Edge and IoT-supported Augmented Reality: Promise, Challenges, and Solutions

This talk is part of the GVU Brown Bag Seminar Series brought to you by the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech.

Speaker: Maria Gorlatova, Ph.D., Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Location: 
Technology Square Research Building (TSRB, 1st Floor Ballroom)
85 Fifth Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30308

ABSTRACT
Mobile augmented reality (AR), which integrates virtual objects with 3D real environments in real time, has been showing outstanding potential in many application areas including education, retail, and healthcare. AR is broadly expected to redefine how we interact with the world around us. Yet current AR falls short of many of the expectations. This talk presents our vision of multi-device, edge computing-supported and Internet-of-Things (IoT)-integrated architectures for next-generation intelligent context-adaptive AR. The talk describes shortcomings in modern AR’s semantic and spatial awareness capabilities and identifies key research gaps that need to be addressed to enable AR to become robust and resource-efficient; we discuss solutions to some of the key challenges, based on the advances in edge computing, machine learning, and resource-efficient simultaneous localization and mapping. The talk also highlights the opportunities associated with the close integration of AR platforms and their users, and describes how integrated multi-device architectures can improve user context awareness in AR. The talk showcases several applications of next-generation context-aware AR, including AR in surgery and mental health.  
 
This talk is based on research that appeared in ACM SenSys, IEEE ISMAR, ACM IMWUT, IEEE INFOCOM, and IEEE/ACM IPSN.  

BIO
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is a Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University. Her research is in emerging pervasive technologies, with a particular focus on next-generation augmented reality and the Internet of Things. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and an Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named among the 10 N2Women Rising Stars in 2019, and has received multiple awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Facebook Research Award, CISCO Research Award, ACM SenSys Best Student Demonstration Award, IEEE/ACM IPSN Best Research Artifact Award, Google Anita Borg Fellowship, the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Young Author Best Paper Award, and the IEEE ComSoc Award for Advances in Communications.