News

NSF RI Project NUCLEUM

 

Professors and Mubbasir Kapadia, together with Prof. Sejong Yoon from TCNJ (a Rutgers CS alumnus) have received a $1M grant from the NSF IIS Robust Intelligence directorate to develop new deep learning models & algorithms for understanding of interactions between human crowds and the environments they occupy:

Project NUCLEUM: Learning Joint Crowd-Space Embeddings for Cross-Modal Crowd Behavior Prediction

This award will support, over the next four years, a unique research project that aims to bring together state-of-the-art in probabilistic multimodal Machine Learning, crowd & behavior modeling, and building design. The project will address the deficiencies of traditional physical simulation-based crowd models by devising a novel way of modeling the inherent relationship between the structure and semantics of complex environments, and the presence and behavior of its human occupants, from small groups to dense crowds. The main goal is to accurately predict crowd behavior, from microscopic motion to aggregate crowd dynamics, in novel, never-before-seen environment configurations using Neuro-Cognitive Modeling of Environments and Humans (NUCLEUM) to replace the computationally expensive yet often mismatched-with-reality physical simulations.

Find out more about this project at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1955404 and at https://project-nucleum.github.io.