It is a crucible for ideas and experimentation, with participants from various educational backgrounds grouped around a screen showing visual displays of what cameras are seeing many miles away.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s project, dubbed CityBeat, brings Air Force personnel together with high school and college students, defense contractor employees and university researchers.

In this, the first summer of the project, they are “layering” visual transmissions from outdoor surveillance cameras at Ohio State University over a map of the university’s main campus in Columbus, tracking the movement of people and motor vehicles. In the process, they are learning not only about population and traffic flows, but about how to improve human comprehension of large amounts of monitoring information.

“There’s no shortage of data,” said Jeff Graley, program manager for CityBeat in the AFRL Human Effectiveness Directorate’s behavioral modeling branch. “But, what do you do with it? How do you manage it?”

The participants can control the overlay of visual information, consulting with each other and trying out different ways of learning the patterns of people movements on the OSU campus they are “watching” from a room in TecEdge, an organization that Air Force researchers helped start up to shape new ideas and encourage collaborations with outside organizations to advance new technologies. TecEdge, headed by former AFRL executive director Les McFawn, sits in a Riverside office complex within sight of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The CityBeat work could help AFRL researchers with a long-term military goal of developing “layered” sensing that pulls together information from cameras, radar and other sources. The goal would be to closely watch defined areas in the air and on ground and pick out suspicious people and their movements. But there also are potential civilian uses including aerial mapping and city planning, Graley said.

Companies that serve the government, including Science Applications International Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and Woolpert Inc., are among the corporate participants that have supplied mentors for the paid student interns, Graley said.

Woolpert’s involvement supports development of the mapping and Geographic Information System services it provides to customers, as well as allowing its personnel to work with young people who could become future employees, said Steve Phipps, senior vice president and director of federal programs for the Dayton-based company.

The summer portion of the year-round research has proved an ideal forum for students in computer science, psychology, chemistry and other studies to learn to work collaboratively — and with companies that might someday offer them jobs.

“Just seeing how people from different fields work together,” said Deepak Chona, who graduated from Beavercreek High School in June and is headed to Vanderbilt University, said in summarizing the experience. “This would benefit anybody.”

“We learn something new every day,” said Kelcey McKinney, of Englewood, who is going into her sophomore year at Ohio State. “We learn from each other.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@coxohio.com.