Search and Discovery

The non-destructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) communities are traditionally divided over a local approach focused on components, versus a global approach to behavior at the level of entire systems. These approaches can be complementary, and IGERT-TEECH Trainees are exposed to a broad range of these sensing technologies to monitor the health of cultural assets such as historic buildings and statues. Because the local and global approaches are complementary in nature, IGERT-TEECH is exploiting both classes of techniques to provide the most comprehensive information on the state of health of an artifact while limiting the number of sensing points.
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Diagnostic Imaging

In the world of medicine, diagnostic imaging yields images of the human body prior to any clinical procedure to reveal, diagnose or examine disease. IGERT-TEECH researchers apply this approach in the form of a digital clinical chart for works of art or structures, feeding high spatial- and temporal-resolution sensor data from multispectral imaging systems into databases and cyberinfrastructures with significantly higher storage and networking demands compared to any previous needs in the field of cultural heritage. Since raw data by itself is frequently of limited value, researchers envision automated pipelines for data processing into higher-order data products to represent the digital clinical chart.
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Analytical Diagnostics

A core competency for IGERT-TEECH Trainees and Investigators is the use of analytical techniques (physical, chemical or structural) to characterize an artifact. Whenever possible, the project approach is nondestructive and noninvasive, given the importance and value of cultural assets, so Trainees will work on portable diagnostic systems and relatively new scanning techniques that permit characterization of the object’s chemistry without damaging it. This approach includes development of novel spectroscopic methods that can be delivered in situ via portable instrumentation.
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Cultural Analytics

To cope with the complexity and detail of data gathered via multispectral imaging and analytical diagnostics, researchers work on new cultural analytics tools and infrastructure to help researchers collaboratively view, interrogate, correlate and manipulate data at a wide range of scales and resolutions. To accomplish this, we are enabling data exploration, hypothesis generation and data analysis by means of interactive visual data interrogation. IGERT-TEECH Trainees also participate in the development of appropriate visual-analytic infrastructure and tools that make possible rapid visual comparison of theory with experimental data.
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