November 2022

Global City Teams Challenge: Strategic Planning Workshop Working Group Series

Project Investigators

CAHMP Co-directors, Brenda Bannan (Principal Investigator) & Dave Lattanzi (Co-Principal Investigator) (2022) lead Global City Teams Challenge Strategic Planning Workshop Working Group Series, sponsored by National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The CAHMP team submitted the proposal in March, 2022 and was awarded $89,390 over one year.

In 2022, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded funding to George Mason University (GMU) to conduct a two-part workshop series to develop an integrated and supportive community-centric strategy to inform, strengthen and expand the Global Community Technology Consortium (formerly the Global City Teams Challenge) (GCTC) program, in an effort to facilitate and enhance smart and connected communities technology research, development and application.

In early August of 2022, the GCTC leadership convened in Arlington, Virginia, at Mason Square on GMU’s Arlington campus as the first workshop meeting in a two-part series. This first workshop, sponsored by the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnerships (CAHMP) at GMU and organized by Dr. Brenda Bannan, was designed to establish a strategic research vision for the GCTC. The workshop provided the leadership of the twelve SuperClusters, also known as Technology Sectors, an opportunity to better understand how the GCTC interacts with internal and external partners to achieve technology deployment and implementation for the purpose of informing the strategic vision. This workshop was followed by a mid-September workshop sponsored by the City of Coral Gables, Florida, and held in their Public Safety Headquarters Smart Building. Augmenting the findings of the first workshop, the second workshop held was designed to delineate the specific priorities and activities of the strategic plan. The leadership of this organization, including Dr. Bannan, attended the SmartCity Expo USA in Miami, Florida as part of the event.

Synthesized results from this workshop series: 1) inform and guide the strategic directions of the NIST GCTC organization to benefit communities and the public related to advanced cyber-physical technologies; and 2) yield insights into the complex and interdependent challenges of disseminating and implementing technology in the smart and connected communities vision.

Interactive Augmented Reality

Recently, CAHMP faculty, Dr. Craig Yu, is involved in a group researchers that present a novel interactive augmented reality (AR) storytelling approach guided by indoor scene semantics.

Their approach automatically populates virtual contents in real-world environments to deliver AR stories, which match both the story plots and scene semantics. During the storytelling process, a player can participate as a character in the story. Meanwhile, the behaviors of the virtual characters and the placement of the virtual items adapt to the player’s actions. An input raw story is represented as a sequence of events, which contain high-level descriptions of the characters’ states, and is converted into a graph representation with automatically supplemented low-level spatial details.

Their hierarchical story sampling approach samples realistic character behaviors that fit the story contexts through optimizations; and an animator, which estimates and prioritizes the player’s actions, animates the virtual characters to tell the story in AR. Through experiments and a user study, they validated the effectiveness of the approach for AR storytelling in different environments.

For more information about this project, please click here.

Also see Craig’s work in assistive robotics here.