By Beth Cavanaugh

Rama Chellappa, professor of electrical and computer engineering

J. Gordon Leishman, professor of aerospace engineering

Michele Gelfand, professor of psychology

Three faculty-led research proposals have been awarded funding from the highly competitive federal Multidisciplinary Research Initiative Program (MURI)—making this the second year in a row that the university has shared the lead in total number of MURI grants.

Rama Chellappa, professor of electrical and computer engineering; Michele Gelfand, professor of psychology; and J. Gordon Leishman, professor of aerospace engineering, will each lead a multi-disciplinary team of experts and researchers from Maryland and other colleges and universities in programs with potential for defense and commercial applications for the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Our faculty from engineering, and the physical, computer and social sciences have a long tradition of working in academic areas important to the Department of Defense, as borne out by the breadth of topics covered in these MURI awards,” says Mel Bernstein, vice president for research.

Chellappa’s research will focus on acquisition of maritime biometrics—including development of long-range image and video acquisition and sensors to capture human faces and motion. Chellappa will work with a team of researchers from Columbia University, University of California, San Diego, and University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Their research has the potential to be utilized in various maritime scenarios.

According to Chellappa, many challenges exist in gaining such biometrics. The motion of the ship, lighting, environmental factors, such as sea spray, rain and fog, human disguises, and poses of the face and body all make reliable extraction and matching of biometric signatures difficult. The team will also work to fuse face and gait biometrics with other close-range signatures, such as iris, fingerprint and hand geometry.

Gelfand will lead a team of six Maryland faculty members and four doctoral students, and partners from Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Central Florida and the Naval Postgraduate School. Together, Gelfand and her team will develop a conceptual model offering a dynamic, multilevel, and contextualized understanding of the role of culture in negotiations and collaborations in the Middle East.

According to Gelfand, this MURI grant provides a unique opportunity for collaboration of her own. Her team consists of researchers and experts in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, political science, economics and anthropology. She will also enlist the help of several colleagues in the Middle East, who will assist in gathering data.

Leishman will lead a MURI research grant to study rotorcraft brownout—a phenomenon that can cause hazardous conditions during helicopter take-off and landing in dry, desert terrain. Brownout causes a significant risk for pilots flying close to the ground, as blinding dust is stirred up by the rotor downwash, causing the pilot to lose visibility.

Watch a short video demonstrating a brownout:

Leishman began studying rotorcraft brownout several years ago when he received a one-year grant from Optical Air Data Systems. The work he did on that grant helped him create a foundation for his MURI proposal. Leishman acknowledges that he and other faculty members spent many hours, over several months, writing the MURI white paper and preparing a comprehensive proposal for the Department of Defense.

Leishman’s team, which is comprised of seven Maryland faculty from aerospace and mechanical engineering, will partner with experts from Arizona State University, Iowa State University and Dartmouth College.

The group will work to better understand the physics of brownout and develop rotorcraft design improvements to ease or eliminate brownout.

University faculty will participate on three other MURI programs studying scalable methods for the analysis of network-based data; silent spatialized communication among dispersed forces; and stochastic control of multi-scale networks: modeling, analysis and algorithms. In 2007, Maryland was awarded three lead MURI grants and participated on teams for three other grants.