VizWorld.com

Looks like the Purdue University Calumet will be getting some nice upgrades at the Center for Innovation through Visualization & Simulations (CIVS), courtesy of a $50k award from BP.  Planned for equipment acquisition and activity development, they’ll be merging simulations with 3d visualization and VR techniques.

“Over the years, Purdue Calumet and BP have collaborated in technology development in ways that improve the quality of life in our region,” Purdue Calumet Chancellor Howard Cohen said. “This gift, for which we are extremely appreciative, will enable us, through our CIVS facility, to build on our capability for responding to challenges in ways that benefit our region.”

Some will say that this is just BP trying to ‘repair’ their image after the Gulf disaster, but anything to bring more visualization support to the issue would be welcome.  And who knows, maybe this will help prevent a sequel:

As a CIVS supporter, BP has benefited from the facility’s capabilities. In fact, Purdue Calumet faculty and students and BP research and design engineers have used CIVS computational fluid dynamics modeling to address corrosion and other concerns at BP’s Whiting refinery.

via Purdue University Calumet | News @ Purdue Calumet.

Science bp, purdue, research, virtual reality

Purdue University is kicking off a new center dubbed “Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments” (VACCINE), funded by the US Department of Homeland Security, to create tools and software for use by government agencies and emergency personnel.

“We are creating ways for people to get information interactively in an understandable format to help them make the right decisions and take preventive measures,” Ebert said. “For example, simulations to see what would happen if you were to quarantine a certain city to control the spread of pandemic flu or whether reallocating police patrols would reduce crime.”

The center will be co-led by Purdue and Rutgers, and consists of a team of 15 universities.

via Untitled Document.

Science analytics, dhs, purdue

In the current issue of the BMC: Biomedical Informations and Decision Making journal, researchers at Purdue demonstrate a new algorithm for classifying and analyzing public health data based on a “Seasonal Trend Decomposition using Loess” that allows new insight into time-varying biomedical data.  Such an analysis is invaluable for analysing medical emergencies such a bioterrorism or disease outbreaks.

Public health surveillance is the monitoring of data to detect and quantify unusual health events. Monitoring pre-diagnostic data, such as emergency department (ED) patient chief complaints, enables rapid detection of disease outbreaks. There are many sources of variation in such data; statistical methods need to accurately model them as a basis for timely and accurate disease outbreak methods.

A preliminary PDF is available at the link below.

via Abstract | Syndromic surveillance: STL for modeling, visualizing, and monitoring disease counts.

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Purdue has created a virtual clean-room with a system like a Mechdyne CAVE for training pharmacists on the real-world environments they’ll be maneuvering.  The system is part of Purdue’s Envision Center of Data Perceptualization.

The simulator runs in a multiwall immersive environment at the Envision Center and will work on wall-sized panels and portable display systems, too. The equipment employs 3-D glasses and a wireless controller something like a Nintendo Wii’s to put users in the middle of the virtual world being projected and allow them to navigate and manipulate it. Head-tracking capability adjusts the view as a user looks around, or “walks” through, the environment, which is detailed down to the labels on the medicine bottles. The software also has been modified to run on desktop and laptop computers.

Video of the environment after the break.

Read more…

Science biomed, purdue, virtual environment

The US Department of Homeland Security has awarded a 6-year $30 million grant to Purdue and Rutgers to build a “Center of Excellence in Command, Control and Interoperability”.

Purdue and its team of 14 universities will focus on the Visualization Sciences, while Rutgers will lead the effort’s Data Sciences component. The center has already formed partnerships with local, state and national groups to provide university researchers real-world examples to help test and refine developing technology.

The two teams also represent coalitions of several other schools from around the southeast, and got a head start a few years ago when DHS granted them about $2million to build the “Purdue University Regional Visualization and Analytics Center” (PURVAC).

via Purdue, Rutgers will lead $30 million U.S. homeland security research center | Lafayette Online.

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