University of Calgary professor receives award for work on 3D digital mapping system

A University of Calgary computer science professor is being recognized for creating a 3D digital mapping system.

A University of Calgary computer science professor has been recognized for his work by Mitacs, an organization that supports industry and academic collaboration.

Faramarz Samavati was awarded Mitacs’ Innovation Award for Outstanding Research Leadership for his work in creating a 3D digital mapping system.

Samavati has been working on the project for 15 years.

“It is a great honor to receive that, and also I am proud of the team that I have built (and) the mentorship and supervision of many graduate students and interns because this innovation is kind of a collective achievement,” he said.

Samavati says most digital mapping applications rely on a “flat Earth,” and that can distort continents, making some larger or smaller than what their actual size is.

“Digital maps like Google Maps, they always have distortions,” he said.

“For example, Greenland on the map looks much bigger than Brazil, but in reality it is smaller. When we take this on the 3D form, on the curved earth, we can see the right size of Greenland versus Brazil, and we can avoid this kind of distortion.”

Samavati and his graduate students created a Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) in partnership with Calgary-based software company Vivid Theory that is like a large quilt draped over the globe, dividing the surface of the earth into small cells.

“We assigned a unique code (to these cells) and those codes are going to be used in kind of storing the information about that region, like a postal code,” he said.

“Where you (can pinpoint) the exact region of your postal code, it can create a much more efficient system for processing a lot of data related to Earth, because this distortion needs to be handled somehow, and if we have a system by its nature that can handle the global curve, (we) can be much better positioned for solving that problem.”

Lakin Wecker, a graduate student, says many DGGSs aim to reduce distortion to be more accurate, and they give up speed as a result.

The system the team developed creates an enormous amount of data, so Wecker was tasked with accessing it quicker because if it isn’t fast, it won’t be used by industry or consumers.

He’s measuring speed not in seconds but nanoseconds, where one second equals one billion nanoseconds.

“We were measuring things that we can do 250 million times a second, seeing if there were potentially smaller ways to reduce that from 20 nanoseconds down to 10 nanoseconds,” he said.

“Although that seems like a pointless endeavour for most people, the size of data that humanity is producing about the Earth is so large that we have billions and trillions of records, and suddenly that becomes super relevant, because if you save that extra few nanoseconds per record and you do it 300 billion times, now it’s actually a realistic savings.”

Samavati established a partnership with a company through the University Innovation Office.

BigGeo is a Calgary-based startup building the Spatial Cloud—a privacy-secure, agentic-intelligent cloud computing system for location-based data.

“BigGeo is at the forefront of the $1-trillion spatial economy,” said Brent Lane, CEO.

“Spatial data represents 80 per cent of all the data that exists on Earth, and so it’s become a major part of the future of AI and how we are existing in the world today.”

Lane says AI can use Samavati’s 3D mapping system to give its users quicker, more accurate information.

“If you’re using your ChatGPT interface, you could use our connected technology to answer questions about what’s the best place to pick up your laundry on the way home from your kid’s soccer practice,” he said.

“We live in a world where being able to access information fast, there’s value there in a number of different ways.”

Mitacs says its Innovation Award for Outstanding Research Leadership is presented to a post-secondary supervisor with an exemplary record of developing collaborations with business partners, providing valuable research and training experiences to their interns and utilizing Mitacs funding to initiate impactful projects.

Mitacs programs are supported by funding from the Government of Canada, as well as provincial and territorial governments across the country.

Samavati says not only does his system digitize the surface of the earth, but also what’s beneath it and above it.

He says there’s still work to do on the project.

“My vision is to have kind of a living digital twin of the Earth, with which we can understand our planet in a better, totally different way and build tools (for occurrences) that you can’t always understand that are happening in our planet—things like predicting disasters, which is very important,” he said.

You can learn more about BigGeo at https://biggeo.com/.