Vehicle telematics is the use of computing, sensing and telecommunication technologies to provide services in an automotive environment. Vehicle telematics service categories include navigation, remote diagnostics, fleet management, safety, information access, context awareness and mobile commerce. Supporting these services requires unique hardware and software architectures. Additionally, issues such as privacy, data security and human factors design must be considered in the implementation of vehicle telematics. The purpose of this paper is to provide a partial review of the extensive body of research relating to this field.

Project54 is involved in implementing telematics services supporting public safety operations. Ongoing research efforts aim to provide telematics services such as navigation, fleet management, remote diagnostics, information access and context awareness to police officers in the field.

Here is the paper:

I. Cassias, A.L. Kun, “Vehicle Telematics: A Literature Review”, Technical Report, ECE.P54.2007.9, University of New Hampshire, Project54, 2007

Ian Cassias

Hello readers!

So while working on my Neural Networks homework, I stumbled across an interesting problem when using the surf command in Matlab. Try running the following commands:

Xi = -2 + [0:20]*0.2;
Xj = -2 + [0:20]*0.2;
X = zeros(2,size(Xi,2)*size(Xj,2));
for i = 1:size(Xi,2)
n = (i-1) * size(Xj,2);
for j = 1:size(Xj,2)
X(:,n + j) = [Xi(i); Xj(j)];
end
end
Y = -1 + double((X(1,:).^2 + X(2,:).^2)
surf(Xi,Xj,reshape(Y,size(Xi,2),size(Xj,2)))

Running this on two different machines produces different graphs:
vs

The first image is the correct output. Note how in the second image, the top-right corner of the cylinder is chopped off. Check your Matlab and see what it outputs. Both of these images were done using Matlab 2007a. If you have a version that doesn’t output the correct graphs, a remedy to the problem is to go to “Edit”->”Copy Figure”, it will either rerender the image on the screen, or at worst put the correct image into the copy buffer.

Fekete András

On October 9th, i hosted a Halo 3 party in Kingsbury Hall at UNH. There was a turn out of 30+ students. I gave a quick presentation about Microsoft new XNA technology which allows hobbyists to create video games for XP/Vista and for the first time ever the Xbox360 platform. XNA is a managed graphics framework that allows a programmer to jump right into writing their video game. I will be giving a in depth walk presentation about XNA where i will give a walk through some code and a demonstration on how to get starting writing video games. This talk date is TBA ( sometime in November).

Jon Oppelaar

As part of being a MSP( Microsoft Student Partner) i was able to get grants for the IEEE, Project54 and the ECE department at the University of New Hampshire. The MSDNAA is free for three years and gives access to all students and faculty to almost all of Microsoft products except for Word. Some thats included are Visual Studio, Visio, Vista and XP. MSDNAA freely accessible for anyone using it for eduaction or research purposes. If there are any other educational departments or research groups who would like to try MSDNAA for free for three years please contact me.

Jon Oppelaar

Hello eceblogger readers!

My name is Mark Taipan, an undergraduate student here at Project54, http://project54.unh.edu/, and for the past few months, my colleague Matthew Lape and I have been working on creating a Project54 application that utilizes an XML script to define its GUI. Normally with Project54 application GUIs, one would have to define the user interface exclusively with C++. While this method works, it does have its drawbacks when developing an application for Project54. XML defined GUI scripts solve these problems and also present some advantages over the “older style” of developing Project54 application GUIs.

Markup languages such as XML, www.xml.com, identify structures within documents. These structures indicate the role of the content (such as text, images) within the document. While XML can be used for many different purposes such as building websites or Microsoft using it with the new file formats for Office 2007, Project54 utilizes XML as a way to define a GUI using a set of its own Project54 XML elements.

Prior to using XML to define a Project54 GUI, Project54 developers had to implement the GUI within the application code. Like changing functionality to the application, if a component of the GUI needed to change, the developer would have to rebuild the .dll. While this may not be a problem during the development phase of the application, once this application has been released the application GUI’s appearance and functionality could not be changed until the next Project54 release. However, with the new XML GUI framework, users now can change the GUI appearance and to an extent, the functionality without having the need to rebuild the .dll. Thus, the interface to the Project54 application can be custom-tailored to fit a user’s needs.

To learn more about utilizing XML elements in Project54, refer to the following technical papers:

• XML Elements for Defining GUI Screens for Project54 Applications
• GUI Interface for Project54 Applications Using XML Defined GUI Screens
• Developing Project54 Applications that Utilize the XML GUI Interface
• XML Elements for Defining Virtual Application Screens for the Project54 MultiApp Application

Below is an example of the differences between developing a Project54 GUI in XML and C++. The first image is a small part of the GUI to a radar application depicting a set of range setting status lights. The next two sections are the equivalent code in C++ and XML used to define these status lights for the GUI. Functionality is not implemented with just this code, but rather this code creates the objects on the screen according to the colors, text, and positions defined.

