On May 19th 2010, Minyi Zhong defended his PhD dissertation at Boston University. His dissertation topic is “Distributed control and optimization for power limited cooperative systems”. Minyi Zhong is a graduate student of Boston University’s Division of Systems Engineering. His dissertation committee includes Prof. Christos G. Cassandras (adviser) and Prof. John Baillieul, Prof. Yannis Paschalidis and Prof. Calin Belta.

Zhong started with the outline of the talk and a summary of the main contributions of his dissertation. His research work is focused on designing control algorithms for distributed systems, especially those wireless power limited systems such as sensor networks and mobile robotic networks. The application areas of his research include environmental monitoring and exploration, surveillance and reconnaissance, search and rescue in disaster relief, etc.

He then went on to explain that a distributed system consists of a collection of autonomous computing devices, often called nodes or agents, each of which has locally accessible control and data. These nodes communicate over a network through message passing and jointly perform a single task, provide a single service or share some common resources. He pointed out that the main theme of the research in distributed system is the design of intelligence local node algorithms which run on distributed hardware, consume local data and produce some desirable global system-wide behavior.

The main mathematical machinery used in Zhong’s research in distributed control is distributed optimization. In the distributed optimization framework he introduced, a control task of the distributed systems is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem, which is then decomposed in series of sub-problems and each sub-problem is solved by a node of system. A key issue addressed by Zhong’s research is how to reduce the communication involved in a distributed cooperative system. His solution involves using node state estimation and event-driven communication so that only when a node finds out that its teammate’s estimate of its state is off by a certain threshold, a communication event will be triggered. Two types of threshold process were introduced (static and dynamic) and their convergence properties are analyzed.

He then illustrated the effectiveness of this event-driven communication scheme by applying it to the sensor network coverage and data collection problem, which is another main problem studied in his dissertation. Towards the end of his presentation, he showed talked about the robotic research platforms used in his experiment. The first one is based on Khepera III, which is a miniature robot with onboard processing and communication capability. But it lacks the ability to perform localization without outside help. The next platform is assembled using off-the-shelf components such as iRobot Create, laser range finder, webcam, netbook. Zhong then showed a video of these robots carrying out coverage control mission, in which he demonstrated this platform’s ability to perform self-localization based on laser scan data and vision-based event detection ability. Throughout the defense, Zhong answered questions from the committee members as well as from the general public.

Jiayin Tian

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

A couple of weeks ago our ECE department hosted Bret Harsham of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) as a part of the ECE900 graduate seminar. Bret gave a very interesting lecture about the ways of shortening voice dialogs through using a contextual push-to-talk button. The title of the lecture was “Contextual Push-to-Talk: Shortening Voice Dialogs to Improve Driving Performance.”

The focus of the lecture was on a prototype in-car voice user interface (VUI) which was tested during my MERL internship last summer. As opposed to the contemporary in-car VUIs, which use only one push-to-talk button for issuing commands, this work presents a way of utilizing multiple push-to-talk buttons depending on the context of the query. For example, if we have three domains of interest, we can associate one push to talk button for each of them. Therefore, we skip multiple steps which are otherwise required in order to switch to a desired domain and initiate a voice search.

This work was recently accepted for publication at MobileHCI 2010 conference.

Zeljko Medenica

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

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 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

Last week an interesting lecture was held by Dr. Frank Rudolph of Beacon Power about flywheel energy storage systems as part of the UNH’s energy club series of seminars on renewable energy.

Flywheels are not a new concept, but the technological development in the last 10 years or so made it feasible to become a commercial product. How a flywheel storage system works? The concept is actually pretty simple: it absorbs energy from the grid and stores it in a high-density rotating flywheel. The flywheel thus acts as a kinetic energy battery. Since it spins at very high speeds (>20000 rpm) it is capable of providing very high bursts of energy in a very short period of time. It consists of an electric motor enclosed in a vacuum container and suspended on magnetic bearings. This way almost no losses are encountered due to inertia in the bearings and the surrounding air. After the power loss the motor acts as a generator, converting stored kinetic energy into electric energy.

