On May 10th 2010 Marcelo Gleiser gave a very inspiring talk at the University of New Hampshire. The lecture’s title was: A Tear at the Edge of Creation, which is also the title of professor Gleiser’s new book. The lecture was part of the CEPS Frontiers Lecture Series.

Marcelo Gleiser is a distinguished physicist and astronomer. He holds the Appleton Professorship of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College. In his career so far he authored more than eighty peer reviewed publications as well as three books in popular science. He is the recipient of many awards.

Professor Gleiser’s talk focused on the significance of asymmetries in our universe that made our lives possible. In the first part of his lecture, he gave a brief historical overview of the research of the “heavens”. He argues that everyone so far has been looking for a unified explanation of the universe and it’s laws, starting with the ancient Egyptians, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Newton and all the way to Einstein. In Gleiser’s opinion, this might not be the right way of thinking, especially if one accepts that our universe is based on fundamental imperfections and asymmetries. He then goes on to explain how time, matter and life are all asymmetric. Time can expand only in one direction, because it is very improbable that things would go “backward”, towards less entropy. Secondly, the universe which we can observe is full of matter and lacking anti-matter. This seems to be a physical necessity, which also creates asymmetry. Finally life on Earth is also asymmetric. For example amino acids in the DNA are “left-handed” while “right-handed” amino acids can be fatal for humans.

Gleiser hypothesizes that self-aware intelligent life in the universe is very improbable and this is why in his opinion it is very unlikely that we will get in contact with other intelligent life forms. Because of this, we should cherish life on our planet and be “humancentrists”.

Professor Gleiser’s lecture was very interesting and witty at the same time. His clever remarks kept a constant smile on many faces. His great way of presenting keeps the audience’s attention easily on topic. I would suggest the book to everyone interested in knowing more about the nature of the universe and life in it.

You can follow up on this and similar topics on the 13.7 blog site, where professor Gleiser is one of the four contributors.

Oszkar

On the 25th of February Dr Marko Popovic gave a talk at UNH in the series of Graduate Seminar lectures of the ECE department (ECE900). The title of the lecture was: “Many Endeavors a Few Successes; an Ordinary Story of the 21st Century ‘Renaissance’ = Multidisciplinary Researcher”.

This lecture was geared towards graduate students who might be in front of some important career decisions. Dr Popovic talked about his experience of finishing his PhD in physics at Boston University and the following years spent at MIT as a researcher. Among other appointments, he worked at MIT’s Biomechatronics Group on walking biped robot simulations. Using cameras, human movements were captured and used in biped dynamics models. Based on these Dr Popovic studied the true influence of the Zero Moment Point on biped robot stability.

Marko sees his career so far as a series of multidisciplinary research engagements. He gave some very good advices to student at the beginning of their careers: be bold and venture out of you comfort zone in order to achieve great goals. I would like to thank Dr Popovic for visiting our lab and giving a great lecture.

Oszkar

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 week my colleague Zeljko Medenica and I visited AgeLab of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. The visit was organized by the New England Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (NEC-HFES). This laboratory is investigating the role of technology in the human aging process. One of the big issues that older people face is driving safety. Bryan Reimer gave a very interesting lecture on driving research done at the lab.

He emphasized that in order to know more about people’s driving behavior, it is very important to know their workload. The workload measures they use are very similar to the ones we collect in our experiments: driving performance, physiological measures and subjective ratings.
After the lecture, we had a hands-on experience with the MIT AgeLab test vehicle and driving simulator, thanks to Bryan, Jarrod Orszulak and Bruce Mehler. The proprietary Volvo test car allows them to collect naturalistic driving data using many kinds of sensors. The driving simulator is based on an STI simulation engine. The car cab is a fixed-base VW Beetle placed in front of a projection screen.

In one of the studies done at AgeLab, researchers compared results from the driving simulator with naturalistic data and found that physiological measures correlate very well over the different platforms. It was very interesting to hear the experience of fellow workload estimation researchers and compare methodologies and measures used. Thanks Brian, Jarrod and Bruce for hosting us.

Oszkar Palinko

On Monday, May 11, I was honored to present my work at a very prestigious IEEE conference on Homeland Security technologies, held in Waltham, MA. During the technical session on the interoperability and field deployable communications, I gave a presentation on the design and development of a software defined Project 25 data base station. Here is a picture taken during my presentation:

First, I took a couple minutes to introduce data communication and talk about potential benefits of having data messages in public safety communication system. I continued my presentation by talking about the problem of very expensive Project 25 equipment that hinders the implementation of data communication in small police departments. Our approach towards a software defined data base station seems a promising and cost effective way for local departments to bring data messages into their cruisers. A very precise and rigorous testing procedure performed in our laboratory showed the compliance of the base station with commercially available P25 radio equipment. Also, the test procedure produced promising and encouraging results prior the real world deployment in a local NH police department. Finally, I concluded my presentation with a demo video which demonstrates an application of querying a remote server using the data base station and Project54’s speech user interface. Here are the slides:

After the presentation I answered a few great questions and received a lot of positive comments about our work on the radio interoperability at UNH and Project54.

Special thanks to Dan Farfan from KinetX Inc., who was so kind to take pictures of me presenting.

Ivan Elhart

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

Last Friday, April 10th 2009, Project54 students visited MIT to hear Patrick Baudisch’s lecture on Back-of-Device Interaction. Patrick is a research scientist at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington.

He presented his findings on researching back-of-device interfaces, which is an interesting new concept of human-computer interaction. A predecessor of the current solution was the lucidTouch project, which provided a semi transparent display screen using a camera mounted on a boom. This solution was novel but not too practical. Since then, Baudisch and his group developed a more sophisticated method for back-of-device interaction: the nanoTouch. Here, the camera based system is replaced with a clickable touchpad on the back of the device.

This is an interesting solution borrowed from the Microsoft Zune MP3 player. It is a touchpad which can be clicked as a momentary push-button switch.

What is the advantage of an interface like this, compared to conventional touch devices that can be operated from the front side, like the iPhone for example? When trying to activate a virtual button from the front, the fingers obscure the critical part of the screen. This makes typing on a virtual keyboard challenging. Patrick presented the results of their study where they found that using the back-of-device interface produces less button-press errors compared to front-of-device touch screens. Also it seems that the new interface will allow reduction in screen and device sizes. Patrick even showed us concept images of wrist watches and rings which could benefit from this interface. As always, Baudisch’s presentation was visually very sophisticated with elaborate images and design.

All in all it was a very interesting talk. I can’t wait to see this technology in an actual product.

Oszkar

On Thursday, April 2nd 2009, Paul Green visited our lab. At that time he gave a talk on Human Factors Engineering and spent the whole day at our lab talking to students and visitors of the Open House.

Dr Green is a distinguished Professor at UMTRI and the president of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He has immense experience in human factors engineering for vehicles. He was kind to share this experience with Project54 students and staff.

In his lecture Dr Green emphasized that vehicle accidents are one of the leading causes of preventable fatalities in the US. Therefore it makes perfect sense to research how human factors engineering can provide a safer in-car environment. Many passive safety systems are already deployed in cars (safety belts, airbags, child seats, etc.) Active systems are also finding their way into commercially available vehicles (anti-lock braking system, electronic stability control, adaptive cruise control, etc.) A so-called Workload Manager is a cutting-edge active safety system. Dr Green presented us his research on how to design such a system. What can an everyday driver take home from this research: it is a bad idea to have any additional tasks while driving, especially when maneuvering (turn, overtake, lane change, etc.) The talk was very well visited by UNH students, faculty and others.

After the talk Dr Green led an informal discussion panel at the Open House event, where everyone could try our driving simulator. We had many visitors from different UNH offices as well as from other institutions.

During the day, we had several opportunities to have discussions with Dr Green. Andrew, Alex, Zeljko and Nemanja were very interested to hear Paul’s experience with running experiments as well as about his opinion on our research plans. Dr Green emphasized many times during these talks that, to produce “good research” it is necessary to identify and precisely define the problems that need to be addressed. Furthermore, hypotheses are even better if they are accompanied by quantitative predictions. Also, he stressed the importance of repeatability of scientific research in our field: it is important to mention all important factors when writing a paper and have the same measures of performance throughout the research/development community.

From left: Andrew, Oszkar, Alex, Paul, Nemanja and Zeljko

All-in-all, Dr Green’s visit was a very inspiring one. I hope that we all will be even more able and motivated to do even better research thanks to Paul.

Oszkar Palinko

On April 2nd, 2009 our lab will host Paul Green, a distinguished Research Professor at UMTRI and the President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Dr. Green will give a lecture on Human Factors Engineering as a part of the CEPS Frontiers Lecture Series.
The lecture will also be an integral part of the ECE900 Seminar Course. Dr. Green has many years of experience in conducting research using driving simulators. He has more than 200 publications and he was the lead author of SAE recommended practices concerning in-car navigation systems design.

After the lecture, Project54 will host a Driving Simulator Open House, during which Dr. Green will be available for questions and everyone will have a chance to try our high fidelity driving simulator.

Also, visitors will be able to get informed about new Project54 applications, updates, experiments. The schedule for April 2nd, will be as follows:

12:30 Light lunch at Kingsbury Hall N101, Durham, NH
1:00 Lecture: Human Factors Engineering by Paul Green at Kingsbury N101
2:00 Driving Simulator Open House with Paul Green at Morse Hall 229 (refreshments and snack)

Everyone is welcome! Come, visit us and learn more about ergonomics and Project54!

Oszkar

Yesterday brought an inspiring talk by Jun Rekimoto, the director of the Interaction Lab at Sony CSL and Professor at the University of Tokyo. The topic of the talk was Sensonomy, a new term coined by Jun which fuses Folksonomy with wireless sensor networks.

The basic idea behind Sensonomy is to integrate the virtual and real world environments. For this, determining the location of the user is of particular importance. Jun has found, that using WiFi for this purpose gives very good results in urban areas. Their research was tested in Tokyo, where there is more than one million WiFi access points! Check out this map. All of these points can be used to determine the location of the user. Here, Mr. Rekimoto compares the quality of GPS position determination vs. WiFi in downtown Tokyo.

It can be seen that the WiFi red line is usually more precise than the GPS black line. WiFi can also be used indoors unlike GPS and it has a much shorter startup time for determining location.

They call this technology the PlaceEngine. Anyone who downloads the client can use it to determine their location while they are online. This technology was used in their lifelogging application. Further information on this can be found at the web site of Mr. Rekimoto’s lab, which is partly in English. Check it out, it’s really interesting.

Furthermore, this research connects very well to the KLAS project which was developed by Mark Taipan and Matt Lape at our lab, Project54. They have used WiFi for determining indoor location. It seems that it is not impossible to take the system out of Kingsbury Hall and “wire up” the whole UNH campus!

Oszkar Palinko