Dirk Colbry

• Managing Director at Michigan State University

This work introduces two new distance metrics for comparing labeled arrays, which are common outputs of image segmentation algorithms. Each pixel in an image is assigned a label, with binary segmentation providing only two labels ('foreground' and 'background'). These can be represented by a simple binary matrix and compared using pixel differences...

In this work, the use of transfer learning was explored to achieve the overall goal of classifying a small number (approx. 215 images) of Nonlinear Multiphoton Multimodal Microscopy Images of unstained oral cancer biopsies into three categories—healthy, inflammatory, and cancerous. This is achieved by first training a neural network model to detect...

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Facilitation is the process of helping researchers to use research computing systems and services to advance their computing-intensive/data-intensive research goals. The growing need for CI Facilitation isn't being met by traditional academic degree and certificate programs, so informal education is required. The Virtual Re...

Cyberinfrastructure facilitation – working directly with researchers Cyberinfrastructure facilitation – working directly with researchers 2 technical content that facilitators need is available via other opportunities). The VR consists primarily of (a) summer weeklong intensive workshops that provide both content and experiences in facilitation, (b...

The CyberAmbassador project aims to provide professional skills training for Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) professionals, with the goal of developing "CyberAmbassadors" [16] who are prepared to facilitate and lead multidisciplinary, computationally-intensive research. This NSF funded program (Award Number 1730137) has the following objectives: (1) Deve...

High-resolution digitalizing of histology slides facilitates the development of computational alternatives to manual quantitation of features of interest. We developed a MATLAB-based quantitative histological analysis tool (QuHAnT) for the high-throughput assessment of distinguishable histological features. QuHAnT validation was demonstrated by com...

We report on an ongoing project to develop a large scale Direct Simulation Monte Carlo code. The code is primarily aimed towards applications in astrophysics such as simulations of core-collapse supernovae. It has been tested on shock wave phenomena in the continuum limit and for matter out of equilibrium. In the current work we focus on the study...

Numerical studies of shock waves in large scale systems via kinetic simulations with millions of particles are too computationally demanding to be processed in serial. In this work we focus on optimizing the parallel performance of a kinetic Monte Carlo code for astrophysical simulations such as core-collapse supernovae. Our goal is to attain a fle...

The Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER) at Michigan State University (MSU) was established in 2009 to coordinate and support multidisciplinary resources for computation and computational sciences. iCER is the home of MSU's centralized High Performance Computing resources, which include a heterogeneous compute cluster with various hardware d...

We report on the development of a test-particle based kinetic Monte Carlo code for large systems and its application to simulate matter in the continuum regime. Our code combines advantages of the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo and the Point-of-Closest-Approach methods to solve the collision integral of the Boltzmann equation. With that, we achieve...

Low cost digital cameras have transformed the process of collecting data. Researchers can now generate massive datasets and analyze the images later, either manually or with the assistance of software tools for processing and annotating images. However, it remains time-consuming and expensive to develop custom software analysis tools for a specific...

Data centers have become a critical computing infrastructure in the era of cloud computing. Temperature monitoring and forecasting are essential for preventing overheating-induced server shutdowns and improving a data center's energy efficiency. This paper presents a novel cyber-physical approach for temperature forecasting in data centers, which i...

Kinetic approaches are routinely employed to simulate the dynamics of systems that are too rarified to be described by the Navier-Stokes equations. However, generally they are far too computationally expensive to be applied for systems that are governed by continuum hydrodynamics. In this paper, we introduce a massively parallelized test-particle b...

People who are blind can be at a disadvantage in social situations because face-to-face communication relies heavily on non-verbal cues. Lack of access to cues such as eye contact can sometimes lead to awkward situations, such as answering a question that was directed to another person. This problem is compounded by the fact that sighted people are...

An increasing number of turnkey, domain specific software packages are available to help users take advantage of advanced cyber-infrastructure and resources such as TeraGrid. However, novice users of cyber-infrastructure are often overwhelmed by the complexities of using cyber-infrastructure. For instance, the user may need to install multiple soft...

Individuals who are blind are at a disadvantage when interacting with sighted peers given that nearly 65% of interaction cues are non-verbal in nature [3]. Previously, we proposed an assistive device in the form of a vibrotactile belt capable of communicating interpersonal positions (direction and distance between users who are blind and the other...

The 3DID system verifies the identity of a cooperative person by matching a sensed 3D surface of the face to a face model stored during a prior enrollment. First, anchor point detection is performed based on a shape index; then, a rigid alignment is determined between the observed and model face anchor points. A best alignment is determined using a...

A practical identification system based on 3D face scanning is presented. The speed of comparing a probe scan to the gallery is enabled by scan normalisation followed by extraction of higher level features. Our canonical face depth map (CFDM) is a standardised representation for three-dimensional (3D) face data in a face-based coordinate system. Ou...

This paper presents a scheme for using tactile rhythms to convey interpersonal distance to individuals who are blind or visually impaired, with the goal of providing access to non-verbal cues during social interactions. A preliminary experiment revealed that subjects could identify the proposed tactile rhythms and found them intuitive for the given...

Accelerometer based activity recognition systems have typically focused on recognizing simple ambulatory activities of daily life, such as walking, sitting, standing, climbing stairs, etc. In this work, we developed and evaluated algorithms for detecting and recognizing short duration hand movements (lift to mouth, scoop, stir, pour, unscrew cap)....