There are many possible uses for flywheels: trains, cars, uninterruptible power supplies, pulse power, but one of the most interesting is the frequency regulation of the grid. By observing frequency changes it is possible to determine if the power demand is higher (frequency drops) or lower (frequency rises) than the supply. Given the property of the flywheels to deliver high amounts of energy in short periods of time, it sounds like a very promising solution to a very complex problem of power management.

Zeljko Medenica

Last Wednesday the Project54 lab hosted the April meeting of the New Hampshire Usability Professionals Association (the NH section of the Usability Professionals Association). What does the NHUPA do? Here is what Michael Hawley, Senior VP for Experience Design at Mad*Pow, and NHUPA president, has to say on this topic:

The New Hampshire Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) provides networking and professional development opportunities for usability professionals, information architects, interaction designers, and other user experience professionals and students in the Seacoast and Southern NH regions. The professionals are dedicated to designing technology and software that is easy to use, useful and engaging. Our mission is to foster the growth of the local usability community and to provide an environment for members to exchange information on job opportunities, tips, tools, methodologies, and technologies related to usability.

The meeting started with a lab open house during which Oszkar Palinko, Zeljko Medenica and I discussed aspects of the Project54 effort related to user interface development and deployment in vehicles. After the open house I gave a presentation introducing two of our studies (Oszkar’s PTT glove study and a study exploring the use of navigation aids in cars). Here are a couple of pictures from the event (more on Flickr):

The 20 people who attended this meeting had excellent questions and suggestions for us, and it was a pleasure to talk to so many of them. Thanks to Michael Hawley for bringing this meeting to UNH, thanks to Kyle Soucy of Usable Interface for recommending the Project54 lab as a good venue for a NHUPA meeting, and thanks to UPA members who visited and spent time talking to us.

Andrew Kun

UPDATE: More pictures on Flickr by Kyle Soucy.

Hello ecebloggers,

Yesterday, Tuesday 04/21/2009, a close friend of mine, Nedeljko Vasic (in the picture below), gave a talk at UNH CS Weekly session on his current research titled Energy-aware traffic engineering. Nedeljko is currently a second year PhD student at EPFL’s Networked Systems Laboratory. In 2006 he was awarded with “St. Sava’s” award by the Ministry of Education of The Republic of Serbia for being the best student in the country. He also received IBM PhD Fellowship for 2009.

What is energy-aware traffic engineering? As Nedeljko mentioned in his talk, Internet’s energy consumption in the US only is 20TWh which costs about 2 billion dollars per year. With demands like cloud computing, video streaming, and video on demand energy consumption is highly likely to increase. CMOS technology is reaching a plateau in power efficiency and cooling might help, but actually coolers will just increase the energy consumption. Nedeljko is suggesting that the solution for this problem lies in a protocol that enables network hardware (routers, network cards …) to be smarter and aware of the amount of energy it needs to optimally address the network load.

Current network hardware operates in 5 different energy modes depending on the amount of network load. If the network load just slightly jumps above a certain operating region it will have to switch to a higher energy consumption mode. This switching between the energy regions is creating peaks in energy consumption, similar to turning on and off your computer. Another network device (in the network) might take this additional load and still operate in its current energy mode. Even more, network devices could take the load from several devices, stay in the same operating region, and if the devices from which the network load was taken don’t have any network load left, they could be put to sleep. By implementing this idea in EATe protocol Nedeljko was able to get within 15% of the optimal energy consumption solution (see picture below), in the worst case scenario, and remove traffic from 15-31% of the devices.

His talk raised a lot of questions in the audience and made the Q&A session 30 minutes long! One of the more interesting questions was how would load switching be provided amongst different ISPs without them revealing a lot of information about their network topology? Professors from the UNH CS department were delighted with his talk and asked him to give another one this fall. I certainly hope that he will accept their invitation

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic