Engineering Frontiers Fall 2018

Visualizing Big Data

While a plethora of data are available from numerous sources, making visual sense of these data is a field unto itself.

“My career for the past 25 years has been getting useful information from data through interactive visual representation. So, I’ve been handling big data for a very long time,” says David Ebert, Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments, or VACCINE, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security center based at Purdue.

The work dovetails with a College of Engineering initiative called Data Mind, which focuses on enhancing existing efforts in research and education, as well as launching new programs in data science and its interface with engineering. The initiative is linked to the university-wide goal of establishing Purdue as a leader in the broadly construed field of data science.

Google Hollywood

In Analytics

A research team led by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is creating algorithms for a range of AI-related advances.

The team has developed a system that searches videos for specific types of objects and activities without any special labeling or annotations. “Think of it like Googling for video,” Siskind says.

Searching 10 Hollywood movies in the genre of Westerns, his team was able to find a variety of horse-related images and video segments.

“Our system has an object detector for people and for horses, and it has semantic definitions of concepts like riding a horse, leading a horse, approaching a horse,” Siskind says. “It has concepts like toward and away from, leftward and rightward, and quickly and slowly.”