Project54 Radar Application GUI - Range Status Lights

C++ GUI Code

static int hsl_range_1;
static int hsl_range_2;
static int hsl_range_3;
static int hsl_range_4;
static int hsl_range_5;

createStatuslightControl(hwRadGUI, 31, 65, L”1″, &hsl_range_1);
createStatuslightControl(hwRadGUI, 39, 65, L”2″, &hsl_range_2);
createStatuslightControl(hwRadGUI, 47, 65, L”3″, &hsl_range_3);
createStatuslightControl(hwRadGUI, 55, 65, L”4″, &hsl_range_4);
createStatuslightControl(hwRadGUI, 63, 65, L”5″, &hsl_range_5);

setSLColors(hwRadGUI, hsl_range_1, GREEN, GRAY, BLACK);
setSLColors(hwRadGUI, hsl_range_2, GREEN, GRAY, BLACK);
setSLColors(hwRadGUI, hsl_range_3, GREEN, GRAY, BLACK);
setSLColors(hwRadGUI, hsl_range_4, GREEN, GRAY, BLACK);
setSLColors(hwRadGUI, hsl_range_5, GREEN, GRAY, BLACK);

XML GUI Code

<device x=”0″ y=”0″ id=”range”>
<lightset x=”31″ y=”65″ id=”range_statusLights”>
<light x=”0″ y=”0″>
<text>1</text><textcolor>BLACK</textcolor>
<oncolor>GREEN</oncolor><offcolor>GRAY</offcolor>
</light>
<light x=”8″ y=”0″>
<text>2</text><textcolor>BLACK</textcolor>
<oncolor>GREEN</oncolor><offcolor>GRAY</offcolor>
</light>
<light x=”16″ y=”0″>
<text>3</text><textcolor>BLACK</textcolor>
<oncolor>GREEN</oncolor><offcolor>GRAY</offcolor>
</light>
<light x=”24″ y=”0″>
<text>4</text><textcolor>BLACK</textcolor>
<oncolor>GREEN</oncolor><offcolor>GRAY</offcolor>
</light>
<light x=”32″ y=”0″>
<text>5</text><textcolor>BLACK</textcolor>
<oncolor>GREEN</oncolor><offcolor>GRAY</offcolor>
</light>
</lightset>
</device>

Mark Taipan

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Ralph Cicerone is the president of the National Academy of Sciences. On Friday, October 19, 2007, he was at UNH talking about global climate change and its human causes. Here is a picture from the talk:

The webcast of this excellent hour-long talk will be available (along with the slides) here. In this post I wanted to address only one of Dr. Cicerone’s points. He discussed the idea some people advance, that we don’t need to combat global climate change since there may be winners as well as losers, and perhaps we (however that is defined) will actually be winners. Dr. Cicerone disagreed, pointing out that we do not know what the outcome of unchecked climate change would be, thus it’s hard to predict who may benefit. We do know however, that significant disruptions would result from it. One simple example: due to rising ocean water levels parts of many coastal population centers would end up under water. For me the takehome message was this: claiming that inaction is a reasonable course of action, based on predictions of supposed winning outcomes for some regions or species, is irresponsible at best.

Andrew Kun

A company called Dash has come out with a car GPS unit equipped with GPS,WiFi, and cellular communications. With these features a network is formed from all the Dash units and live traffic information is shared. In addition to live traffic data, they have database of historic traffic patterns for metropolitan areas. This sounds great. However, for this to really useful lots of cars in your course would need their product. It seems that some standard should be created( if not already) so other units besides Dash can benefit and thus create a larger , more accurate and more useful traffic sharing network.

Jon Oppelaar

2008 model year Ford cars will have an interesting option: voice activation for mobile phones and digital music players. Ford calls this option Sync and has a website to promote it. Check out the video on the bottom right to get a feel for Sync.

The technology uses Microsoft’s speech recognition software (just like we do with Project54). The idea is to provide pretty powerful functionality to control phones and music players. Music players are actually hard to control since when you design the interaction you don’t know what music will be on the player (e.g. names of bands and songs, especially future ones), and you don’t know how they may be pronounced. The latter point needs to be carefully addressed even for known artists/albums/songs/etc, if you want to sell the technology in multiple countries where different languages are used (e.g. France and Germany). After all, the French and the Germans pronounce U2 differently from each other.

I’m looking forward to testing this speech interface out soon. I guess I should head over to a Ford dealership!

Andrew Kun

It appears there may be a step forward in public safety communications, or at least another plan. There have not yet been many details published about the plan, but I suspect it will be interesting to keep an eye on this one. See an article about it here.

Benjamin McMahon