Correction appended.
Fabio Pellacini, a professor of computer science at the College and Reza Olfati-Saber, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering, have been awarded grants for five-year research projects by the National Science Foundation as part of the Faculty Early Career Development program CAREER awards. Olfati-Saber, who was awarded $400,000, intends to develop technology to improve military rescue missions and Pellacini, who was awarded $59,602, plans to work to simplify computer image editing.
With his grant, Olfati-Saber intends to create mobile sensor networks that can significantly improve decision-making and response times for key events occurring in critical infrastructures and nature, such as forest fires and other natural and man-made disasters. A mobile sensor network involves wirelessly connected entities, ranging from wireless cell phones to robot wireless communicators.
Through exploration of this engineering concept, Olfati-Saber and other scientists will be able to further understand how simple interactions lead to a cohesive group behavior. The ability of wirelessly connected mobile sensing devices to work as a unit has far-reaching applications in security technologies, Olfati-Saber said.
Pellacini's project aims to simplify image editing in order to enable average computer users to create 3-D images and videos.
"Computers right now block creativity, whereas I want to get rid of the meaningless tasks you do to get the art through," Pellacini said.
Popular editing software, like Adobe Photoshop, requires users to trace objects in a photo in order to change color and saturation. Pellacini and Ph. D. student Xiaobo An have simplified this process, allowing users to alter different parts of a photo with the click of a mouse.
For example, while editing a photo of a field of flowers, one can make flowers a different color by roughly highlighting one flower rather than individually tracing each bud.
According to Pellacini, his algorithms will dramatically speed up the photo and video editing processes, reducing the time spent editing from hours to seconds. "We can go fast," Pellacini said. "Can we go intuitive? The computers are fast enough to do everything we need them to, we just can't use them very well."
To solve this problem, Pellacini plans to create software that will enable users with limited computer training to create 3-D videos or perform advanced photo editing.
Pellacini is also developing advances to 3-D animation editing. He explained that animation movies such as "Toy Story" currently have good control of shape and motion, but material and lighting are still unrealistic, making figures look plastic.
One of Pellacini's projects involves allowing animators to edit 3-D lighting in realtime. In animation, virtual lighting is arranged for each scene. Previously, there was a delay between arranging the lighting on a screen and seeing the new lighting changes displayed. Pellacini's work reduces this refreshing time, again shaving hours off of a formerly lengthy process, he said.
"It may seem trivial, but it's a Ph.D.'s worth of math," he said. "We masquerade incredibly complicated math in a incredibly simple interface. Math embodies the tedious work that you used to do [when editing]."
Both professors are excited to receive this award.
"It's a reflection of the approval of your peers in your field of work and vision for future developments," Olfati-Saber said.
For the record, the original article ("Two professors win CAREER awards," Feb. 6) incorrectly stated that Professor Olfati-Saber planned to use the grant to create a mobile sensor network for military search and rescue missions. In fact, using NSF funds for any military project is illegal. Olfati-Saber plans to use the funds to create mobile sensor networks in order to improve decision-making and response times in the event of various natural and man-made disasters.
