SAMI - Situational Awareness from Multimodal Input

:: home

:: people

:: research

Welcome to the web site of the SAMI project. SAMI is one of the primary projects under the larger NSF funded project RESCUE, and is focused on developing next generation situational information management technologies.

The goal, broadly, is to develop general purpose information systems that can aid say a decision maker in, say, an emergency situation to get answers to queries such as "identify and display the the fire trucks that have arrived near the main tower " or "what are roads out of downtown that are likely to remain blocked the next two hours ?"

(Check out an Overview Presentation on SAMI)

General purpose engines that can enable information systems that provide such information require advances and development in several areas such as multi-modal information capture and extraction, information fusion, information semantics, GIS integration, reasoning with uncertain information and also addressing information reliability. These are precisely the challenges that the SAMI team seeks to address. We have identified three principal technology components in situational information systems, namely a situational data management component, a component for extraction, interpretation and synthesis of raw multi-modal information, and a component for analysis and visualization.

The project is a collaboration between various institutions namely UC Irvine, UC San Diego and ImageCat Inc. and spans researchers in diverse areas such as data management, artificial intelligence, multi-media, and GIS systems.

An additional exciting aspect, besides our research, is our collaboration with first responders for transiting some of our technology into the real world.