VMASC 2010 Annual Report (PDF) - the Virginia Modeling, Analysis ...

Center activities
2009
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Dr. Yiannis Papelis, a leading scholar, educator and researcher
in the field of modeling, simulation and visualization (MS&V),
has been named chief scientist of VMASC. Executive Director
Dr. John Sokolowski announced the selection on Tuesday,
August 10, 2010.
2010
for Strategic Planning and Product Development, Thursday, June
10th: Business Plan /Entity Structure and How to Start an M&S
Company and Friday, June 25th: Strategic Planning for Early-Stage
Companies: Why planning is even more important for you than for
the Big Guys. Each workshop attracted participants from industry,
academia, and government.
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July/August 2010
In July, Old Dominion University’s VMASC had the honor of hosting
state and federal government officials in two separate informational
sessions. Secretary of Technology Jim Duffey met with ODU’s
President John Broderick, VMASC’s Executive Director John
Sokolowski and Director of Business Development Thomas
Reese to discuss the importance of modeling and simulation
education and research for the state of Virginia, and then
toured VMASC’s facilities and participated in presentations and
demonstrations focused on Transportation, Virtual Environments,
and Medical M&S technology applications.
Dr. Jeffrey Lacker, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Richmond, also visited Hampton Roads recently to discuss the
economic outlook of the nation and its context regionally. The
Fed’s President was impressed by VMASC’s modeling capability
and especially interested in recent M&S applications in foreclosure
market modeling. VMASC researchers are currently modeling
the contagion effect of foreclosures and fine-tuning their model
to include foreclosure probabilities. This data is beneficial for
policymakers and financial experts to explore impacts, develop
strategies to minimize effects and discover emergent human
factor and market behaviors.
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Old Dominion University’s Game Development Summer Camp
was hosted for another year by VMASC at the end of July and in
early August. Led by VMASC-affiliated faculty, the summer camp
doubled in size this year, with a second camp filling up rapidly to
capacity of 20 students. The two camps ran from July 26-30 and
from August 9-13 at VMASC headquarters in Suffolk, for students
ages 13 to 16.
With this appointment, Papelis assumes a primary role in
advancing collaborative MS&V research and development
by providing research expertise to government agencies
and industry, promoting Old Dominion University, Hampton
Roads and Virginia as a center of MS&V activities, and pursuing
initiatives and new projects that will enhance VMASC’s mission
in the modeling and simulation arena.
Dr. Papelis initially came to VMASC in August of 2007 as a
Research Associate Professor and spearheaded the Virtual
Environments applied research area. Since this time, he has
conducted valuable M&S research focused on agent-based
simulation, immersive environments, and critical infrastructure
dependency modeling. In addition, Dr. Papelis has mentored
students at the Masters and Ph.D. levels and teaches modeling &
simulation courses at ODU.
As the principal researcher on projects funded by the National
Institute of Aerospace & NASA, U.S. Navy, U.S. DOT National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Joint Forces
Command, and SEVA Port, Dr. Papelis has been involved
most recently in research supporting NASA’s autonomous
traffic operations laboratory, visualization of port logistics
and immersive virtual environments used primarily in ground
vehicle simulations.
The research conducted by Dr. Papelis can be applied to a wide
range of topics, including the realistic simulation of crowds,
simulation of critical infrastructure components, and control of
autonomous ground and aerial vehicles.
Before joining ODU’s VMASC, Dr. Papelis spent a year as a visiting
assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, during
which time he was involved in projects supporting Army flight
simulator interoperability and competed in the DARPA Urban
Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle competition.
Prior to this, Dr. Papelis was the Chief Technical Officer at the
National Advanced Driving Simulator & Simulation Center
and the Center for Computer Aided Design at the University
of Iowa, where he conducted traffic safety research and
worked extensively on agent-based modeling of traffic, virtual
environment modeling, 3D visualization, and operator-in-theloop
simulator.
The camp was led by Dr. Yuzhong Shen, assistant professor in
ODU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of
In conjunction, Dr. Papelis lead multiple research projects
the Batten College of Engineering and Technology; and Hector
assessing the effectiveness of Electronic Stability Control (ESC)
Garcia, senior project scientist with VMASC. Each day of the weeklong
with the purpose of making ESC standard equipment in all
Game Development Summer Camp consisted of interactive
future vehicles. Yiannis Papelis earned a BSEE (with honors)
lectures, hands-on game development exercises, and a game-play
from Southern Illinois University in 1988, a MSEE from Purdue
session at the end of each day. Participants learned how to make
University in 1989 and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical & Computer
computer games in an easy and enjoyable way, and developed
Engineering from the University of Iowa in 1993.
action games with Game Maker, a popular and intuitive game
development tool. They also learned simple 3D modeling using
14 Google SketchUp.
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