's face, using visible and infrared spectrum cameras. The grant will help purchase a dynamic camera that will acquire 3D surface data over time that will be used for biometrics and face expression analysis, Kakadiaris said. Pavlidis, who serves as the director of the Computational Physiology Lab, developed ATHEMOS, an Automatic THErmal Monitoring System, that allows remote physiological monitoring of a person's health including measurements of blood flow, pulse and breathing rate. The NSF grant will partially fund the development of a new ATHEMOS system, Pavlidis said. Co-director of UH's Data Mining and Machine Learning Group, Vilalta, is involved with research that analyzes massive amounts of data to extract informative patterns. His group is also involved in the automated analysis and characterization of Martian topography. Undergraduate and graduate students are able to participate in the research process. "Our facilities, which will be open to researchers
from academia and industry, will serve as research and training grounds
for scientists, and will also have a direct impact on our educational activities
by providing hands-on experience to our students," Kakadiaris said.
Send comments to dcnews@mail.uh.edu |
To contact the
To contact other members
of
 |