Here at Project54, we work extensively with New Hampshire State Police. Subsequently, we have one of their 2006 Dodge Chargers for demonstrating and testing the Project54 system. One of my colleagues here at the University of New Hampshire, Daniel VanderClock, recently took the opportunity to take some photos of the interior and exterior of the car (some photos are shown below). The entire outstanding set can be seen on our Flickr account here.

Thanks Dan for your all of your wonderful work and we look forward to your future photo shoots!

Mark Taipan

A week ago Mike, Mark, Eric and me attended another NEC-HFES student research conference in Boston. It is an annual event where students from different areas of human-factors engineering have a chance to present their work and share their thoughts and ideas with other people. This time the conference was held at MIT’s Stata building.

We were very pleased to see that the quality of presented research increases every year. It is definitely the case that this conference is gaining on popularity as the number of participating universities rises. This year I was pleasantly surprised to see how many driving simulator related studies were presented. In the picture below you can see me while presenting my work.

As always, there was a very interesting keynote speaker. This year it was Dr. David Aurelio. He gave an interesting overview of his career and how he got into the area of human-factors. He also demonstrated some of the specific applications that he worked on for different companies over the years. His most recent experience was with the design of sound systems and in the picture below you can see a demonstration of the remote controller that he designed.

In general this was an interesting experience, and we are looking forward to it next year.

Zeljko Medenica

Last week Dennis O’Brien the Chief Electronics Engineer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) gave a very interesting talk in the CEPS Frontiers lecture series. LLNL is one of the premier applied physics laboratories in the world. Together with Los Alamos, it is in charge of managing the US nuclear stockpile. It also runs a host of projects in the fields of national security and energy research.

Mr. O’Brien is a distinguished alumnus of UNH CEPS. He earned his BSc and MSc at our university in ‘75 and ‘77 respectively. Since then he was working at LLNL on various projects and at many positions. Currently he is the Chief Electronics Engineer of LLNL in charge of workforce planning and development for over 1300 engineers and other personnel.

At the beginning of the talk, Mr. O’Brien gave a quick overview of LLNL and its stunning achievements. He then spent the rest of the lecture introducing the National Ignition Facility, one of their most interesting and most expensive projects. It is essentially a huge laser (500 terawatt!) covering the area of three football fields. Its purpose is to generate enough energy to start nuclear fusion, with hydrogen as fuel, in a confined place. The idea is to generate more energy with fusion than it took to produce the laser beams. If this process of ‘ignition’ succeeds it could be the basic principle of future fusion powered power plants.

It was great to have such an accomplished alumnus give a talk at UNH. I think current students and faculty were very much inspired by the example of Mr. O’Brien’s great career and accomplishments.

Oszkar

Last Friday, a few of us from P54 attended a day long student conference geared towards human factors and ergonomics. The conference was very interesting, showcasing about 20 presentations dealing with various fields. Three of us from P54 (only ones from NH) gave presentations on our current research. I gave my presentation on our research on the multitouch display with geotagged & oriented photos.

It was a valuable experience for me, since I have not yet given a presentation to so many people whom I did not know. Of course, I was nervous at first, but it went away as my presentation started, and went well overall. I’m sure I will have to make more of these types of presentations in the future, so it was very good practice. Aside from my presentation, I also enjoyed a lot of other things from the conference. One of the other presentations was focused on controlling fully automated search and destroy robots in the field, and how often the person controlling them should reassess the goals and priorities of the robots.

Also the girl in the picture (one of three presenting) had an amazing voice. We all agreed she should be on radio or something, or a professional presenter. Mark and Zelijko gave awesome presentations too, and we all enjoyed some Friday evening rush hour traffic from Boston. It was great!

Mike Litchfield

A few days ago a new Microsoft Surface arrived to our labs. It is a great tool for user interaction studies. It’s surface material has a very pleasant non-stickiy textured feel to it.

Touch interactions on the Surface are recognized by multiple underlying infra-red cameras and transformed into user actions. The image is rendered by a projector located underneath the tabletop. The Surface is a really exciting user interface since it allows incredibly fast multi-touch and multi-user interactions. Not only can it detect the location of a finger on the tabletop, but also its orientation based on the shape of the infra-red blob.

We hope that this interface will allow researchers as well as students at UNH ECE to develop exciting new user experiences.

Oszkar

Last week I attended the “Exploring Mathematics Night,” which is an event organized annually by the UNH’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. This is always a very interesting event intended to promote mathematics and encourage young people with degrees in mathematics about the vast opportunities that are available after graduation. This year was no exception and we had a chance to listen to five very interesting panelists (see the picture below). They shared with the audience their experiences about their job search right after the graduation as well as more recent experiences in their current companies. Visiting this event is definitely a very nice experience and I highly recommend it.

Zeljko Medenica