Debasis Mitra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Florida Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Center for Advanced Computer Studies of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Mitra's first Ph.D. was in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor in Computer Science at Jackson State University before joining Florida Institute of Technology. In the past Mitra has worked on reasoning with spatial and temporal knowledge. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award and the HEADWAE award for research and teaching excellence in Mississippi.

Current research focus in Mitra's Lab is in Bio-medicine. The group is engaged in improving analysis of Nuclear Medical images of heart. A long term vision in the lab is to understand the molecular biology of Coronary desease for improving human health. The group also works on Bio-informatics and Knowledge-representation with this objective.

Students about to complete their Bachelor's/Master's/Ph.D. & interested in joining the group are welcome to contact Mitra.

Courses

• Spring 2013: Scientific Computing
• Spring 2013: Formal Languages and Automata Theory
• Fall 2012: Analysis of Algorithms
• Fall 2012: Medical Imaging
• Past Course: Computational Molecular Biology
• Past Course: Constraint Reasoning

Announcement for RA

A talk for Remi recruitment

A talk on Medical imaging

Graduate Students

• Daniel Eiland
• Mahmoud Abdallah
• Stephen Johnson
• Hui Pan
• Chen Shi
• Bo Li

Alumni (Thesis/Dissertation)

• Antall Fernandes, M.S., Visible Measures Corp, Boston,
• Richard Hoch, M.S., General Dynamics
• Florent Launay, M.S., Microsoft Corp.
• Sung Park, M.S., Microsoft Corp.
• Keith Ledig, M.S., Harris Corp.
• Gandhali Samanth, M.S., Progressive Insurance
• Michael Smith, M.S., (-not available-, in New York)

Alan Bundy's Page on how-to-do research

Current Collaborators

• Grant Gullberg & Group, Department of Radiotracer Development and. Imaging Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA, an old Group image
• Marcus Hohlmann, Physics and Space Sc. Department, FIT

Past Summer Interns

• Avishek Bannerjee, IIT Khragapur (2009)
• Gaurav Mangukya, IIT Kharagpur (2009)
• Sanchit Gupta, IIT Delhi (2008)

Acknowledgements

• US National Institute of Health
• US National Science Foundation
• US Department of Homeland Security
• Peter Belhumeur, Columbia U

Some university rankings

Projects

INVERSE PROBLEMS

Nuclear Imaging

Our objective in this project is to translate raw data from SPECT (Single Photon Emmission Computer Tomography) and PET (Positron Emmission Tomography) scans of cardiac system (heart) into diagnostic or prognostic information. We collaborate with cardiologists and a National laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley, CA) in this effort.

Muon Tomography

Muons are leptons (weakly interacting elementary particles) that are highly penetrating because of low charge (same as that of electron) but high momentum (about two hundred times heavier than electron). This makes them ideal probe for detecting materials with higher atomic numbers (Z). Steady flux of muons are produced by cosmic ray at upper atmosphere. This type of natural muons can be used as non-invasive probes for charting magma chambers in volcanos, hidden chambers in pyramids, and for detecting Uranium-like high-atmoic number materials in cargo containers. Our project is related to the last area. Our group collaborates with a High Energy Physics lab at FIT. We work on reconstruction algorithms for muon-tomography.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge Base on Science/Engineering Experiments

Science or engineering researchers produce copious amounts of data in their experiments. Often management of data becomes unwildy, even when each data set is not necessarily very large. Typically researchers keep track of data with directory hierarchy and file naming conventions. This becomes extremely cumbersome and expensive in terms of time needed to find out necessary data and resulting in repetition of experiments that may have been done before. A database for keeping track of metatdata (information on data) is essential. We are engaged in studying this aspect of experiment-related data management. We also addressed the issue of organizing knowledge behind a scientific or engineering experiment. The objective is to help scientist in answering queries about the experiment or data produced for the experiments. A long term goal is to understand how creativity can be computationally modeled in scientific works and how such a knowledge management system can debug an experimental set up or protocol. Our application focus is in bio-medical experiments and those in physics. Currently we are engaged in developing a meta-database management system for our collaborators at Lawrence Berkele National Lab.

COMPUTATIONAL MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

Protein Structure Comparison

A protein is a chain of amino acids that forms a complex structure in 3D. Each protein typically has the same structure and its function is often determined by this structure. Thus, proteins are classified according to their strucutures and comparing protein structures is a serious algorithmic business. We are engaged in studying and developing such structural comparison techniques.

Finished Project: SPATIO-TEMPORAL CONSTRAINT REASONING

Detecting inconsistency in time-interval network

A typical Constraint Reasoner checks for satisfiability in an input set of constraints. For a satisfiable set it may also generate a consistent scenario. However, traditionally nothing is done with an inconsistent set of information. Any user of such a system would often wish that the system were more helpful in debugging an inconsistet situation. We address this issue in relation to time-interval relations where constraints are qualitative (e.g., before/after) and disjunctive in nature.

