The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK government’s main agency for funding research in these fields, has recently awarded around £300,000 as grant aid to a team of researchers from Informatics. The research team is led by Dr Rami Qahwaji and comprises Dr Hassan Ugail and Dr Stan Ipson from the School of Informatics and Dr. Jean Aboudarham from Meudon observatory (Paris) as visiting researcher. This three year project, which is scheduled to start in March 2008, will undertake fundamental research to better understand the Sun's features and their associated energetic activities. Such studies are fundamentally important to mankind because the extremes of space weather arising from significant solar activities affect communications, power systems and satellites, on which we are becoming more and more reliant.

The researchers aim to achieve a step change in our understanding of solar features and the behaviour of the Sun, in order to be able to improve the forecasting of disruptive solar activities. For this purpose the researchers have proposed to study this problem in full 3-dimensional detail for the first time. The proposed 3D models will provide physical and visual descriptions, which will be more complete than the current text-based descriptions and could require less computer storage than 2D image segmentations of the features of interest. In this research, through active collaboration with Meudon Paris observatory and gathering data from different satellites, the researchers will develop mathematical models and computer software resulting in a 3D catalogue of solar features such as sunspots, active regions and filaments.

The proposal submitted to the EPSRC by the researchers received outstanding reviews and was ranked in top position by the panel that considered the 65 proposals, thus indicating the quality of the research proposed. The principal investigator of this project Dr Rami Qahwaji said "We are extremely pleased that EPSRC has funded a project of this nature and moreover we are thrilled that the proposal received such a high rating. This gives us added confidence in the quality of the research work we are undertaking. This project will demonstrate a real convergence between 2D-based image processing, machine learning and 3D-based geometric modelling and we hope that the technology developed will be useful for other applications that may benefit from such an interface."

One of the other investigators in this project, Dr Hassan Ugail, who is also the Head of the Distributed Virtual Environments (DVE) research group said: "Projects of this nature are a testimony to the high quality multi-disciplinary research being undertaken within the DVE and Digital Imaging research groups and within the School of Informatics in general."