Terry Wardrop of St. Paul’s School in Concord, who teaches Artificial Intelligence as part of the school’s Advanced Studies Program, brought his class for a visit to the Project54 lab. Terry’s students experimented with the Project54 system in our Labcar and took a spin in the Project54 driving simulator. Several of us participated in hosting them, including Nathan Purmort, who is an alumnus of St. Paul’s ASP. Here are a couple of pictures from the visit, taken by Brittany Clifford. In this photo, Zeljko Medenica, Project54 PhD student, shares a laugh with ASP students:

In this photo, ASP students are operating the lights and siren of the Labcar:

As the pictures show, we all had a good time.

Andrew Kun

Datacasting is a technology Project54 is trying to take advantage of for communications between police headquarters and officers in the field. We’ve completed a field study on datacasting and have found that problems with signal reception sometimes happen during rain events. We’ve set up a Rooftop Rain Event Logging Station to further explore what is going on.

Three antennas were placed on the roof of Kingsbury to log statistics of the datacasting signal. In particular, we are interested in collecting signal-to-noise ratio and signal strength variations over time, especially during rain events. Here is what the antenna setup looks like:

The small omni-directional antennas mounted on aluminum ground planes simulate the receiver installation we installed on vehicles. This antenna is the most susceptible to signal degradation because it receives more multi-path interference, from many different directions, confusing our receiver. This is a picture of the receiver on the aluminum plane:

We also have two directional antennas that face opposite directions. The first, facing the NHPTV DTV transmitter, monitors the signal statistics for a base line. The second, facing away from the transmitter, measures the backscattered signal level, which has been shown to affect our omni-directional antenna. Here they are:

You can read more on our datacasting work in this paper. Two more papers will appear shortly and you will be able to find them here.

Benjamin McMahon

I stumbled across an interesting video this past week which showcases some very interesting image mapping and assembly techniques. The research was done by Microsoft and presented at the TED conference in California. To avoid retelling the whole story, here is a link to the video of the conference presentation.

One of the products the speaker mentions is Photosynth and the fact that there is an online demo available. Once you watch the video, definitely take a look at the demo.

I can see the applications of this technology to be enormous. This reminds me a lot of what Google is trying to achieve with their Street View add-in for Google Maps.

This video introduces a radio interoperability solution based on off-the-shelf devices which were integrated into Project54. As a proof of concept, the Motorola and E.F. Johnson radio devices were used to test the solution. Three simple tests are presented in this video to demonstrate the solution’s capability to patch different radio types in the system. The first and second tests only check that the received and transmitted signals are correct. The third test demonstrates the successful patching of signals between radios, and it also shows the solution’s ability to monitor conversations on the command PC.

For more information on a precursor of this system you can read this Project54 technical report. 

Ivan Elhart

It was great to showcase my work at Pervasive 2007, but it was even better being able to see the work that others have done in the field. An example of a paper that I found really interesting was given the best conference paper award and was entitled Shake well before use: Authentication based on Accelerometer Data. The paper, written by Rene Mayrhofer and Hans Gellersen of Lancaster University UK, presented a very simple and elegant solution for authenticating small blue tooth devices. Normally for private key encryption to occur it is necessary to enter in a key/password into each device. An example of this is WEP encryption. However, just like with WEP it can be very cumbersome to enter in these private keys. The paper suggested a method of generating private keys based on accelerometer data generated when a user shakes the two devices in their hand. In a real life application you can imagine picking up a cell phone and Bluetooth headset, giving them a quick shake, and immediately begin using them without any additional configuration. I was impressed at how great an idea this was and how effectively it was researched and presented at the conference.

There several other papers that others may want to check out. If you go to the papers section of the Pervasive website, you can check out for yourself what was presented. Googling the titles will sometimes bring up a PDF version that you can read, or for those of you at UNH, I have the conference proceedings that anybody is welcome to borrow.

Probably my favorite part of my trip to Toronto was the exposure to other cultures. It is not that Toronto is very different from American cities like Boston, but that the conference brought together people from around the globe. Beyond hearing the speakers from other countries, I had the opportunity to talk to people from Germany, Norway, Japan, Denmark, and Scotland as well as other regions of the United States such as New Mexico and Colorado. It was great to hear their views of my work and country, and it was great to learn about their work and countries as well.

Toronto also claims to be a multicultural city and one way I got to experience this was through food. I was happy to be able to brush up on my chopsticks skills (which were/are in dire need of practice) as I went to Japanese sushi, Chinese/Thai fusion, and Dim Sum Chinese restaurants. I also tasted some of the local flavor at a great French/Québécoise restaurant, and visited a small vineyard to taste some wine, including ice wine.

There isn’t much else to say about my experience of other cultures simply because it is such a subjective experience. However, due to this fact I really encourage anyone that travels to try to experience as much of other cultures as possible. This may involve making yourself uncomfortable, such as trying new foods or struggling with language barriers, but it is worth it. I actually have a very introverted personality. For those who are unfamiliar with this term, it doesn’t mean that I am uncomfortable in social situations or even that I dislike talking with people, but rather that it takes a great deal of energy for me to socialize. My point being that it would have been much easier for me to retreat to my hotel room and watch TV. However, I didn’t want the opportunity to pass me by and I am glad that I didn’t.

The keynote speaker at Pervasive 2007 was Adam Greenfield. Adam spoke about his first book called “Everyware.” In this book Adam explores how ubiquitous/pervasive computing will change our lives and makes recommendations on how to design pervasive/ubiquitous systems so that they do not clash with the social norms we live by. Here is a picture of Adam Greenfield giving the keynote speech (the photo was taken by Matthias Kranz):

“Everyware” is available in electronic form through the UNH library. To get an idea about its contents read this interview with Adam Greenfield. For more information on Adam’s work you can also take a look at Adam’s blog.

Andrew Kun

Here is the video of Jacob LeBlanc’s presentation at the Pervasive 2007 One Minute Madness. If you’re not familiar with the presentation format, here is what happens. The conference has a separate session for poster, video and demonstartion presentations. These three types of contributions are presented in parallel, each at its own station. The One Minute Madness session precedes the poster/video/demo session. In it, one author for each accepted poster, video and demonstration is alloted a one minute slot to pitch his or her contribution to the attendees. The idea is that attendees then select contributions to explore in more detail during the poster/video/demo session. The one minute limit is strictly enforced (this year it was enforced with a hockey stick). At Pervasive 2007 around 30 posters, demos and videos were presented so we had about 30 one-minute presentations in a row. Thus the name one-minute madness.

Btw, I’m sure Jacob will tell you that it takes some preparation to do well at an event like this. It also takes good nerves - look at the audience, it was pretty packed, so you have to be ready to speak in front of a crowd.

Andrew Kun