Outside: With the Wild Things and Indoors: Around the Mall & Down the Corridor

We're meeting up post-Where / WhereCamp 2011. Join us for some cool presentations on the Outdoors and Indoors.

Note, to avoid conflict with Where we're meeting on April 26th, the fourth Tuesday in April not our usual and time-immemorial third Tuesday.

Belay that order, Scotty... about a new temporary location, that is. We're meeting at our usual place, Kiev Training Room in Google Building 40 in Mountain View (map (http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110020205459820723016.00045c21f469e568e4c0b&z=17)). Go to the B40 Lobby and sign in like you've always done. We'll be picking up our food at Charlie's Cafe next door to Kiev -- enjoy the variety. Please arrive earlier than usual (around 6:30 PM or so) to make your way to Charlie's with Google Security's guidance and bring your tray back to Kiev.

California Early Detection Network’s Integrated Mapping and Management Planning Platform

Daniel Gluesenkamp, Director of Habitat Protection and Restoration for Audubon Canyon Ranch

http://californiaedn.org/images/stories/CAEDN-Banner.png

California Early Detection Networks (CaliforniaEDN (http://californiaedn.org/)) is working with the Calflora database to build an integrated mapping and management planning platform that gives land managers improved tools for mapping, managing, and monitoring wild plants. The platform integrates a heavily used on-line database; data collection devices (mobile apps, GPS cameras); online decision support tools (science-based weed risk assessment and occurrence prioritization models); and scale-variable planning modules to identify measurable objectives, assign treatments and monitoring, and evaluate outcome data. This on-going effort has already created an open access web-GIS application which lets users submit and manage data from their existing GIS systems or via this new shared infrastructure.

Dan will talk about the challenges faced by on-the-ground natural resource managers. Then he will review existing and planned tools CaliforniaEDN provides to improve conservation delivery by planners, scientists, and land managers.

Micello's Indoor Mapping Platform

Prakash Narayan, VP, Platform, Micello, Inc.

http://micello.com/sites/default/files/product_integrations2.png

We introduced Micello to the WebMapSocial audience in Feb 2010 and showed you our iPhone application that had ~ 250 indoor maps of shopping malls.

Micello has made huge progress over the last year. We now have 3000+ indoor maps of locations ranging from Malls to Conference centers to Airports to Hospitals. In addition to having these maps available for the "Micello Maps" application on the iPhone, Android and iPad, Micello has launched (http://micello.com/pressrelease/micello-launches-first-ever-set-indoor-map-apis) its platform. This will allow developers to access indoor maps from within their applications and offer their users a rich and interactive experience. There is a hyper-local eco-system that is emerging and Micello is enabling it.

In this presentation, we will show you the capabilities of the Micello Platform and also show some of the applications that have been built using the Micello platform.

Automated 3D Modeling of Building Interiors

Avideh Zakhor, Professor Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California Berkeley

http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/research/indoor/rick_backpack_hall.jpg

Automated 3D modeling of building interiors (http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/research/indoor/) is useful in applications such as virtual reality and entertainment. In this talk, we develop an architecture and associated algorithms for fast, automatic, photo-realistic 3D models of building interiors.

The central challenge of such a problem is to localize the acquisition device while it is in motion, rather than collecting the data in a stop and go fashion. In the past, such acquisition devices have been placed on robots with wheels or human operated pushcarts, which would limit their use to planar environments. Our goal is to address the more difficult problem of localization and 3D modeling in more complex non-planar environments such as staircases, or caves. Thus, we propose a human operated backpack system made of a suite of sensors such as laser scanners, cameras, inertial measurement units (IMU)s which are used to both localize the backpack, and build the 3D geometry and texture of the scene.

The two main challenges to localizing a human operated backpack system in indoor environments are (a) lack of GPS, and (b) having to recover six degrees of freedom (DoF) pose information, rather than 3 DoF namely, x,y, and yaw, typically used in wheeled systems on planar floors. As it turns out, the small pitch, roll and z variations for typical human gait cannot be ignored for the full 6 dimensional pose recovery made of x,y,z, pitch, roll and yaw. We propose a number of scan matching and visual odometry based localization algorithms and compare their performance using a high end IMU sensor which serves as the ground truth. We also propose a number of 3D model generation approaches, and show examples of resulting models for multiple floors of the electrical engineering building at U.C. Berkeley.

Dinner is generously sponsored by Google.

WHERE WE MEETUP:

We meet in the Kiev Training Room of Building 40 at Google HQ in Mountain View. To locate our meeting place, use this map (http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110020205459820723016.00045c21f469e568e4c0b&z=17). If you've never been there, you may need a few extra minutes to park & navigate through the campus. To get to Kiev Training Room, you must enter through the lobby of Building 40. Once in the lobby, Google requires that you sign an electronic NDA. Please be courteous of their professional space and grant them this request. Security will escort you to Kiev Training Room after you've signed in. Thank you for your understanding.

Thanks always for your support and participation. YOU make this Meetup great.

Catherine and Alec

catherine[at]endpointenvironmental[dot]com
ada[at]dara-abrams[dot]com