Cool video (although some people are not impressed):

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Andrew Kun

Check out Cubit, the open source multitouch display by NOR_/D, in this video:

Very cool! You can now place an advance order for TouchKit, the development version of Cubit.

Here’s a good article with more details on this display and other similar efforts. Want more pictures? Click here. I tried to search Flickr for some customer-generated pictures (that is pictures of what the TouchKit product may look like and how people are using it), but no luck yet.

Andrew Kun

On Tuesday, Ian Cassias defended his MS thesis. Ian worked in the field of telematics and he was interested in three topics: remote diagnostics of vehicles, vehicle fleet management and traffic monitoring.

My favorite part of Ian’s thesis is his work on traffic monitoring. Ian looked at how the police radar could be used to estimate traffic volume for a given segment of road and how fast the traffic is moving. In order to do this, Ian looked at the number of car velocity readings the radar reports, and the actual values reported. From these numbers he attempted to characterize road conditions along two axes: the slow-fast axis and the light traffic-heavy traffic axis. Ian’s pilot study shows that the police radar could very well be used to monitor traffic. If we can further develop this system we could make police cruisers into a set of roaming traffic probes. Data from the cruisers could be used for traffic prediction and, if wireless communication is available, for real-time traffic reports.

Nice work Ian!

Andrew Kun

My colleague Andras Fekete and I had a chance to visit the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver, on our journey with Dr. Miller and Dr. Kun to Colorado for the National Institute of Justice conference. The museum started as the private collection of Mr. J. D. Forney with only a few cars. Today, it is a unique historical collection of over 500 exhibits including antique cars, locomotives, buggies, unicycles, bicycles, motorcycles, rare, exotic, and concept vehicles. The most famous exhibits are: Amelia Earhart’s “Gold Bug” Kissel, Prince Aly Khan’s Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, the Brewster with a heart-shaped radiator, the Hispano Suiza, the Forney Locomotive, and the 4005 Big Boy – the world’s largest steam locomotive (how big it is you can see in the picture below). We were lucky to meet an engineer who had been operating one of the Big Boys and who, in the museum, shared his experience and passion about locomotives with us. The Big Boy was designed to operate at 80 mph with total weight of 1,189,500lb and producing a maximum of 6,290 horsepower. It is really impressive. Only 25 Big Boys were built ever, between 1941 and 1944, and only 8 of them still remain.

The only car in the museum in which we could sit in was the Model T. The model T was the first car produced on an assembly line designed by Ford which was the beginning of the automotive revolution which started in 1908. The Model T had economy of 13 to 21 mpg, 20.2 horsepower, and maximum speed of 40 to 45 mph. In 1927, when the last Model T was built, the Ford Motor Company was producing an automobile every 24 seconds. In the period between 1908 and 1927, more than 15 million Model T cars were built which “put America on wheels”. In the picture below, my colleague Andras and I are enjoying the Model T and for a moment pretending that we are at the beginning of the 20th century.

The museum is really impressive with its huge and unique historical collection of vehicles of all kinds. It is a perfect place to visit for all fans of cars and history. We had a pleasant time and all custodians were more than polite. You can find more pictures from the museum here.

Ivan Elhart & Andras Fekete

Last week, May 12-13, the IEEE held a conference on Homeland Security technologies in Waltham, MA. Eric Ramsey, a former Project54 employee, was presenting a paper related to his master’s thesis on the development of a Project25 data radio basestation. I went down to accompany him for the 2nd day of the conference and view some of the other presentations on Homeland Security technologies.

During the opening talks of the day, it was immediately apparent that this was not a gritty engineering conference, but instead more of an business-oriented affair, discussing the industry that has grown up around Homeland Security rather than the gory details of the technologies themselves. This put Eric’s presentation a little out of place as it was a very detailed engineering breakdown of his work, but it didn’t seem like he lost anyone as people asked intelligent questions and were more than willing to discuss the topic with us afterward!

Here is Eric presenting:

The presentations which particularly interested Eric and I, since we are both involved (or were at one point, in the case of Eric) in the Project25 basestation project at Project54, were those concerning radio interoperability. We saw many different takes on how to solve the problem of facilitating better bandwith and channel usage, allocation, and communication in general between public safety organizations. From creative (in terms of today’s standards) radio policy management to satellite-based communications (rather than LMR), to shifting bandwidth to the 700MHz band (formerly occupied by analog television) to improving the radios themselves, there are a lot of little pieces to the puzzle! We even saw a presentation from a fellow NIJ COMTEC fundee, Nancy Jesuale.

On a side note, one of the professors here at the UNH ECE Department, Andrzej Rucinski, was co-chair of a session at the conference. Unfortunately, the session ran at the same time as Eric’s presentation, so we were unable to head over and say “hi”.

The conference was a great experience - I hadn’t been to one since the Network Security conference I attended a few years back in Boston, and this one was just as interesting. It’s always nice to take a step back from your own work and check out what other people in the field are doing! Radio interoperability is a huge undertaking, and it’s great to see so many smart people working on the problem!

Last week Pasha Melnyk defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Biologically inspired composite image sensor for deep field target tracking.”

Pasha was interested in the problem of deep field tracking, or more specifically, he was interested in using image sensors to track objects from when they are very far from the observer all the way into the near field, when they are close to the observer. Pasha proposed a system in which multiple image sensors of different focal lengths create a composite image sensor that can achieve this type of tracking. However, he then ran into the problem of how to recognize and track objects in this new composite image. Will objects have different characteristics as they move through space and get picked up by different parts of the composite sensor? Pasha found an elegant solution to this problem. He described the composite image by nesting the log polar representations of individual cameras. One result is that objects do not significantly change shape as they are tracked by the multiple cameras.

