7/11/2008 - NGA announced today that Dr. James Keller, Curator's Professor of Electrical and Comptuer Engineering, was awarded a grant from the NGA University Research Initiative (NURI) program entitled "Linguistic Spatial Reasoning". This is part of NGA's "Text to Sketch" initiative. Co-Investigator on the award was Dr. Marge Skubic, Associate Professor of Electrical and Comptuer Engineering.

The overall goal of the proposed research is to investigate theoretical and algorithmic structures that will allow the conversion of linguistically described events to sketches consistent with image data, and to reason from the fused information in either a static or a predictive sense.

Specific objectives of the proposed research are:

(1) Investigate mechanisms to "invert" linguistic intelligence in the form of scene descriptions so that they can be used to create approximate sketches that capture the scene objects and their relationships.

(2) Research methods to convert linguistically described temporal and spatial events to create sketches with active path information.

(3) Investigate methods to match linguistic descriptions to imagery. Use matching to estimate size, shape, and distance calibration parameters.

(4) Continue research into automated sketch-to-scene matching using spatial relations, again with the goal of using the matching to refine context sensitive descriptions.

(5) Build spatial reasoning modules to infer object existence and relationships from existing spatial information.

(6) Research spatiotemporal reasoning to predict potential new locations of the agent of the temporal description. This involves automated spatial perspective taking.

5/20/2008 - The CGI announced today that 13 MU students have been selected by NGA for internships this summer under NGA's student internship program (STEP). These students have educational backgrounds in Geography, Computer Science, Information Technology, Industrial Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. These students have been placed in various branches within NGA's Production (P), Source (S), and Innovision (I) divisions as well as the eGeoINT office. "The NGA intern program is outstanding and we are very pleased to have placed so many students in the program this year," said Dr. Curt Davis, CGI Director. "These students will gain valuable work experience in the geospatial intelligence field and past experience has shown that this can significantly influence their plans of study and future career goals as a result."

2/5/2008 - The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) announced today that MU's undergraduate Geospatial Intelligence Certificate Program (GICP) has been granted accreditation. Two other other universities (Penn State and George Mason) were also accredited for graduate-level certificate programs.

"These three exceptional universities should be very proud of their courses and support of the geospatial intelligence tradecraft," said Stu Shea, USGIF president and chairman. "GMU, Mizzou and Penn State can be confident their teachings are not only relevant but also translate directly to real-word situations their students will encounter in their professional careers."

"We are very pleased to be able to offer the first accredited undergraduate GeoINT certificate program in the nation," said Dr. Curt Davis, CGI Director. "We have many undergraduate students that participate in summer internships at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The GeoINT certificate program will allow these, and other students, a unique opportunity to pursue a specialized program of study that is important for our nation's security."

1/1/2008 - It was announced today that CGI Director, Dr. Curt Davis, has been elevated to the rank of Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) . Dr. Davis was recognized by the IEEE for his "contributions to satellite remote sensing". The IEEE is the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology with more than 380,000 members worldwide. According to the IEEE, the grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in IEEE fields of interest. The accomplishments must have "contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society." The total number of Fellow recommendations in any one year must not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the IEEE voting membership on record. "It is my most significant professional accomplishment to date and a great honor," Davis said. "It’s recognition for my entire body of work in satellite remote sensing over the last 20 years."