Good social skills are important and provide for a healthy, successful life; however, individuals with visual impairments are at a disadvantage when interacting with sighted peers due to inaccessible non-verbal cues. This paper presents a haptic (vibrotactile) belt to assist individuals who are blind or visually impaired by communicating non-verbal...

Classroom note-taking has been shown to be beneficial, even if the student never reviews his/her own notes. Students that are legally blind are thus at a disadvantage because they face significant barriers to note-taking in the classroom. This presentation demonstrates a working prototype of the CUbiC Note Taker, which is a highly portable device t...

1. ABSTRACT The act of note-taking is a key component,of learning in secondary,and post-secondary classrooms. Students who take notes retain information from classroom lectures better,

D face recognition technologies, with a computation time of a few seconds, perform well for person verification. However, current D face recognition approaches are too slow for person identification, even for a watch list of only a few hundred face models. By transforming scanned 3D faces into a canonical face format, storage size is greatly compre...

ABSTRACT In this paper we describe a real time system for detecting and recognizing lower body activities (walking, sitting, standing, running and lying down) using streaming data from tri-axial accelerometers. While there have been various attempts to solve this problem, what makes our system unique is that it uses a minimal set of sensors and wor...

The canonical face depth map (CFDM) is a standardized representation for storing and manipulating 3D data from human faces. Our algorithm automates the process of transforming a 3D face scan into its canonical representation, eliminating the need for hand-labeled anchor points. The presented algorithm is designed to be a robust, fully automatic pre...

The 3DID system has been developed to verify the identity of a person by matching a sensed 3D surface of the face to a face model stored during an enrollment process. Anchor point detection is performed based on shape index; then, a rigid alignment is determined between the observed and model face anchor points. The alignment is refined using a mod...

Purpose To report on the evaluation of error of a face matching system consisting of a 3D sensor for obtaining the surface of the face, and a two‐stage matching algorithm that matches the sensed surface to a model surface. Design/methodology/approach Rigid mannikin face that was, otherwise, fairly realistic was obtained, and several sensing and ma...

The performance of face recognition systems that use two-dimensional images depends on factors such as lighting and subject's pose. We are developing a face recognition system that utilizes three-dimensional shape information to make the system more robust to arbitrary pose and lighting. For each subject, a 3D face model is constructed by integrati...

This paper outlines methods to detect key anchor points in 3D face scanner data. These anchor points can be used to estimate the pose and then match the test image to a 3D face model. We present two algorithms for detecting face anchor points in the context of face verification; One for frontal images and one for arbitrary pose. We achieve 99% succ...

Commercial databases containing images of tire tread patterns are currently used by product designers, forensic specialists and product application personnel to identify whether a given tread pattern matches an existing tire. Currently, this pattern matching process is almost entirely manual, requiring visual searches of extensive libraries of tire...

The performance of face recognition systems that use twodimensional (2D) images is dependent on consistent conditions such as lighting, pose and facial expression. We are developing a multi-view face recognition system that utilizes three-dimensional (3D) information about the face to make the system more robust to these variations. This paper desc...

The performance of face recognition systems that use two- dimensional images is dependent on consistent conditions such as lighting, pose, and facial appearance. We are developing a face recognition system that uses three-dimensional depth information to make the system more robust to these arbitrary conditions. We have developed a face matching sy...

The world’s population is aging at a phenomenal rate. Certain types of cognitive decline, in particular some forms of memory impairment, occur much more frequently in the elderly. This paper describes Autominder, a cognitive orthotic system intended to help older adults adapt to cognitive decline and continue the satisfactory performance of routine...

The Nursebot project is a multi-disciplinary, multi-university effort aimed at developing mobile robotic assistants for the elderly.

The percentage of elderly people in the population is increasing at a phenomenal rate [14]. A signicant challenge faced by many elderly is a decline in cognitive functioning, particularly in memory. In this paper, we describe Autominder, an automated agent designed to serve as a cognitive orthotic", assisting an elderly client in carrying out the r...

The goal of execution monitoring is to determine whether a system or person is following a plan ap-propriately. Monitoring information may be uncertain, and the plan being monitored may have complex tem-poral constraints. We develop a new framework for reasoning under uncertainty with quantitative tempo-ral constraints-Quantitative Temporal Bayesia...

We present a viable 3D face verification algorithm that uses automatically identified anchor points and the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm to align two face surfaces. This algorithm is fast (< 2 seconds on a 3.2GHz P4) and robust to noise in the data (< 10% spike noise). We show that our algorithm tolerates up to 15 degrees of variation in...

The goal of execution monitoring is to determine whether a system or person is following a plan ap- propriately. Monitoring information may be uncertain, and the plan being monitored may have complex tem- poral constraints. We develop a new framework for reasoning under uncertainty with quantitative tempo- ral constraints - Quantitative Temporal Ba...

The goal of execution monitoring is to determine whether a system or person is fonowmg a plan ap- propriately. Monitoring information may be uncer- tain, and the plan being monitored may have com- plex temporal constraints. We develop a new frame- work for reasoning under uncertainty with quantita- tive temporal constraints - Quantitative Temporal...

We describe the design and implementation of a new honors research seminar for first-and second-year undergraduates. Open to students from all majors, the "CyberGreen" seminar introduced key concepts in engineering, sustainability, and computational science through a series of lectures and hands-on projects. Students learned about the use and maint...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2006. Includes bibliographical references. Microfiche. s