Olson Coauthors Paper with CSS Undergrad Siqi Zhang
June 2016 — Dr. Olson worked with Siqi Zhang on a conference paper "Keypoint Recognition with Histograms of Normalized Colors." The paper was presented in a poster session at the 2016 13th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision.
Lagesse Receives the Distinguished Undergraduate Research and Creative Practice Mentor Award
May 2016 — Dr. Lagesse received the award along with another UWB faculty member, Julie Shayne. The award goes to faculty members who exemplify UW Bothell's commitment to undergraduate research education. The award winners are nominated by students, faculty, or staff. Dr. Lagesse's research focuses on cyber security, specifically in wireless communication systems, secure machine learning, secure electronic voting, and cyber security education.
Folsom Receives $75,000 Grant Through the Amazon Catalyst Program
May 2016 — Tyler Folsom has been selected for a $75,000 grant through the Amazon Catalyst program. The project is "Taking Vehicle Automation to Bicycles". The UWB Embedded Systems Lab has two recumbent electric tricycles with steering and brake actuators for drive-by-wire. We have demonstrate remote operation three ways:
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On-board joystick
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Remote operation from Android device over Bluetooth
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Radio control from a model airplane controller.
The grant will be used to extend operation to full autonomy, with most of the money providing student internships. The computer system is based on a stack of Arduinos programmed in C/C++ and supported by custom designed printed circuit boards. Present software and sensors compute GPS localization, speed, heading, and steer angle. One Arduino is dedicated to finding the best current route to the destination and another uses an array of sonar range finders to detect obstacles. Work remaining includes a control system to maintain desired speed and heading, algorithms to avoid obstacles, system integration, redesign of circuit boards, and improved documentation.
The vehicles have been used to support CSS 427/428. We would welcome interdisciplinary applications such as communications, real-time vision, electronic circuit design, and mechanical design of a fairing. Open source code is available on https://github.com/elcano/elcano. In a year, we hope to offer a vehicle automation package costing under $2000 suitable for toy cars, real bicycles/tricycles, and real cars. Our ultimate goal is an urban transportation system based on vehicles that weigh less than the rider and offer a drastic reduction in energy consumption and greenhouse gas production.
Socha to Speak at Microsoft Research
May 2016 — Dr. Socha will be giving a talk at Microsoft Research on June 1st. He will be speaking about "Wide-Field Ethnography: Studying Software Engineering (and Other Things) in 2025 and Beyond." This talk presents a vision and initial results relating to these types of questions. This vision evolved from our struggles working with a large (6 TB) dataset of video, audio, screen-capture, photos, time-lapse imagery, and interviews gathered from a software development organization over 11 days. We used multiple data collectors (e.g., nine GoPro cameras, six Zoom H2n audio recorders) running concurrently, so that we can follow work across space, time, and modality. The talk discusses opportunities and challenges of working with such a large, multi-modal, multi-channel dataset, some initial challenges on doing this type of research in business and educational settings, and our thoughts on how both opportunities and challenges will grow as researchers deploy more sensors and data collectors to gather more types of data over wider spaces over longer periods of time.