As I’ve written here before, I really cannot believe how poorly IEEE Xplore works. I have what the IEEE calls the IEEE Member Digital Library. This is a $35/month (!) service that allows you to download 25 (!!!) papers a month. So, I just tried to download a paper with the following result:

Seems pretty straightforward, right? IEEE Transactions, etc. However, I get this message:

“The content you requested is not included in your subscription.”

Hmmm… So I check to make sure my Member Digital Library is up to date, and I see that it expires April 30, 2008 (today’s date), so that should be fine. I call the IEEE and they confirm my suspicion that, since I’m logging in from work, and my institution (UNH) has a subscription, the IEEE system confuses me with UNH. SinceUNH’s subscription doesn’t allow access to this paper, I can’t access it.

Now, I did tell the very nice person on the phone (Virginia) that this is UNBELIEVABLE. This is the IEEE. And this is a $420/year service. And it’s work related, so I need to be able to access it from WORK. And most infuriatingly, it’s not even a consistent problem. I’ve downloaded plenty of papers from work using Xplore, while other times, like today, I was thwarted.

My grave concern was noted, and I received a promise that if I email Virginia the title of the article, I will receive a copy of it via email. I will also get credit for the papers I was not able to download this month on my next month’s allotment of papers (kind of like the minutes roll-over on a cell phone plan). Thanks Virginia. I hope you do tell management that they need to make fixing this service a priority.

Andrew Kun

Reading Engadget this morning, I stumbled across something rather interesting not only for myself, but for some of my colleagues here at Project54. Oszkar Palinko is heavily into research and experimentation using a glove for push to talk for the Project54 system. There is a local company called RallyPoint that has taken a glove that would be able to control a computer in a military application. One can read more about this glove here. This is what the glove looks like (via Technology Review):

In our system, instead of a weapon, the police officer would be holding on to the steering wheel of the cruiser. Perhaps we could get a hold of a couple of these gloves and see how well they work in our field of research.
-András Fekete

The new dilbert.com is pretty slow. However, if you just want the strip, you can go to www.dilbert.com/fast and read away. On the other hand, the new site has nice features, e.g. you can get code to embed strips in your own website. So here it goes:

Btw, I think those of you have a job in the “real world,” or have had one in the past (read: you’re not a student or a tenured professor), will agree with me that Dilbert is very educational (thus the “education” tag for this post). Perhaps the UNH ECE department should make it part of the curriculum to discuss some of the strips in preparation for an industrial career. I may bring this up at our next Industrial Advisory Board meeting

Andrew Kun

Last Saturday was the UNH ECE Department’s open house (in fact this was the UNH College of Engineering and Physical Sciences open house). The Project54 lab was one of the labs prospective ECE students toured. Our visitors got a chance to test drive the Project54 driving simulator (newly equipped with an eye tracker). We also talked about college life and how work in a research lab fits in with school - in fact Mark Taipan spoke on this subject from the perspective of a UNH ECE undergraduate student. Here’s a picture of Mark at the open house:

Turnout was great (around 100 people) and I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to meet prospective students and their families and friends. For more open house pictures from our lab click here. Finally, thanks to Alex, Mark, Oszkar and Zeljko for making the open house a success.

Andrew Kun

Each year at UNH, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Seniors join with other engineering disciplines in the Undergraduate Research Conference (URC). Here they present their research projects that they have been working on for months, some even up to a year. This year, the projects range from renewable energy to digital imaging processing to audio noise canceling.

One interesting project was “InterFACE”, which utilizes digital image processing to track the movement of a face. It then uses that data to recreate the motion in a robotic head sculpture. The pictures below depicts their system design.

Another project which incorporated electrical design was the “Tidal Power Generation”. This project was a combined effort of the Mechanical, Ocean and Electrical Engineering Departments. Here the idea of utilizing tidal action, and the related currents, to convert into electrical power by way of a turbine was investigated.

Above we see the display of the system, as well as a demonstration of the theory behind the project.

Overall, the conference was exciting and impressive, and the Seniors really worked hard to put forth their best efforts. For both myself and Mark Taipan, we were especially excited due to our recent award of a SURF Grant for the summer of 2008 to work on our project Kingsbury Location Awareness System (KLAS). We will be presenting our project at the URC next year, and so it was very helpful to see this year’s projects which will help us plan our presentation for next year.

Matthew Lape

The above title is the caption of a flier I’m starting to distribute around UNH campus these days. It is a call for potential subjects to participate in one of our experiments which will test a number of hypotheses. Among others, we will be testing how does our wireless glove work as a push-to-talk activator. Here’s an image of the actual scenario.

The subjects will be driving a curvy road, while transferring radio messages using the speech user interface. The experiment will last about 1.5 hours all together, including training and filling out forms. We pay our subjects 15 dollars in gift certificates (BestBuy or Target, free choice) upon completion of the task. Another $5 will be added, if the speech interactions are performed fully.