Publications

Tomography

• “Imaging Myocardial Perfusion and Neuronal Activity In Rat Hearts Using Dynamic Pinhole SPECT; in Proc. of World Molecular Imaging Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 2012,
  Rostyslav Boutchko, Kathleen Brennan, Mahmoud Abdalah, Debasis Mitra, Ruud Ramakers, Freek Beekman, and Grant Gullberg.
• “The Importance of Regularization and Parameter Selection for Time Activity Curves Estimation in Dynamic SPECT; in Proc. of IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, Anaheim, CA, 2012,
  Mahmoud Abdalah, Rostyslav Boutchko, Debasis Mitra, Shi Chen, Grant T. Gullberg.
• “SinoCor: Inter-frame and Intra-frame motion correction tool; in Proc. of IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, Anaheim, CA, 2012,
  Daniel Eiland, Debasis Mitra, Mahmoud Abdalah, Rostyslav Butchko, and Grant T. Gullberg.
• “SinoCor: Motion Correction in SPECT,” in Proc. of SPIE Medical Imaging Conference,, San Diego, 2012,
  Debasis Mitra, Daniel Eiland, Mahmoud Abdalah, Rostyslav Boutchko, Grant T. Gullberg, and Norberto Schechtmann. [PDF]
• “Imaging of high-Z material for nuclear contraband detection with a minimal prototype of a muon tomography station based on GEM detectors,” "Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A",, 652 (2011) 16–20
  Kondo Gnanvo, Leonard V. Grosso III, Marcus Hohlman, Judson B. Locke, Amilkar Quintero, and Debasis Mitra.
• “GEANT4 Simulation of a Cosmic Ray Muon Tomography System with Micro-Pattern Gas Detectors for the Detection of High-Z Materials,” "Transactions on Nuclear Science", VOL. 56, NO. 3, JUNE 2009
  Marcus Hohlmann, Patrick Ford, Kondo Gnanvo, Jennifer Helsby, David Pena, Richard Hoch, and Debasis Mitra. [PDF]
• “Muon Tomography Algorithms for Nuclear Threat Detection,” "Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence" series, Springer Verlag, June 2009, (Proc. of the 22nd International Conference on Industrial, Engineering & Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems - IEA/AIE-2009)
  Richard Hoch, Debasis Mitra, Marcus Hohlman, and Kondo Gnanvo. [PDF]
• “Performance Expectations for a Tomography System Using Cosmic Ray Muons and Micro Pattern Gas Detectors for the Detection of Nuclear Contraband,” in Proc. of the IEEE Nucl. Sci. Symp. 2008, Dresden, Germany, pp. 1278-1284, IEEE Cat. CFP08NSS-CDR, ISBN 978-1-4244-2715-4, ISSN 1082-3654, e-Print: arXiv:0812.1007.
  Kondo Gnanvo, Patrick Ford, Jennifer Helsby, Richard Hoch, Debasis Mitra, and Marcus Hohlman. [PDF]
• “GEANT4 Simulation of a Cosmic Ray Muon Tomography System with Micro-Pattern Gas Detectors for the Detection of High-Z Materials,” IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., Vol.56, No.3, pp. 1356-1363, June 2009. (Proc. of the 2008 Symposium on Radiation Measurements and Application - SORMA West, Berkeley, June 2008,)
  Marcus Hohlmann, Patrick Ford, Kondo Gnanvo, Jennifer Helsby, David Pena, Richard Hoch, and Debasis Mitra. [PDF]

Spatio-temporal Reasoning

• “Explanation Generation over Temporal Interval Algebra,” in Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Representation and Reasoning: Trends and Future Directions.' Shyamanta M. Hazarika (Editor), Information Science Publishing, ISBN: 1616928689, August 1, 2010.
  Debasis Mitra and Florent Launay. [PDF]
• “Spatial-reasoning for Agents in Multiple Dimensions,” Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 774-791, August, 2002
  Debasis Mitra, and Gerard Ligozat. [PDF]
• “Explanation Generation over Temporal Interval Algebra,” in Technical Note of AAAI Spring Symposium on Bechmarking Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Systems, Stanford University, March 2009.
  Debasis Mitra. [PDF]
• “Qualitative Direction Calculi with Arbitrary Granularity,” in Pacific Rim Conference on AI (PRICAI), 2004
  Jochen Renz and Debasis Mitra. [PDF]

Computational Molecular Biology

• “Correlogram-based method for comparing biological sequences,” Debasis Mitra, Gandhali Samant and Kuntal Sengupta, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering & Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE 06), Annecy (France), LNAI Springer Verlag, 2006.

• "Digital Signal Processing in Predicting Secondary Structure of Proteins," Debasis Mitra and Michael Smith, Proceedings of the IEA/AIE-2004 conference, Springer Lecture Notes on AI.

Other areas

• “Three generations of research in computational creativity and beyond,” in Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium on Creative Intelligent Systems (AAAI Tech Report). (Eds.) Ventura, D., Maher, M. L., and Colton, S.; Stanford, California, March 2008.
  Debasis Mitra. [PDF]
• “Creativity in Knowledge-bases,” an abstract in NSF Workshop Notes on Creative IT at Washington D.C., January 2009.
  Debasis Mitra. [PDF]
• More to be posted soon