As a part of Project54, we have a newly formed Radio Testing Lab which is used for performing tests on projects related to the usage of Land Mobile Radios. Currently we are working on two projects that attempt to solve problems associated with the utilization of mobile radios. While the first project provides a solution for the interoperability problem using radio patching, the second project is based on the implementation of APCO Project 25 radio standard.

In the lab, for test equipment, we have more than fifteen radios made by different manufacturers (Motorola, Kenwood, and E. F. Jonson), several digital phosphor oscilloscopes (Tektronix TDS3000B series), a vector signal analyzer (Agilent 89441A with RF section), and a bunch of PCs and laptops. With this equipment and our experience we can assure that our projects are well tested and verified. Below are two pictures from the lab.

Using the radio patching method, we have developed a solution for the radio interoperability problem. It is based on more affordable off-the-shelf devices and represents an adequate solution for small public agencies. The system supports full radio patching with proper PTT functioning and has audio signal latency bellow what is specified by ITU-T standard. It turned out that radio patching is the cheapest and fastest solution to the radio interoperability problem. More information about the system can be found in this technical report, and here about its precursor system.

Project 25 seems a perfect solution to constant growing needs for data communications in cruisers because it supports both data and voice transmissions over radio channels. Also, most public safety agencies already have and use Project 25 compliant radios. However, in order to fully utilize their radios and Project 25 data capabilities those agencies have to purchase very expensive Project 25 data capable base stations. Small public safety agencies usually cannot afford such expensive pieces of equipment. To address this problem, we have developed a software-based Project 25 data base station as an affordable way for small agencies to bring the data into their cruisers. The project is in its final testing stage and very soon will be ready for deployment. You can read more about our base station in this previous post. More technical information about the implementation of the transmission side can be found in Eric’s thesis.

Ivan Elhart

The title of this post was the first sentence that popped into my mind, when I figured out that our DriveSafety simulators can be divided into many small, so called SingleBox, simulators. The title is of course an hommage to Clarke and Kubrick’s timeless work 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this movie Dave Bowman realizes, that the monolith is full of stars.

My realization that the simulator is full of small, SingleBox simulators reminded me of the above scene from the movie. The SingleBoxes can be set up by accessing the configuration page of any DriveSafety simulator. Each channel computer can be reconfigured to act as a separate system. In this case the computers have more work to do, since they all have to act both as hosts and channels in the same time. This could lead to some dropped frames, but in our experience, the simulations are totally acceptable. Here is an interesting image showing multiple scenarios running on what used to be channels and are SingleBoxes here:

What’s the use of this? The most important property of the SingleBoxes is that they are highly portable, which is very important for presentation purposes. We just had one of them shipped for a demonstration of my paper at the Intelligent Environments conference past week in Seattle. We just separated the rear channel off the DS-100, which was otherwise left fully operational. The other advantage of the SingleBox mode is the possibility to combine many of these into a single simulation. This would open a new range of study topics, where more than one subject would participate in the same scenario, therefore allowing interaction between the drivers. Some students already expressed their willingness to volunteer in such experiments. I hope they are not fueled by the possibility to play bumper cars in a virtual world.

Before finishing, let me get back to the topic of the Space Odyssey movie for a few more seconds. If you watched it, have you ever wondered about the meaning of the starchild? I always did. Kubrick said about it that it is up for anyone to come up with their own explanation. But I really like this one by Donald MacGregor. Accordingly, it is not by chance that Richard Strauss‘ Also Sprach Zarathustra was selected for the opening theme of the movie. This piece was composed based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s same-titled book, which apparently served as inspiration to Kubrick’s fascinating movies. If I got you interested, please visit the link with the detailed explanation.

Oszkar Palinko

At the end of the Intelligent Environments 2008 conference we were treated to a visit to Microsoft Home. The people who work at this facility attempt to see 10 years into the future in order to predict the technological landscape Microsoft will have to compete in. Our host was David Baumert, Program Manager (see picture below).

So what does the future hold? I’ll talk about three technologies that David discussed: organic LEDs, RFIDs and communications.

Organic LEDs should allow us to embed displays into walls and create unobtrusive touch panels to be used in environmental controls, doorbells and such. OLEDs will be cheap, foldable and we’ll be able to paint over them to make them truly blend in with the environment. In fact, they (or similar display technologies) will allow us to transform entire walls or rooms into displays controlled by the current occupant.

