Dr. Zixiang Xiong, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, received a best demo paper award at the 2018 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) held July 23-27 in San Diego, California.
Xiong received this award for his paper titled "Augmented Reality Sandpit Simulating Ant Colonies,” which was co-authored by collaborators, Lachlan Smith
A common way ant species navigate their environment and search for food is by using pheromone chemical trails leading to and from food sources. The augmented reality sandpit project featured in the paper shows the creation and progression of these pheromone trails within a colony in an interactive way by utilizing a simulation that gives users the ability to move sand in a real sandpit while seeing virtually projected images on top of the sandpit change to reflect ant colony behavior.
Xiong is an IEEE Fellow and his research interests include distributed source coding for sensor networks, data hiding, and network information theory joint source-channel coding, networked multimedia and data compression, genomic signal processing, network traffic smoothing
IEEE ICME serves as a forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in multimedia technologies, systems and applications from both the research and development perspectives of the circuits and systems, communications, computer and signal processing communities.