Pasha successfully applied his idea to the problem of vehicle tracking. He was able to track vehicles from several hundred meters and then capture license plates as the vehicles drove by. The videos of this were really impressive.

Great job Pasha (and Rich Messner, Pasha’s advisor).

Andrew Kun

Ray Kurzweil is well known for his work on optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition. Recently, he was invited by the National Academy of Engineering to be part of a committee charged with outlining the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. Last Thursday, Ray gave a talk on this subject at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, and four of my students and I went to hear him speak.

A good portion of the 2 hour talk was devoted to two ideas. One is that careful analysis of data can allow you to predict the growth of particular technologies. The second is that the growth of most, if not all, (successful) technologies is exponential. E.g., the number of Internet hosts has risen exponentially over the years (see slide below). Note that the slide tells us that this trend wasn’t perceptibly altered by the boom and bust of the dot-coms. Ray’s take on this: Wall Street didn’t realize that the Internet was growing exponentially, extrapolated the seemingly linear growth of the early exponential curve and came to the wrong conclusion that the Internet is not a viable place to make money.

The rest of the talk was devoted to several technologies that in Ray’s opinion will make a difference in the next 20-25 years (note that he prefers to talk about this shorter time horizon rather than the next century). One set of technologies is related to biology. To frame this discussion, it’s worth taking in this quote:

“As remarkable as biology is, it’s full of downsides, and needs to be improved upon.”

That’s the spirit! So how will we do this? Well, in Ray’s opinion, our computational powers are rising fast enough that by 2029 we’ll have computers that will be able to pass the Turing test (btw, this will be OK, we’ll use them to extend our own abilities and the whole thing will not result in some takeover by the machines). Our abilities to simulate biological processes are already very powerful, and will only get more powerful, which in turn will allow us to engineer new cures rapidly. We’re in the process of developing miniature robots to be deployed in our bodies to fight disease and generally make us stronger (e.g. provide us with an extra boost of oxygen). And we also need to develop a way to quickly respond to any viral outbreak (man-made or natural).

Ray also predicted that ubicomp will play a central role in our future, since we’ll be “online all the time with augmented reality.” This was fun to hear for my students and me, since our Project54 research relies heavily on the ubicomp field. And, talking about students, the topic of education also came up. Ray pointed out that “passion, desire and skill to learn is what we nan give our students.” Very well put.

Overall, the talk was inspirational. Now I want to read this book! Thanks Ray,

Andrew Kun

p.s. See more pictures from the event here - thanks Ivan!

The UNH ECE department (http://www.ece.unh.edu) introduced a non-thesis option for the Masters program and I am excited to be one of the first students to take advantage of this option. The non-thesis option replaces the thesis with two 900-level courses, a technical paper, and two technical presentations. The benefit of this option is that it allows the opportunity for students to take additional courses, therefore being exposed to a wider range of material. The two additional courses I was able to take were Non-Linear controls with Professor Thein and Speech Signal Processing with Professor Kun, both courses were great.

The full graduation requirements for the UNH ECE Masters Program are:
Thesis Option:
- 24 credit hours of graduate course work, with at least 12 of those credit hours earned in 900-level courses
- 2 credit hours of ECE900 seminars
- 6 credits of thesis work
Non-Thesis Option:
- 30 credit hours of graduate course work, with at least 18 of those credit hours earned in 900-level courses
- 2 credits hours of EEC900 seminars
- 2 technical presentations
- 1 technical paper

David Estes

Hello ecebloggers,

Today, Monday 05/12/2008 was the last day of the student project presentations and the day of LPC (Linear Predictive Coding). The session chair was Nate Bourgoine (picture below).

After a little confusion in the beginning, Ivan Elhart (in the picture below), CATlab member, opened today’s presentations with Project 25 MATLAB implementation of compression. He explained the standard he tried to implement for speech compression and he compared his results with Praat.

Yuanli Wang (picture below), who we know as the session chair for Wednesday 05/07/2008, used LPC for compression and synthesis of speech. We had a nice demo where we heard his results.

After Yuanli, another member of CATlab presented. Oszkar Palinko (picture below), presented his work on a wireless microphone. He transmitted LPC coefficients to lower the amount of data transmitted over RF.

The honor of closing the student presentations went to Dan Reynolds (picture below). He implemented audio water marking and his presentation was voted for the best student presentation of the class. He also received a nice book as a reward. Congrats Dan!

Here should be a picture of all of us with a satisfied, wide smile after the end of the ECE 992 Speech class. Unfortunately you’ll get just the description of the picture because my camera battery died, but I’m sure you can imagine it. Here’s some help : )))

All pictures from the presentations can be found here.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Hello ecebloggers,

Friday 05/07/2008 was another exciting day of student presentations. The session chair was Dave Estes. He didn’t bring Budweiser (Dude!) but he did have a nice slide listing all the presenters (see picture below).

The first presentation today was from Nate Bourgoine. Nate’s project was on speaker recognition using high order formants. He thoroughly explained what he did and gave a nice demo. Here’s picture of Nate:

Next was Keith Spaulding (see picture below). Keith analyzed and synthesized the chant “OM”. He explained what we are supposed to achieve with chanting and the difference between speech processing we did in class and what he did.

Jon Carrier (in picture below) closed today’s day of presentations. Echo cancellation was the topic of his project. He explained the way echo appears and how he tried to handle it.

Monday 05/12/2008 is going to be the last day of student presentations. All pictures from the presentations can be found here.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic