NSF Summer REU Grant

The CCL has received a grant from the National Science Foundation which will support two undergraduates in summer 2008 to participate in the construction of a novel repository for biometric data.

Researchers at Notre Dame have collected tens of thousands of such images and videos, and design new algorithms for identifying and matching people based upon these measurements. Answering these questions is very computation and data intensive. A large scale study of a new matching algorithm could take many CPU years to complete. To attack these problems in a reasonable amount of time, we must enlist hundreds of CPUs to work on different portions of the problem. While we have demonstrated the practicality of this idea with some custom programming, the overall system is not (yet) easy to use for end researchers.
To solve this problem, the participants in this program will construct a well-organized repository of biometric data, connect it to our campus distributed computing system, and create an interface that makes it easy to specify and execute large biometric jobs.