After the 2009 Undergraduate Research Conference at UNH the university newspaper featured not less than three Project54 undergrad students on its front page in the headline article.

Dave Garneau was part of the UNH Precision Racing Team, which won the first prize on the conference. Dave designed the traction control system for the racer. As previously reported, Mattew Lape and Mark Taipan developed the impressive Kingsbury Location Awareness System, which can help students find their way around university buildings.

Matt, Mark and Dave have defended their senior projects at this conference as they prepare to graduate from UNH this May. Nice work guys! You have surely showed that you can be called engineers from now on. Good luck in your future careers!

Oszkar

Here’s an interesting video I came across today regarding a 3D human-computer interface using electrostatics, without the need to attach any auxiliary device to your hand. It’s interesting to see the different interfaces that are being researched right now (e.g. multitouch) and whether one of these newer interfaces will be prominent in consumer applications. In addition, having just presented at the recent Undergraduate Research Conference here at UNH with Matthew Lape, I think it’s even more impressive that this was done by seniors at Northeastern!

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.

Mark Taipan

Earlier this week I hosted Brad Gillespie on a visit to the UNH ECE department. Brad, an ECE alumnus (MS EE ‘94), is a veteran of Microsoft, where he was the Technical Assistant to Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie. Currently, he advises early-stage technology companies, focusing on strategic issues at the intersection of business and technology.

Brad had a busy two days at UNH. He visited the Project54 lab and led a discussion about entrepreneurship, career options and similar topics with P54 students and staff (see picture above and more on Flickr). Brad also gave a talk on this same topic to about 50 ECE graduate and undergraduate students. Here are the slides from this talk:

One message from the talk that I thought was very important is that for the majority of the people on Earth the Internet will be accessible through a mobile phone and not a PC. In fact, the PC is unlikely to be part of our computing future. Brad returned to this point the following day when he led another discussion with students, this time in John LaCourse’s ECE 444 Bionics course. Brad described some of his experiences in India, and again stressed that PCs, reliable power sources and wired Internet connections are not available in most places on our planet. Also, this state of affairs cannot change too quickly, since the infrastructure to provide power and communications to remote places is expensive and slow to deploy. Companies that want to provide Internet-based services to developing countries will have to take this fact into account. More generally, they will have to deal with what Bell and Dourish call the messiness of the (ubicomp) world.

It was great to have Brad at UNH and I’m looking forward to his continued involvement with the ECE department. Thanks Brad!

Andrew Kun

Yesterday Mark Taipan and I presented KLAS, or Kingsbury Location Awareness System at the Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering (ISE) Symposium for the 10th annual UNH Undergraduate Research Conference. We were able to share with the audience our project poster, our KLAS video, as well as have two PDAs on hand to provide user demos.

Here we see the KLAS URC presentation setup where both Mark and I are showing two interested engineers our project’s attributes.

This pictures (taken during one of our slower traffic moments) shows a little more of our presentation display.

Finally, we see both Mark (Left) and Myself (Right), standing next to our project poster.

In addition to these photos, we have posted many other pictures from this year’s URC here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eceblogger/sets/72157617236370816/

These pictures, as well as the ones above, were taken by Oskar Palinko. Thanks Oskar for capturing the event!

Overall this year’s URC was an excellent experience, and both Mark and I are proud to have been able to do the work to be involved!

Matthew Lape

Recently Mark Taipan and I completed the development of our Kingsbury Location Awareness System (KLAS) Video. Here you will see the development and operation of KLAS, and its principle functions, giving an example usage for both the Tour Guide and Navigation Applications. Hope you enjoy the video!

Matthew Lape

Hello ecebloggers,

Yesterday, Tuesday 04/21/2009, a close friend of mine, Nedeljko Vasic (in the picture below), gave a talk at UNH CS Weekly session on his current research titled Energy-aware traffic engineering. Nedeljko is currently a second year PhD student at EPFL’s Networked Systems Laboratory. In 2006 he was awarded with “St. Sava’s” award by the Ministry of Education of The Republic of Serbia for being the best student in the country. He also received IBM PhD Fellowship for 2009.

What is energy-aware traffic engineering? As Nedeljko mentioned in his talk, Internet’s energy consumption in the US only is 20TWh which costs about 2 billion dollars per year. With demands like cloud computing, video streaming, and video on demand energy consumption is highly likely to increase. CMOS technology is reaching a plateau in power efficiency and cooling might help, but actually coolers will just increase the energy consumption. Nedeljko is suggesting that the solution for this problem lies in a protocol that enables network hardware (routers, network cards …) to be smarter and aware of the amount of energy it needs to optimally address the network load.

Current network hardware operates in 5 different energy modes depending on the amount of network load. If the network load just slightly jumps above a certain operating region it will have to switch to a higher energy consumption mode. This switching between the energy regions is creating peaks in energy consumption, similar to turning on and off your computer. Another network device (in the network) might take this additional load and still operate in its current energy mode. Even more, network devices could take the load from several devices, stay in the same operating region, and if the devices from which the network load was taken don’t have any network load left, they could be put to sleep. By implementing this idea in EATe protocol Nedeljko was able to get within 15% of the optimal energy consumption solution (see picture below), in the worst case scenario, and remove traffic from 15-31% of the devices.

His talk raised a lot of questions in the audience and made the Q&A session 30 minutes long! One of the more interesting questions was how would load switching be provided amongst different ISPs without them revealing a lot of information about their network topology? Professors from the UNH CS department were delighted with his talk and asked him to give another one this fall. I certainly hope that he will accept their invitation

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

This year marks 400 years since Galileo Galilei used his telescope to explore the skies. To celebrate this anniversary and in an effort to promote and gain interest in astronomy, this year is observed as the International Year of Astronomy around the world. UNH’s Physics Department has joined this effort by providing a series of lectures once a month by UNH faculty, staff and students on a wide variety of astronomy topics during the school year.

This Saturday professor Mark McConnell gave an interesting presentation named “Earth Attacks! A History of Martian Exploration”. As the title suggests, the lecture covered Martian exploration from the very early days until the present time. Professor McConnell has performed some research why Mars is such a popular topic among people. One of the reasons may be the discovery of Martian canals in 1887, which were assumed at that time to be created by some advanced civilization. Nowadays we know that the canals are not real, but nevertheless Mars is still intriguing both the scientific as well as the science-fiction community. Since the discovery of water ice on Mars last year I have a feeling that this is just the beginning of the great exploration.

Another interesting astronomy talk at UNH will be on May 16^th and the topic will be “The Search for Other Worlds”. Hope to see you there!

Zeljko Medenica

A few days ago I ran across an interesting device in a local electronic store. Finally it is time when such device arrived at our lives with satisfying performance for an affordable price. I found that buying it as a new PDA/phone accessory would be worth considering. It is an ultra-mobile (size: 2.0×0.9×4.5″, weight: 5.6 oz, battery life: 40-60 minutes) handheld projector which uses LED technology to project an image up to 50 inches in diagonal. It might potentially solve the burden of a small phone screen.

Although, the video shows some potential applications, it is still not clear what the killer app will be, how the mobile phone users will accept mobile projectors (regarding privacy), and how the projectors will enhance user experience and multi-user interaction.

Ivan Elhart

Have you ever wanted to tag photographs immediately upon capture?  Your answer to this question is probably twofold: (1) Yes I have; it would seem to be more convenient. (2) No I have not; text entry on a mobile device is a difficult process.  Now, what if I told you that we’ve developed an application which provides this functionality while removing you from the larger majority of text entry?  If I told you this then you’d be willing to participate in its evaluation study, right?

The figure above depicts the latest version of Project54’s imaging application.  It’s come a long ways since its initial developments, now targeting any camera-equipped Windows Mobile 6.0 device.  The leftmost portion of the figure shows the Manager window, where you can capture photographs.  The rightmost portion of the figure shows the Tags window, where you can tag your photographs via text entry, screen-tap selections or voice commands.  That’s right, voice commands; hence, using voice to tag digital photographs on the spot.  Interested?  The middle portion of the figure demonstrates the imaging application’s cooperation with Flickr, allowing you to upload your live photo stream directly to your account wherever you are.  Interested?

Participation in the study is free and usage of the application will not expire, you get to keep it for however long you want.  Everything you need to get started is downloadable: installer; written tutorial; video demonstrations.  The application also houses an on-device tutorial, so if you’re the type who likes to figure things out as you go along, then this may provide a quick and easy route through basic training.  You should be aware that this is a research study and that large amounts of data will be logged and transferred from your device.  Therefore, if your cellular data plan is anything other than the unlimited type then you may not wish to participate.  For additional information regarding the logging and collection of data please review the study’s consent and release forms.

So how does it work?  There are many features implemented by the imaging application, all of which are detailed in the written tutorial.  In an effort to keep this post as simple as possible I’ll only review the tagging process.  The figure below depicts the First Use window (left) and the Tag Bank window (right).  Upon first use of the application, the First Use window will be displayed and you’ll be able to link with your Flickr account.  At this time the most frequently used tags from your Flickr account will be downloaded to your phone.  The First Use window also allows you to specify up to five photographic interests, each of which is compared against Flickr’s immense tag database for similar listings which are then downloaded to your phone.  This series of downloads initially populates the tag bank.

Only the tags displayed by the Tag Bank window are valid voice commands.  Tags may be inserted or removed from the tag bank as necessary, as shown in the rightmost portion of the figure where we are inserting the tag “john”.  The more you use the application the more voice becomes a viable interaction method.  The performance of speech recognition is based on your knowing of which tags exist in the tag bank, so please review its contents after linking with your Flickr account. 

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have.  Thank you for your participation – and don’t forget to speak up!

Michael A. Farrar
mafarrar@unh.edu

As a senior at UNH, I’ve seen countless of students (including myself) stressing out about nothing to do with academic work! It seems that much of the stress that has descended about the senior class pertains with life after school. Everything from finding jobs, interviews, graduate school applications and details such as where am I going to live next year have been topics of discussion among many of my peers. Help is always appreciated and one place to receive guidance to transitioning to the “real world” is the website, Students 2 Business.

So what can you do on the Students 2 Business (S2B) website? Yes, you can of course find jobs from employers ranging from Microsoft, to Verizon, and even the CIA. You can post not only your resume for potential employers to find, but also talk about some of the important experiences that have shaped who you are as a professional and colleague. Networking has always been important and sometimes the saying is true, it is about who you know instead of what you know! The S2B website allows you to network and connect with not just employers but fellow colleagues as well. Who knows, maybe one of your friends can help you get a job at his/her company or vice versa. Lastly, moving into the real world is an exciting but anxious process and the S2B website shares lots of tips on everything from moving to different cities to providing information about different fields.

Take a look at the slides to learn more about the benefits of Students 2 Business, how to sign up, and how to connect with fellow S2B members!

Mark Taipan