NGA announces geospatial grant winners
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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency University Research Initiative grants are aimed at spurring research at universities in geospatial science and related areas.
Each year, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's Office of Basic and Applied Research casts out some seed money in the form of NGA University Research Initiative grants. The grants are aimed at spurring research at universities in geospatial science and related areas such as mathematics and engineering.
This year the agency has awarded grants averaging $300,000 in each of seven topic areas. Some of the awards include up to three one-year options of approximately $150,000 per year.
The topics are as follows:
- Topic 1. Research in extracting geospatial data and accounts of movement from natural language (free text such as narratives and speech) and integrating the results with other data in geospatial databases. The grant was awarded to Alan MacEachren at Pennsylvania State University.
- Topic 2. Research in rapid monitoring and prediction of surface-water levels. Grants were awarded to C.K. Shum at Ohio State University and William Stein at New Mexico State University.
- Topic 3. Research in modeling and characterizing soils, for application to detection of buried landmines, unexploded ordnance and tunnels. Grants were awarded to Jan Hendrickx of New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and Donald Sabol Jr. of Nevada Desert Research Institute.
- Topic 4. Research in how the atmosphere interacts with oceans and how oceans interact with the solid Earth, in order to improve predictions of the Earth's rotation that are needed for accuracy in the widely used Global Positioning System. Grants were awarded to Steven Dickman at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Jun-Yi Guo at Ohio State University.
- Topic 5. Research in biologically and geometrically inspired object-recognition methods for use with imagery. Grants were awarded to Rongxing Li at Ohio State University and Guillermo Sapiro at the University of Minnesota.
- Topic 6. Research in analytic tools and techniques for geospatial information science, with special emphasis on analysis of geodynamic processes. Grants were awarded to Michael Goodchild at the University of California at Santa Barbara, P. Jeffrey Brantigham at the University of California at Los Angeles and Tyler Erickson at Michigan Technological University.
- Topic 7. Research in characterizing image signatures. Grants were awarded to David Messinger at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Philip Dennison at the University of Utah.
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