Supported by a Chase Dististinguished Research fellowship I am currently completing my doctoral dissertation in the Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering at the University of Maine under the guidance of Dr. Michael Worboys.
Formal models of indoor environments for reasoning about pedestrian navigation tasks should capture key static and dynamic properties and relationships between people, spaces, and objects, and provide an effective framework for reasoning about change. Of particular interest are changes in properties or relationships that affect a person's ability to carry out a goal directed navigation task. This thesis presents a framework for formally representing indoor environments, the events that occur in them, and their effects on the topological properties and relationships between spaces (e.g., rooms and stairways), people, and objects (e.g., PDAs and keys). The goal is to provide a computational foundation for qualitative spatiotemporal reasoning about indoor pedestrian navigation by modeling the effects of key indoor events on human, object, and space relationships in indoor environments. A formal indoor bigraph model supports constructing algebraic specifications of indoor environments that independently represent people and place locality (e.g., building hierarchies) and connectivity (e.g., path based navigation graphs). This model is supported by a typed indoor event calculus which provides a logic-based formalism for representing the effects of indoor space events on key indoor relationships. Together, they support the construction of narratives about indoor navigation tasks as potential sequences of events and their consequences in indoor environments. For example, given a person's starting situation (an initial indoor scene) and a particular goal-directed navigation task (goal state) we can construct a potential sequences of events (actions a person can take in the environment) that leads to satisfying her goal (e.g., if a fire occurs in the building, how can she straightforwardly reach an exit?).
Locus enim est principum generationis rerum (For place is the origin of things) - Roger Bacon
SenseME was a collaboration between SIE, Global Relief Technologies, and the Maine National Guard whose goals are to provide Critical Infrastructure Sensor Integration and Logistical Asset Tracking during disasters by using sensor technology to
Indoor Spatial Awareness (ISA) is a multi-national R&D project whose vision is to provide a basis for Indoor Spatial Theory and Systems to meet the growing need for indoor spatial awareness in hospitals, convention centers, and other ubiquitous computing environments. The goal is to develop a computing technology to:
See my bio, publications, or research pages for further details.
Lisa Walton
Graduate Research Assistant (Advisor: Dr. Michael Worboys)
Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering
University of Maine, Orono, ME. 04469
lisa DOT walton AT spatial DOT maine DOT edu
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