The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of New Hampshire now has a Facebook page. You can find it here.

Show your support for UNH ECE by becoming a fan! And of course, you can use the page to make plans for Homecoming and the ECE Department’s 100 year anniversary celebration.

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

Students from the UNH Tech Camp recently visited the Project54 lab. These students ranged from 7th to 12th grade, and all but two were from New Hampshire. The camp is aimed to give young interested students a glimpse of the engineering and science world. The students were given a brief background of how P54 came together and how the system works. Lastly the students got a chance to use the lab car and drive the simulator, the pictures below are from the UNH Tech Camp’s visit.

Here, Oszkar Palinko explains how the eye tracker software and the simulator are used at P54.

Here, I explain to a student how the touch screen and voice command can be used to control P54.

This was the first annual UNH Tech Camp and it was great to see such a large turn out. It is always a good experience when you get to work with young students so interested in engineering. I look forward to the visits from the UNH Tech Camp in the future.

David Garneau

Last week, May 12-13, the IEEE held a conference on Homeland Security technologies in Waltham, MA. Eric Ramsey, a former Project54 employee, was presenting a paper related to his master’s thesis on the development of a Project25 data radio basestation. I went down to accompany him for the 2nd day of the conference and view some of the other presentations on Homeland Security technologies.

During the opening talks of the day, it was immediately apparent that this was not a gritty engineering conference, but instead more of an business-oriented affair, discussing the industry that has grown up around Homeland Security rather than the gory details of the technologies themselves. This put Eric’s presentation a little out of place as it was a very detailed engineering breakdown of his work, but it didn’t seem like he lost anyone as people asked intelligent questions and were more than willing to discuss the topic with us afterward!

Here is Eric presenting:

The presentations which particularly interested Eric and I, since we are both involved (or were at one point, in the case of Eric) in the Project25 basestation project at Project54, were those concerning radio interoperability. We saw many different takes on how to solve the problem of facilitating better bandwith and channel usage, allocation, and communication in general between public safety organizations. From creative (in terms of today’s standards) radio policy management to satellite-based communications (rather than LMR), to shifting bandwidth to the 700MHz band (formerly occupied by analog television) to improving the radios themselves, there are a lot of little pieces to the puzzle! We even saw a presentation from a fellow NIJ COMTEC fundee, Nancy Jesuale.

On a side note, one of the professors here at the UNH ECE Department, Andrzej Rucinski, was co-chair of a session at the conference. Unfortunately, the session ran at the same time as Eric’s presentation, so we were unable to head over and say “hi”.

The conference was a great experience - I hadn’t been to one since the Network Security conference I attended a few years back in Boston, and this one was just as interesting. It’s always nice to take a step back from your own work and check out what other people in the field are doing! Radio interoperability is a huge undertaking, and it’s great to see so many smart people working on the problem!

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

Hello ecebloggers,

Today, Monday 05/12/2008 was the last day of the student project presentations and the day of LPC (Linear Predictive Coding). The session chair was Nate Bourgoine (picture below).

After a little confusion in the beginning, Ivan Elhart (in the picture below), CATlab member, opened today’s presentations with Project 25 MATLAB implementation of compression. He explained the standard he tried to implement for speech compression and he compared his results with Praat.

Yuanli Wang (picture below), who we know as the session chair for Wednesday 05/07/2008, used LPC for compression and synthesis of speech. We had a nice demo where we heard his results.

After Yuanli, another member of CATlab presented. Oszkar Palinko (picture below), presented his work on a wireless microphone. He transmitted LPC coefficients to lower the amount of data transmitted over RF.

The honor of closing the student presentations went to Dan Reynolds (picture below). He implemented audio water marking and his presentation was voted for the best student presentation of the class. He also received a nice book as a reward. Congrats Dan!

Here should be a picture of all of us with a satisfied, wide smile after the end of the ECE 992 Speech class. Unfortunately you’ll get just the description of the picture because my camera battery died, but I’m sure you can imagine it. Here’s some help : )))

All pictures from the presentations can be found here.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Last Saturday was the UNH ECE Department’s open house (in fact this was the UNH College of Engineering and Physical Sciences open house). The Project54 lab was one of the labs prospective ECE students toured. Our visitors got a chance to test drive the Project54 driving simulator (newly equipped with an eye tracker). We also talked about college life and how work in a research lab fits in with school - in fact Mark Taipan spoke on this subject from the perspective of a UNH ECE undergraduate student. Here’s a picture of Mark at the open house:

Turnout was great (around 100 people) and I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to meet prospective students and their families and friends. For more open house pictures from our lab click here. Finally, thanks to Alex, Mark, Oszkar and Zeljko for making the open house a success.

Andrew Kun

Each year at UNH, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Seniors join with other engineering disciplines in the Undergraduate Research Conference (URC). Here they present their research projects that they have been working on for months, some even up to a year. This year, the projects range from renewable energy to digital imaging processing to audio noise canceling.

One interesting project was “InterFACE”, which utilizes digital image processing to track the movement of a face. It then uses that data to recreate the motion in a robotic head sculpture. The pictures below depicts their system design.

Another project which incorporated electrical design was the “Tidal Power Generation”. This project was a combined effort of the Mechanical, Ocean and Electrical Engineering Departments. Here the idea of utilizing tidal action, and the related currents, to convert into electrical power by way of a turbine was investigated.

Above we see the display of the system, as well as a demonstration of the theory behind the project.

Overall, the conference was exciting and impressive, and the Seniors really worked hard to put forth their best efforts. For both myself and Mark Taipan, we were especially excited due to our recent award of a SURF Grant for the summer of 2008 to work on our project Kingsbury Location Awareness System (KLAS). We will be presenting our project at the URC next year, and so it was very helpful to see this year’s projects which will help us plan our presentation for next year.

Matthew Lape

Congratulations to Matt and Mark on receiving summer undergradate research fellowships! They will work with me on a ubicomp project that Matt described in an earlier post.

Andrew Kun