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

Last week, Lieutenant Mark Liebl of the NH State Police started testing new versions of the Project54 navigation application and the Project54 handheld application.

Jon Oppelaar installed a USB GPS unit (GlobalSat BU-353) in Mark’s cruiser. This unit performs significantly better than an older GPS unit that was intalled several years ago, and it will enable Mark to test Jon’s navigation application. The application integrates Microsoft MapPoint into the Project54 environment. Here’s Jon (in the passenger seat) tweaking software settings in Mark’s cruiser during the installation of the USB GPS unit:

Andras Fekete worked on updating the software that allows a handheld unit to control the in-car devices (see picture below). Andras has already successfully deployed handheld technology in the Lee, NH police department, which we describe in a paper that will be presented at IE08. We’re now looking forward to getting Mark’s feedback about Project54 handheld software.

While Jon and Andras were installing new hardware and software, Mike Farrar talked to Mark about using the Project54 handheld computer’s imager, not only as a 2D barcode reader (e.g. for driver licenses), but as a camera. Mike is developing software that will allow officers to take pictures and tag them. Tagging can be done using voice commands, which should speed up data entry. It’s worth mentioning that Mike is developing his software using the Symbol MC-70, which comes with a cell modem. This opens new opportunities for getting data to officers in the field, especially in urban areas. In fact, the new version of the MC-70 also has a built-in GPS unit, again presenting interesting opportunities for law enforcement applications.

Thanks for testing all this harware and software Mark!

Andrew Kun

The January/February 2008 issue of Speech Technology Magazine has an article on Project54. The primary subject is the Project54 speech user interface. It’s a fun read.

The article includes interesting quotes from Project54’s Bill Lenharth and from Lieutenant Mark Liebl of the New Hampshire State Police (NHSP). Mark has been involved in formulating requirements for the Project54 system and testing our designs since the inception of the project. He has also helped deploy the system in over 300 NHSP cruisers.

Toward the end, the article mentions two areas of our ongoing research. One of them is the investigation of how various characteristics of in-car speech user interfaces (SUIs) influence driving performance. We’ve been conducting experiments with human participants in order to evaluate the influence of individual SUI characteristics on driving performance. E.g. we have investigated the relationship between speech recognition accuracy of in-car user interfaces and driving performance. A small correction to the article: we do not conduct our experiments using Project54-equipped cars - the experiments use our driving simulator.

The second research topic the article mentions is our investigation of the effects of in-car navigation devices on driving performance. This is collaborative work with Tim Paek of Microsoft Research. One question we hope to answer is when drivers feel compelled to look at the GUI of a navigation device, even if they have speech output from the device. This is an important question since taking your eyes off the road while driving is potentially hazardous. Note that one of my graduate students, Jon Oppelaar, has integrated Microsoft’s MapPoint into Project54. Mark Liebl is testing Jon’s software on the road (this is the “voice-enabled GPS unit” in the article).

Andrew Kun

Have you seen the 80s movie WarGames? Well, I’m old enough to have seen it in the movies. Here’s the trailer:

Here’s why I ask if you’ve seen this movie. Kent Chamberlin, Erika Clifford and I were discussing ongoing and future datacasting technology evaluations by Project54 at UNH. We’re interested in using datacasting in first responder operations. One aspect of the evaluations is finding out where, and under what conditions (weather, moving or stationary receiver, etc), can the datacasting signal be received. Here’s a post that discusses work using stationary receivers on how weather events are related to datacasting reception. We’re currently planning a study evaluating a technology that allows receiving datacasting signals while moving, e.g. in a car. We plan to install datacasting receivers in vehicles and create coverage maps for (parts of) the state of New Hampshire.

It occured to me that this planned activity is very similar to wardriving. Wardriving refers to driving in search of Wi-Fi networks. The result is the map of an area with Wi-Fi networks shown. Wardriving was named after wardialing, the term used in WarGames, that means dialing a list of phone numbers in search of lines hooked to computer modems. Here’s what this looked like in the movie:

So, should we use “wardriving” to describe data collection for our datacasting work? Or maybe find another term? Also, I wonder if there are any wardriving maps of Durham, NH?

Andrew Kun

Azentek has developed a powerful full-featured in-vehicle computer with a built in 6.5” touch-screen that replaces the traditional double DIN sized radio. Highlights include: Core Duo 1.83 GHz processor, Vista/XP, up to 2GB RAM, Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, Dolby 5.1 surround, A/V IO and noise+echo cancelling microphones for hands free calling and voice activated navigation. Additionally this computer supports advanced telematics applications such as remote fleet management and vehicle diagnostics.

here is a video of the system:

Ian Cassias

Vehicle telematics is the use of computing, sensing and telecommunication technologies to provide services in an automotive environment. Vehicle telematics service categories include navigation, remote diagnostics, fleet management, safety, information access, context awareness and mobile commerce. Supporting these services requires unique hardware and software architectures. Additionally, issues such as privacy, data security and human factors design must be considered in the implementation of vehicle telematics. The purpose of this paper is to provide a partial review of the extensive body of research relating to this field.

Project54 is involved in implementing telematics services supporting public safety operations. Ongoing research efforts aim to provide telematics services such as navigation, fleet management, remote diagnostics, information access and context awareness to police officers in the field.

Here is the paper:

I. Cassias, A.L. Kun, “Vehicle Telematics: A Literature Review”, Technical Report, ECE.P54.2007.9, University of New Hampshire, Project54, 2007

Ian Cassias

A company called Dash has come out with a car GPS unit equipped with GPS,WiFi, and cellular communications. With these features a network is formed from all the Dash units and live traffic information is shared. In addition to live traffic data, they have database of historic traffic patterns for metropolitan areas. This sounds great. However, for this to really useful lots of cars in your course would need their product. It seems that some standard should be created( if not already) so other units besides Dash can benefit and thus create a larger , more accurate and more useful traffic sharing network.

Jon Oppelaar