The year 2009 has been a busy one for Project54. We began the year off in February by moving from our garage facility in Madbury to a garage located on campus and within Morse Hall. The transition of the group from two locations into one has been seamless and has worked out beautifully. We now have all of our personnel and equipment housed in the same location.
In early May we held an open house to show off our new location as well as to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. Hard to believe it has been 10 years for the project already. The weather was great and we had a good turnout with a nice mix of law enforcement, fire dept and campus personnel.
The middle of March brought upon us a flurry of outreach activity beginning with our participation in the UNH High Tech Day a program put on by the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments for area high school students, ECE Open House to welcome freshman along with a steady stream of demonstrations and tours provided to visiting organizations and high schools that has continued through out the year totaling over 500 visitors!
In April we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to host Paul Green for a visit to our lab. He gave a great talk on Human Factors Engineering and spent the day visiting us and answering all of our questions.
Amidst our outreach activities demonstrating the Project54 system we have been busy traveling to a variety of conferences, where we have written and had papers and posters accepted for presentation as well as busy with developing and running a number of experiments. For example, Mike Farrar’s experiment “Using Voice to Tag Digital Photographs on the Spot” conducted to determine how effective voice could be in the tagging of photos. Some other experiments by Nemanja Memarovic, Alex Shyrokov and Zeljko Medenica using our driving-simulator and eyetracker to collect a variety of data pertaining to distracted driving and navigation. During this time we were also busy with recruiting activities leading to the hire of Mark Taipan, a recent BS graduate and former student of Project54. We were very fortunate that Mark accepted the offer for our Research Project Engineer position and is now a staff member of the Project. Welcome, Mark we are happy to have you as part of the P54 team!
One of the great things about this project is that we have a lot of great students that work with us but the time always arrives where they reach graduation and it seems all too quickly we have to say goodbye. This year we have said goodbye to undergraduates Matt Lape, and David Garneau along with graduates Mike Farrar, Nemanja Memarovic and very soon Alex Shyrokov who is currently preparing his Ph.D defense. Lastly, Ivan Elhart is leaving us to return to his home country of Serbia. Ivan, thank you for all of your work with the handhelds. Undergraduate, Eric Ojala, who has been with us for roughly a year has also contributed greatly to progress on the handhelds and is, unfortunately for us, leaving to pursue a new position. Good luck to everyone and thank you for all of your hard work on the project, you will be missed.
So now we are left with working on bringing more students to the project, new undergraduate faces we have currently working on the project are Devin Mullen, Erika Swanson, and Mike Litchfield who started earlier this year and we welcome new Graduate Research Assistants, Dylan Fransway and David Filipovic, who will be starting in January.
It has been a fun and productive year with the new year just around the corner. Let the holidays begin!
~Erika C.