RFIDs will be everywhere. OK, you don’t need to be part of Microsoft Home to know this, working at Walmart would teach you the same. However, it’s interesting to think about how these RFIDs can be used by your home to make your life easier. Some examples: RFIDs in food packaging can be used to recognize if you’re about to use the correct ingredients in a recipe (your home is displaying the recipe on the kitchen countertop); RFIDs in prescription medication containers by your home in the process of verifying that you’re taking the correct medication, at the correct time and correct amount; and the RFID in a knick-knack you purchased in Paris can tell your home the date and location of the purchase and this can be one factor in your home’s decision to recommend a Paris-based movie for your viewing pleasure on the anniversary of the purchase.

The third technology I wanted to mention is in fact the collection of technologies that make up the wireless communications experience. The folks at Microsoft Home expect that your mobile phone will be very much present 10 years from today, and that it’ll be much more powerful than it is today. It’ll be the key to your home, the intelligent gateway to your sought-after attention (spam will still be with us), and it will be a powerful remote control.

The visit was certainly a lot of fun. David Baumert knows the predictions of MS Home will not always be correct. E.g. he readily admits that the lack of small home robots (like the ones made by iRobot) in the current depiction of the future is a mistake. Nevertheless, seeing a group of smart people thinking about our collective technological future inspires one to try to do the same, as well as to work hard at shaping that future. For me, that was the most exciting thing to take away from this visit.

Thanks to IE ‘08 organizers for facilitating the visit, thanks to Microsoft for hosting us, and a special thanks to David for the excellent tour.

Andrew Kun

Hello ecebloggers,

As some of you may know my wife and I were on a two week vacation in Negril, Jamaica. This beautiful island has many things to offer: sea, landscape, cuisine, culture… There isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t heard of Bob Marley and The Wailers. Although there’s a lot to write about Jamaica (tourism, music, cuisine…) I’m gonna write about something else that caught my attention.

Because of high poverty people struggle to survive day by day (but they still keep smiling:) ). In such a world some thing’s that we take for granted, like electricity, are luxury and not all the people can afford it. The high price of electricity comes from the main source to generate it: oil.

But people need electricity in their everyday lives, so they get it for “free” (see pictures below).

All the connections, except maybe two, are illegal, or “free”. If you are in a touristic place, like Negril, Ocho Rios or Montego Bay you wouldn’t see these so often. But if you go inside the country these connections are common. Besides being illegal, these connections add additional weight to the pole and create danger for the surrounding area. When we were traveling in the country one of the poles crashed on the road. Luckly nobody was there.

Jamaica is loosing a lot of money because of the illegal electrical connections. Their government is trying to reach to the people and address the problem (see picture below).

These billboards can be seen throughout the country. In order to solve this problem Jamaican government is making a lot of effort to lower the cost of electricity by making their system more efficient and using different fuel to produce electricity.

I hope that Jamaica will find a solution for the problem.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Over the past few months I’ve spent much of my time developing the Project54PDA imaging applications.  Finally, after some coding revisions and a small in-lab experiment, we’re just about ready for deployment.  From the results, it seems as though tagging of images using handheld devices has a bright future, along with the note-taking and memo-recording capabilities the application provides.

Back in April we met with Lieutenant Mark Liebl of the NH State Police who gave his insight to the applications’ possible uses.  Mark had stated that he occasionally comes across a driver who has forgotten to carry or had misplaced their driver’s license.  In these circumstances information may be taken verbally from the subject and checked against the records database as normally would be done.  However, this assumes that the driver was being truthful.  This is where the imaging application comes into play.  At the time of questioning an officer may take a photograph of the subject and pair it with tagging, note, and/or memo data that may be reviewed later if necessary, providing some physical data on the event.  Along with this, Mark also believed that such data may be gathered at the scene of minor motor vehicle accidents.

Below are some screenshots of the imaging application in use.  Since most people are fairly familiar with the operation of a digital camera, I tried to have the imaging GUI replicate that functionality as much as possible.  Like all commands the application provides, images may be captured using the graphical buttons or through speech interaction and reviewed by using the scrolling features shown in the upper corners of the shot.  In the adjacent figure, the tagging mode of the application is depicted with the tags “poster” and “project54 logo” already paired with image (lower text area).  The upper text area displays previous tags the user has entered into the system, and allows the tagging process to be completed (through graphical or speech interaction) more rapidly.  That’s right, speech tagging!  Note-taking is performed using the text editor of the PDA, and the memo feature allows for a maximum 30 second audio recording.

With all of this data now stored on the PDA, I found it necessary to develop a set of applications which allow for extraction to and easy viewing on a desktop machine, because viewing data on a PDA is about as slow and painful as it gets.  The transfer application (not shown) handles the extraction, and the management application offers a centralized interface for data review (see the figure below).  All-in-all it was a lengthy process to get these applications working in harmony, but I think the data collection and organization methods they provide will prove to be quite valuable.

