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

This week UNH’s Tech Camp visited Project 54 to take a look at the simulator.

The tech camp is a program based out of Kingsbury Hall, where kids from seventh through tenth grade are able to get a sense of STEM professions (These include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). The camp is designed to give students interested in STEM professions a closer look into what these jobs are all about.

Tech Camp students visited the Project 54 simulator, as well as a model of a New Hampshire State Police cruiser. Students were given a short briefing about Project 54, and were then allowed to ask questions about what the system does.

Above: Oskar Palinko demonstrates the use of the Project 54 simulator to UNH Tech Camp Students

Many students enjoyed testing the simulator, which allows the user to get a first hand look at Project 54. Students learned about how the Project makes operating a police officer’s cruiser safer, using speech controls and an integrated computer system, rather than a multitude of buttons and switches.

Above: Mark Taipan demonstrates Project 54 to UNH Tech Camp students with a state police cruiser model.

Devin Mullen

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

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

See what Matt Cookson, Associate Vice Chancellor for External Relations for the University System of New Hampshire, has to say about opportunities for young professionals in NH:

I fully agree with his assertion that NH is a great place to live and raise a family.

Andrew Kun

UNH students, staff and faculty now have access to the IEEE/IET Electronic Library (for a description of what IEL provides click here).

I would like to thank Jennifer Carroll and Emily Poworoznek of the UNH Library for acquiring this excellent resource for our campus.

Andrew Kun

Hello ecebloggers,

Throughout the semester, Ivan Elhart, Michael Farrar, and myself, have developed a handheld-display
projection application, allowing users to transfer the handheld displays’ contents to an
alternative viewing platform. We have recorded several scenarios demonstrating the
system and would like your feedback. In each video, an image of the handheld
displays’ contents will be shown in the lower-right corner of the frame.

Click here to help us and take the survey.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Brad Gillespie, a friend and UNH alumnus, pointed me to this article by Don Dodge. Don is greatly concerned about the high dropout rate at US engineering schools and he offers some ideas on how to fix this problem. For schools like UNH some of his ideas sound good only in theory (e.g. provide full scholarship to all students - that may be expensive, and Don acknowledges this), but others are indeed well worth looking at (basically, engage students from day one, show them that an engineering career is fun).

What do you think about all this? How does engineering education at the undergraduate or graduate level strike you? Just right? Boring? Engaging? Any ideas on how to make it better?

Andrew Kun

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