With the goal at Project54 being to produce solutions in order to create a safer environment in which the police officer can control all of the lights, radar, and various devices within his/her police car, it is interesting to see the need for similar technology within regular cars to solve the problem of distracted drivers. Recently, the New York Times featured the series “Driven to Distraction”. Along with examining the issue of distracted drivers, the series allows you to “Gauge Your Distraction” with an interactive game that illustrates the large distraction that texting while driving creates. Similar to the goals of Project54, the public should become more aware of the dangers of in-car distractions and what can be done to limit these hazards.

Erika Swanson

For everyone with a Twitter account, there’s a new service called TwitTruth that can tell you details about your use of the social networking site. Unlike tools that analyze publicly available tweets, this application asks for access to your account and then analyzes if you’ve been tweeting links, re-tweeting, or just updating followers on your life. You can learn about other TwitTruth users, too. I thought it was a pretty cool concept to see if your usage of Twitter is in line with what statistics would deem “normal”. You can check out an article in The New York Times, or go directly to the website.

Erika Swanson

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

Have you ever wondered about where people most often look at when searching online maps? Microsoft Research has the answer. I recently found out that they released a free tool called “Hotmaps“, which collects statistical information about the frequency of people looking at different areas on the world map, and then displays collected data as a heat-map (i.e. a two dimensional histogram) using Microsoft Virtual Earth. Pretty neat idea!

Zeljko Medenica

During our experiments we use questionnaires to collect some data. So far we have used paper questionnaires. The major advantages of paper questionnaires are: ease of administration (subjects know what to do with them); and ease of creation (using a word processor). On the other hand,  there are two major flaws: unintentional incompleteness (subjects miss some questions); and data entry errors (transfer from paper to digital form is error prone). We are looking into an alternative method of questionnaire administration. The most likely solution is the delivery of computerized questionnaires through a survey application, such as LimeSurvey, an open source php based survey application. LimeSurvey allows an easy creation of questionnaires, while providing full control over the survey presentation. The questionnaires and data can be exported/imported using csv format. Questionnaires can also be printed and with the help of queXML and queXF the conversion of the data from paper into digital format can be automatic.

Alexander Shyrokov

Check out the new audio preview button on YouTube:

Pretty neat, and it was inspired by web comic xkcd (via Lifehacker)

Andrew Kun

I just ran across Slideshare, a (beta) website that lets you share slides (yes the name is descriptive). I uploaded my first set of (PowerPoint) slides, and now I can embed them in this post - very cool:

Andrew Kun

Check out www.tinyurl.com. It allows you to create tiny URLs out of long and winding ones. This is neat when you want to send a link in an email to someone without having to worry if their email client will interpret the multiple lines of the link correctly.

It’s also neat if you want to include links in presentations or posters. I’m preparing a presentation for an upcoming talk at Microsoft Research and have just used this site to create a couple of links: one to this YouTube video of the Project54 driving simulator and another to this eceblogger post about the eye tracker that we’ve recently installed in the simulator. Best of all, tinyurl allows you to create your own custom tiny URLs. So, I’ve created www.tinyurl.com/p54sim and www.tinyurl.com/eyetracker.

Andrew Kun

Check out Robert Scoble’s post on longer videos coming to YouTube. He also has a link to a Mark Cuban post in which Mark argues that YouTube’s business model is flawed and that Hulu’s is better. However, Hulu only has content generated by NBC and Universal (such as full-length movies), and no user-generated content (such movies about Project54 research on YouTube) so it seems like we’re comparing apples and oranges. Perhaps a better comparison is between YouTube and Flickr, especially now that you can upload movies to Flickr. Both YouTube and Flickr are social networking sites, while Hulu is not.

Andrew Kun

If you haven’t heard by now Microsoft’s http://maps.live.com has updated their routing algorithm to account for traffic. Check the box next to “Choose route based on traffic” to recalculated a route with traffic added into the equation.

The technology behind this is called Clearflow. Microsoft’s Adaptive Systems and Interaction group has created traffic models to predict congestion and find the quickest route.