Title: Information integration and human interaction for indoor and outdoor spaces

NSF grant IIS-0916219,

M. Worboys (UMaine, PI), and N.A. Giudice (UMaine, co-PI).

Brief Abstract.

Advances in portable sensing technology and improved mobile access to online information services have vastly increased the amount of data available for modeling and assisting the navigation behavior of humans in built spaces. Imagine emergency response workers equipped with hand-held devices that would allow them to navigate outdoors to the scene of a city disaster and then navigate inside buildings, bypassing dangerous or blocked routes to locate survivors. Unfortunately, the ability to integrate and reason using these differing types of data has lagged behind data acquisition technology. The goal is to provide a unified informatic framework for static and dynamic outdoor (O) and indoor (I) spaces that supports seamless human navigation in mixed outdoor/indoor (OI) environments. This proposal directly addresses Information Integration and Informatics topics of modeling information structures for knowledge discovery, fusion, summarization, and visualization and the Human- Centered Computing topic of developing an interactive platform for seamless navigation assistance in OI spaces using a portable, context-aware system. The key novel components are the creation of a framework for seamless OI-spaces whose functional integration in studies of human navigation tasks will be evaluated in both virtual and real OI-environments.