Michael Farrar

Hello,

As you know, we have multiple computers that we use during our experiments. We have to prepare every computer before the experiment and then collect the data after the experiment is done. The usual procedure is to use a check list so we do not forget something. NASA have been using this approach for some time:

We still manage to forget things, though. And given that all our computers are connected into a network I decided to automate some of the procedures.

Setup: Multiple computers, each of each must have a set of properly configured applications running. The settings may be changed during different experiment stages. For example: Pre-experiment stage (all applications are launched, subject id is provided),  Experiment part 1, Experiment part 2, Post-experiment stage (save data files, close applications).

Solution: Imagine that all the applications that we use can be controlled from a command line. Then all we need to do is to execute proper commands on every computer. That is simple: every computer runs a “command execution server” on startup. The experimenter creates a batch file for every stage of the experiment that connects to the “command execution server” to run commands with proper parameters.

Problem 1. Most applications are GUI based. But AutoHotKey provides a solution for this problem. AutoHotKey can control mouse and send key presses to the windows. It even comes with a recorder that allows easy creation of the scripts.

Problem 2. What to use as an “command execution server”? Programs similar to Remote Desktop are GUI based. Telnet and ssh require user permission settings and could be cumbersome to configure, but they could provide additional security. Given that we are not worried about security (it’s a local isolated network), I implemented a server and a client in perl (thanks to the Network Programming with Perl, a great tutorial by James Lee). The server will execute any perl script that a client sends to it (yes, it can be dangerous, but it is also very flexible).

Solution: The server runs on every computer. Every computer also has a set of AutoHotKey script files that control the applications (this is an example of an AutoHotKey Script, which executes a notepad and writes a message in it). The experimenter executes a client that informs the server to run the proper commands (assuming AutoHotKey is installed properly):

my @args = (”AutoHotkey.exe ScriptExample.ahk _SUBJECT_”);
system(@args) == 0 or die “Failed to execute given command\n”;

Notice that the client substitues _SUBJECT_ for a given parameter and ahk script uses it. This code is saved in a file such as ExecuteScriptExample and is piped to the client. This is what the experimenter does to run a script on a remote computer:

perl NetCli.pl Subject1 IPADDRESS_1 <ExecuteScriptExample

I hope this will help you to automate your own tasks. One can execute or even dynamically create batch or perl scripts and then run them on the remote computer.

Thank you.

Alexander Shyrokov

Check out www.tinyurl.com. It allows you to create tiny URLs out of long and winding ones. This is neat when you want to send a link in an email to someone without having to worry if their email client will interpret the multiple lines of the link correctly.

It’s also neat if you want to include links in presentations or posters. I’m preparing a presentation for an upcoming talk at Microsoft Research and have just used this site to create a couple of links: one to this YouTube video of the Project54 driving simulator and another to this eceblogger post about the eye tracker that we’ve recently installed in the simulator. Best of all, tinyurl allows you to create your own custom tiny URLs. So, I’ve created www.tinyurl.com/p54sim and www.tinyurl.com/eyetracker.

Andrew Kun

You might know, from previous posts, that I’m working with different kinds of push-to-talk (PTT) activation solutions. One of those is the PTT glove, which I will present at the Intelligent Environments Conference next week (07/21/08).

Today, we just got the first media attention event for the glove: it is featured on a very interesting blog about wearable computing, talk2myshirt.com/blog.

This blog came to my attention, while I was searching the web for commercial glove interaction solutions. The site has a very nice collection of these products. I like it, that wearable IT accessories are neatly categorized: gloves, hats, shoes, skirts, etc, even ties!

This may sound like a cliché, but it’s always good to communicate with other bloggers, professionals, researchers, etc. If I’m not aware of other solutions similar to mine, I might think that I invented PTT gloves, but it’s always good to get a reality check by seeing if anyone else had a similar idea before. Communication can also help co-operate with others and figure out what the real problems of a particular field of research are.

A good contra-example for this is the Miss Universe event. How can we have a Miss Universe, when only humans participate? Did we research all possibilities of life on other planets (not just in the Solar system) before declaring a human to be Miss Universe? What would the Klingons have to say about this (if they exist/ed)?

Oszkar Palinko

Hello,

AutoHotKey is a handy utility that can be used for automation tasks. This program can move the mouse or send key events to different applications. It also can show dialogs. I mostly use it as a macro recorder that works across all the applications. It supports a simple (as in easy to learn), but powerful scripting language. You can learn more about it by watching this video:

Blue skies!

Alexander Shyrokov

I recently set up several reading lists on Amazon - check them out here.

Andrew Kun