Prof. Neda Pekaric-Nad was recognized for her service to the UNH ECE Department at the department’s annual retreat on May 9, 2007. Prof. Pekaric-Nad has spent five and a half years working in our department and has recently returned to the University of Novi Sad in the former Yugoslavia. In the photo below she shares some cake with UNH ECE Department chair, Prof. John LaCourse, at the department retreat.

Our department has benefited greatly from the work of Prof. Pekaric-Nad. She has taught a variety of courses (e.g. a new power engineering course), she has invited visitors to our department to give talks, and she has helped us (and me personally) by recruiting graduate students from the University of Novi Sad. I would like to wish her the best in her future endeavors and I’m looking forward to continued collaboration with her.

Andrew Kun

Hi, my name is Jacob LeBlanc and for those of you who don’t know I’m a Software Engineer with Project54. As Dr. Kun mentioned below, I presented a Late Breaking Results paper and poster at this year’s Pervasive Computing Conference in Toronto. In this post, I will talk about the conference experience regarding my own presentation, but look for follow up posts about my thoughts on the other papers at the conference as well as the experience of travelling to and staying in a multicultural city like Toronto.

This was the first computing conference that I have attended and in general it was a great experience. I was given only 60 seconds to give a speech aimed at convincing others to view my poster and read my paper, and given that the time limit was enforced with a hockey stick, I wanted to be sure I finished with time to spare. One thing I found in preparing for this presentation is that it is best to focus on a few key points instead of trying to cover everything. This may seem obvious given the time limit, but I think this also applies to much longer presentations. The longer talks given by other authors that I found to be the most engaging were perhaps not the least dense, but were certainly carefully and logically laid out. So my advice from a personal preference standpoint is to focus on the most important or most interesting aspects of what you want to say. If you do a good enough job then others will seek more information by reading your paper or better yet, they will come talk to you. In my speech I only had time to state the basic research problem and proposed solution. This made it easy to prepare for, but a bit nerve racking as I couldn’t afford to forget anything. I practiced enough where I didn’t forget anything, and it seemed to go well enough.

After I got through my 60 seconds, there was a three hour viewing session where I was given the opportunity to show off my poster, answer questions, and gain insight into what others thought about the work I had done. I received a lot of positive feedback and was encouraged by others to continue this work and to conduct some user studies. One great thing about talking with people from other fields is that it is a reminder that we don’t operate in a bubble. After spending a lot of time focusing on direct stakeholders it is easy to forget that there is a larger community that can benefit from the work that we do.

Jacob LeBlanc and myself are at Pervasive 2007 in Toronto, Canada. On Monday Jacob presented his poster on wireless updates for police cruisers. The paper talks about the Project54 system that will allow us to remotely update in-car data in police cruisers and retrieve data from them. The system uses Wi-Fi hot spots and is being tested by Jacob and others at Project54. Here is a picture of Jacob discussing his poster with conference attendees:

Tuesday morning included very interesting talks, one by Jeremiah Scholl of Norwegian Center for Telemedicine. Jeremiah talked about human-human communication between doctors in hospitals. As I’m writing this we’re having lunch with Jeremiah and a couple of other researchers.

Andrew Kun