Yesterday, at the GIS Day 2008, Cameron Wake gave the keynote speech on the topic of ‘Climate Change in the Northeast’. Professor Wake is a distinguished researcher in the field of climate change at UNH.

Since GIS Day is an event geared towards elementary and high school students, Wake urged the millennium generation to talk to their parents about climate change and to educate themselves on the topic. His lectures are always very interesting with fascinating, eye-opening graphs.

The image above shows the increase in the amount of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere in the last 50 years. All significant scientific research shows that today’s climate change is largely influenced by humans. At the end of the lecture I asked professor Wake what could be the motivation of those people who do not want to accept climate change to be caused by man, against all the scientific results. He answered, that those people might have ideological reasons for doing so, since all research data shows otherwise.

Oszkar

Our lab has recently acquired a TouchKit development system. It serves as a basic building block for creating multi-touch screen user interfaces. The TouchKit consists of an infra-red illuminated projection screen and a FireWire camera board. A projector has to be added to complete the system. Here is the initial setup:

The image shows the projection screen in front which is held upright by an improvised clamping board on its right side. The projector throws the image onto the screen from the back, allowing the user to interact from the front. In this initial setup the camera board is mounted on a box and connected to a PC using FireWire. The system has a really interesting principle of operation: as the user touches the front of the screen, the infra-red illumination coming from the inside of the screen changes. This change is picked up by the camera and is further processed by the software API, which is based on the OpenFrameworks C++ library.

Multi-touch user interfaces have become more popular recently with the introduction of technologies like Microsoft Surface, iPhone and CNN’s Magic Wall created by Peceptive Pixel Inc. The last one claims to be the most advanced multi-touch user interface. Here is a video showing its impressive capabilities.

We are still in the process of setting up and configuring our TouchKit system. We will post more information about it here when it becomes operational. Once this is done, it will be a great asset for students in the UbiComp course this fall at UNH taught by Prof. Andrew Kun. Students will be developing innovative user experiences based on the TouchKit as part of their course projects.

Oszkar Palinko

Hi Ecebloggers,

This time, I decided to write something about the current activities in my college, IIT Guwahati. After completing my internship at UNH , I always thought how I could promote the current research work at UNH and my pilot experiment work for obstacle testing during the internship period. Fortunately, the electronics department in our institute has initiated a lecture series on certain crucial areas of research in the electronics domain. This lecture series is being organized and managed by Cepstrum, the IIT Guwahati ECE society. I volunteered to contribute in this lecture series, the topic being “Speech Processing and In vehicle Interaction”. Quite Interestingly, much more students showed up for this lecture than was expected. I gradually commenced from defining speech synthesis , speech recognition etc. and later slowly paced up the proceedings covering the in - vehicle speech user interface. For elucidating an “in vehicle speech user interface” in a limited time, nothing could serve better than the demo video available for the Project54 speech user interface on the Catlab website. I then moved on to expand some details about my work at UNH and then finally covered the future prospects and current research at the Microsoft Research Lab, US. I used the Microsoft Research Driving simulator video to show the future directions in this field. Since some of the listeners were first year and second year undergraduates, I had to restrict myself to the basics of speech without going into the technical details. Here is a picture from the lecture and the rest can be found on this website.

Now, something about the listeners’ responses..Some of the second year undergraduates were interested to know about certain specific fields like keyword spotting and speech recognition. Since my final year B.Tech project at IIT Guwahati is on “Speech based Emotion recognition” , I was able to suggest some parameters imperative for emotion and speech recognition but again, without going into the finer technical details. Moving on, some juniors were interested to know how the lane variance and the steering wheel angle variance measures could be used to actually improve the driving performance. To vividly reply that query, I mentioned about the current research work being done in Project54 Lab to improve the driver performance. I remembered reading Oszkar’s paper on the wireless Push to Talk Glove and thus quoted it as an example, elaborating how it is better than the fixed PTT switch and helps to improve the driving performance. Finally, I concluded the lecture providing the website address for eceblogger as a resource for information about the latest proceedings in the Project 54 Lab. Thus to summarize , I had a wonderful time and I hope I could have incited some enthusiasm in my junior undergraduates.

Puneet Lakhanpal

Last Friday Oskar Palinko defended his MS thesis. Oszkar’s thesis was centered around the cool push-to-talk (PTT) glove he has designed.

Oszkar ran a rather large user study (24 participants) to evaluate if the PTT glove outperforms a fixed PTT button. While in comparing driving performance when using the two PTT solutions Oszkar didn’t find a main effect, he did find that the experiment participants looked down at the steering wheel more often when using the fixed PTT. Is this a problem? Maybe. While the total amount of time subjects spent looking at the steering wheel when using the fixed PTT button amounted to about 1% of the total experiment time, the average fixation was around 300 ms long. If such a fixation came at the wrong time (e.g. at the moment a leading vehicle started to brake), this could be a problem.

Congratulations Oszkar on a job well done!

Andrew Kun

This fall I’ll be teaching a graduate level course on ubiquitous computing (ECE 992). The course will look at recent research in this field, or more accurately in a few segments of this field. Specifically, we’ll look at the visions of ubicomp, some applications, human-computer interfaces, context awareness and privacy.

The course will revolve around reviews of the recent ubicomp research literature. I envision something similar to an NSF review panel, with instructions on what to pay attention to (they won’t be exactly NSF instructions but will have similarities to those), a lead reviewer who starts off the review process, a scribe who takes notes and where the entire class constitutes the panel.

Students will also work on a ubicomp project - basically either the evaluation of an existing ubicomp system, the design of the specifications for a new system or the implementation of a new system. I hope that people who decide to take the course will bring their own ideas from their research or work and that we can create projects that will be useful to them in those domains. I know a couple of students from my lab will be able to do this.

You can check out the course website here and relevant links here. Questions? Send me an email.

Andrew Kun

Hello ecebloggers,

Here’s another post about Jamaica

Jamaicans are very proud with their high schools. In the 60’s Jamaica didn’t have as many high schools as it has today. Students from different parishes (parish is like a province, Jamaica has 14 parishes) were given a choice to go to two or three high schools. As our taxi driver told us the story, he himself had to take an hour and a half ride by bus to get to the school. He’s from a Hanover parish and there are two of the oldest and most respected high schools on the island: Rusea’s (in the picture below) and Manning’s.

The school was build in 1777 after Martin Rusea, a French refugee, left gracefully all of his land (in his will dated July 23rd, 1974) for a free school to be built. The traditional colors of the Rusea’s high school are yellow, blue and green. Originally this school could admit roughly 100 students per year. Over the time the need for higher education in Jamaica forced the school to expand and now it has two campuses and admits more students. I was surprised when I heard that this high school was founded in 1777 (see picture below).

Students who graduate from this school are very respected on the island because it’s not easy to get in. Usually they continue their education.

Rusea’s High School gave one very famous and world wide known athlete: Marlene Ottey (in the picture below).

In the list of all time athletes Merlene Ottey is ranked fourth in 100 meter track and third in 200 meter track.

She holds the record for being the oldest track medalist ever and for winning the most women’s World Championship medals (14). Because of her achievements she is called “Queen of the Track”.

That’s all from Jamaica, mon.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Check out this link for a great visualization of sorting algorithms by David Martin of Boston College.

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

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