This is a great opportunity for people to make money while experiencing an advanced driving simulator and the Project54 interface, just like the ones deployed in police cruisers in NH.

So if you are interested to participate, please contact me by writing me an e-mail at oskar dot palinko at unh dot com.

Thanks!

Oszkar Palinko

A demo featuring Project54 datacasting software was displayed at the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters convention. Last year, Project54 collaborated with the New Hampshire Public Televisionin a study to evaluate the application of one version of the technology to law enforcement problems. At this year’s NAB convention, Harris Corporation demonstrated the Project54 software and a new version of the datacasting technology, called MPH. You can read more about the Project54 demo and MPH at the NAB convention here and here. For more on the Project54 work on datacasting, take a look at Professor Kent Chamberlin’s webpage. Professor Chamberlin is the leader of the datacasting team at UNH.

Brian Shepperd, NHPTV’s Director of Engineering and Information Technology, snapped some great photosof the demo at the convention. Here’s one of Brian with the laptop running the Project54 datacasting software.

Thanks for the photos Brian and, more importantly, thanks for collaborating with us!

Andrew Kun

Last week, Lieutenant Mark Liebl of the NH State Police started testing new versions of the Project54 navigation application and the Project54 handheld application.

Jon Oppelaar installed a USB GPS unit (GlobalSat BU-353) in Mark’s cruiser. This unit performs significantly better than an older GPS unit that was intalled several years ago, and it will enable Mark to test Jon’s navigation application. The application integrates Microsoft MapPoint into the Project54 environment. Here’s Jon (in the passenger seat) tweaking software settings in Mark’s cruiser during the installation of the USB GPS unit:

Andras Fekete worked on updating the software that allows a handheld unit to control the in-car devices (see picture below). Andras has already successfully deployed handheld technology in the Lee, NH police department, which we describe in a paper that will be presented at IE08. We’re now looking forward to getting Mark’s feedback about Project54 handheld software.

While Jon and Andras were installing new hardware and software, Mike Farrar talked to Mark about using the Project54 handheld computer’s imager, not only as a 2D barcode reader (e.g. for driver licenses), but as a camera. Mike is developing software that will allow officers to take pictures and tag them. Tagging can be done using voice commands, which should speed up data entry. It’s worth mentioning that Mike is developing his software using the Symbol MC-70, which comes with a cell modem. This opens new opportunities for getting data to officers in the field, especially in urban areas. In fact, the new version of the MC-70 also has a built-in GPS unit, again presenting interesting opportunities for law enforcement applications.

Thanks for testing all this harware and software Mark!

Andrew Kun

The Project54 lab will have three papers at the Intelligent Environments 2008 conference (to be held in Seattle, WA, July 21 and 22).

Oszkar Palinko and I have a short paper and a demo paper, both related to our research on how press-to-talk buttons influence driving performance when used with in-car speech user interfaces. The short paper describes Oszkar’s PTT glove and the demo will show his work on using pressure sensors mounted on a steering wheel as a PTT solution.

Andras Fekete and I have a short paper which describes the deployment of a Project54 handheld computer in the Lee, NH police department.

Great job Andras and Oszkar!

Andrew Kun

So a couple weeks ago, my colleague Ivan Elhart and I got to join Dr.Miller and Dr.Kun on a journey to Colorado for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) conference. What can I say, it was a fabulous time. We arrived on Wednesday at 11pm (local time), so we just had time to grab some really late dinner, then head to bed. Thursday morning from 9am-12pm was the demonstration time, where TWG members were to walk around to each exhibit and take notes. Well, towards the end, it was actually cut short which made last minute rush through presentations even more hectic.
All in all, I was pretty pleased with our booth. In the morning, we got up early, and set everything up. As you can see here, we were pretty eager to get started.

Here we are all set up with the Project25 demo on the left (presented by Dr.Miller and Ivan), and the handheld demo on the right (by Dr.Kun and myself).

Ivan took some pretty good pictures during the demonstration. The room was pretty small with all the equipment and people walking around I was glad I didn’t need to wear a formal jacket.

After the demo session, the 15 minute presentations of people’s demonstrations started. There were some pretty interesting projects explained in more detail. Dr.Kun’s presentation was the next day, so we got to sit around, relax and enjoy other’s presentations.
On Friday, Dr.Kun gave his talk on the research we do here. It was tough presenting effectively, because of the limit of 1 slide for the presentation which could be divided into 4 subsections. Thus effectively reducing the distance the slides could be clearly seen from, and in essence bringing down the usefulness of the slide itself.

Other than these small details, the conference was enjoyable. The food was good, the hotel rooms were nice. Boulder is a beautiful city, for those of you who have never been there, I strongly suggest you go. Ivan and I stayed an extra few days to enjoy some snowboarding in the mountains about 1hr from Boulder.
Overall, it was a good time, and it was very educational for (I think) all of us.

András Fekete & Ivan Elhart