Scott Graham

System architecture for 3D terrafly online GIS

We present the architecture of 3D TerraFly, a three-dimensional extension of TerraFly, which is a Web-enabled geographic information system designed for visualization, analysis and composition of remotely-sensed imagery. 3D TerraFly has a client/server architecture. The client-side application is a web-embedded component called the 3D TerraFly Viewer that performs 3D terrain rendering and interactive navigation. The server side applications include texture imagery servers and mesh servers that, respectively, handle texture data requests and mesh data requests.

Constraint driven model using correlation and collaborative filtering for sustainable building

Sustainable building has emerged as an important topic due to the fact that it can significantly reduce the impact of buildings and their operation on the natural environment and more efficiently utilize resources throughout a buildings life-cycle. When compared with a traditional buildingdesign process, integrated project delivery has proven to be more efficient, and is thus gaining wider acceptance for many sustainable building projects. However, managing design and construction from different disciplines is still challenging. Conflicts among constraints are often not identified at the right design stage, which results in multiple iterations of the design process. In this paper, a novel constrain-driven model that enhances design processes through better management of constraints and thus delivers optimal design solutions with higher energy performance is proposed. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was applied to capture the correlations between different items (parameter-value pairs) and classes (constraints). Meanwhile, it integrated Collaborative Filtering methods and Constraint Satisfaction Problem to train and refine the proposed model. Finally, we have applied our model to a synthetic data sets to demonstrate its performance.

PIRE: a global living laboratory for cyberinfrastructure application enablement

This Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) is a 5-year long project funded by the National Science Foundation that aims to provide 196 international research and training experiences to its participants by leveraging the established programs, resources, and community of the Latin American Grid (LA Grid, an international academic and industry partnership designed to promote research, education and workforce development at major institutions in the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and other locations around the world). In return, PIRE will take LA Grid to the next level of research and education excellence. Top students, particularly underrepresented minorities, are engaged and each participant will receive multiple perspectives in each of three different aspects of collaboration as they work with (1) local and international researchers, in (2) academic and industrial research labs, and on (3) basic and applied research projects. PIRE participants will engage not only in computer science research topics focused on transparent cyberinfrastructure enablement, but will also be exposed to challenging scientific areas of national importance such as meteorology, bioinformatics, and healthcare. During the first year of this project, 18 students out of a pool of 68 applicants were selected; they participated in complementary PIRE research projects, visited 7 international institutions (spanning 5 countries and 4 continents), and published 9 papers.

On-demand geo-referenced terrafly data miner

We present a comprehensive Internet data extraction tool adopted for the TerraFly Geographic Information System (GIS). TerraFly is a web-enabled system that allows users to virtually fly over remotely sensed data, including satellite imagery and aerial photography, using a standard Internet browser. The data extraction tool presented here is designed to augment the users virtual flight experience with extensive data relevant to any given geographical point along the virtual flight path. The data presented to the user is retrieved from several server-side databases and is collected from the Internet data providers using our patented data extraction technology. Some data elements are presented to the user as overlays, some in popup windows, and some via hyper-linking to third-party web sites