Projects for the NGI Scholars Program

When physically threatened, a mobile phone is a valuable tool for calling the police. But what if it's too late? The Video 911 system lets the user begin recording audio and video as soon as they are threatened. It is stored in an offsite repository that cannot be erased or damaged. If the user finds safety they can neutralize the recording. But should they be attacked and lose control of the phone an operator is notified who can then examine the recorded stream and GPS data in order to dispatch an officer. But more importantly, informing an assailant that their face is already safely recorded will be a powerful deterrent.

The remote Internet-controlled rover gives users the ability to visit a remote location without the hassle of physically going there. Internet users will be able to use remote-controlled vehicles to explore interesting tourist, shopping, and adventure sites around the world. Each rover will be controlled by an online user that 'rents' the unit for a certain period of time. The user will receive live video and sound feeds from the rover, and may eventually be able to interact with the environment using grappling devices, visual displays, or speakers. Users may also interact with one another through an integrated chat. Allowing users to explore and interact with remote environments from their personal computer will not only enhance the web experience but also make the world that much smaller through next generation Internet.

The Cooperative Library is a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing/storage network. It is based on research at UC Berkeley and MIT. Files uploaded into the network are broken up into blocks and are replicated and cached through out the network's nodes for redundancy and reliability for file retrieval.

I created an application which listens to a well known multicast address for multicast session and then puts them into INDIVA, a program that automates the production of webcasts. Furthermore, to save resources, a program is created and implement within VIC such that all "meaningless streams" are discarded.

I am currently working on a Generic Sensor platform which will allow the motes to communicate data back to a base station, irrespective of the function. I hope that this platform will allow integratation of the functions of a typical sensor node. The node will sit passively but will respond to command packets it receives from the base station. I will also attempt to implement broadcast and routing back of data to the base station.

WISE (Web-based Inquiry Science Environment) is a tool developed by the School of Education which provides an on-line science learning environment for students. In the Spring semester, I worked along with a few students under the supervision of Prof. Michael Clancy to develop a curriculum for CS3, our introductory course in symbolic programming, which was to be tested (this summer) before being adopted as an addition to UC Merced's CS program.

My current summer project involves an extension of this study for the course CS61B (Data Structures). This will involve studying the course material taught over the years by different instructors and coming up with a lesson plan that can then be developed similar to the above. The task also includes coming up with some novel ideas for projects that would be of a more diverse nature than have previously been used, so as to adapt to the (intended) diverse nature of Merced's engineering program.

One of the first, most common, and most useful applications that today's computer users access is the World Wide Web (web). One population of users for whom the web is especially important is those with motor disabilities, because it may enable them to do the things that they might not otherwise be able to do: shopping, getting an education, running a business. This is particularly important for low bandwidth users: users with such limited motor and speech that they can only produce one or two signals when communicating with a computer. We present requirements for low bandwidth web accessibility and two tools that address these requirements. The first is a modified web browser, the second a proxy that modifies HTML. Both work without requiring web page authors to modify their pages. (The proxy is being written for this project).

Throughout these years, software designers and developers have designed software courseware such as webCT and blackboard, to facilitate students' online learning experience. These systems undergo intensive development and have good usability for the student, but do not embody particular pedagogical principles. As the design of normal web sites has a great effect on users' ability to find and use information. The goal of this research project is to derive some heuristics to extend the learnability of online educational courseware. The derived learnability heuristics will help instructors to develop and design coursewares and applications that are user-friendly to students. This affects students' and professors' experience and confidence in using the online courseware. I believe that with improved learning experience, students would find studying more fun and interesting.

The Street Stories project in SIMS makes narratives from residents in the area available to anyone passing by who wants to know more about the community they are exploring. The project uses GPS and handheld technology to tell stories about issues shared by a community over space and time. Currently the project runs on an iPAQ device that has GPS and extra memory to store the audio files. My project will model the same idea, but on a different and smaller, lighter, more common platform - a cellular phone. Because of the nature of the target device, changes need to be made to the design, including the addition of a server and database to store the necessary files due to the memory limitations on cell phones. Modifying the target device to be cell phones enables a more realistic future for Street Stories.