Yu Cai (TTEC/ICC) is Principal Investigator on a project that has received a $82,416 Other Sponsored Activities Grant from the National Security Agency/National Science Foundation. The one-year project is titled, “Innovation GenCyber Learning Experience for High School Students Through Storytelling + Teaching + Gaming + Doing.” Bo Chen (SCS), Guy Hembroff (TTEC), and Tim Van Wagner (TTEC), are co-PIs.
Zhen Liu (CEE/MTTI) is Principal Investigator on a project that has received a $90,418 contract with Michigan Department of Transportation. This project is titled “Improved Calculation of Scour Potential in Cohesive Soils and Scour Susceptible Rock.” Brian Barkdoll (CEE) and Stan Vitton (CEE) are co-PI’s on this 14-month project.
Michigan Tech will offer two non-residential, week-long GenCyber camps this summer. The first camp is for local middle school and high school students (grades 7-12) and will be held the week of June 17. The second camp is for local K-12 STEM teachers and will be held the week of August 12.
Explore the world of cybersecurity with experts in the field through fun, real-world learning experiences. Camp activities include hands-on exercises, interactive lectures, games, career exploration, and campus tours.
All camp activities will be offered at no cost to camp participants. Visit mtu.edu/gencyber to learn more and register.
Funding of the camps is provided jointly by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Kuilin Zhang’s (CPS/CEE) research on transportation planners was the subject of a story covered in Auto World News titled, “Filling in the gaps of connected car data helps transportation planners,” which was published on May 6, 2019.
Graduate students Chong Cao and Joe Oncken work with researcher Bo Chen (CPS/ME-EM) in the Intelligent Mechatronics and Embedded Systems lab. In the lab, they develop Simulink models for smart city technology — and show how the models shift into real-life testing.
“We develop and validate the controls in our process using a simulation first,” Cao explained, to which Oncken added: “Simulink is just an on-computer simulation software that’s all visual — you put building blocks together — and make an entire model of an electric car, the electrical grid.”
Bo Chen is the Dave House Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. Joe Oncken is PhD Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Mechanical Engineering – Engineering Mechanics; Chong Cao is a PhD Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Yu Cai (SoT/ICC), is principal investigator on a project that has received a $87,895 other sponsored activities grant from the National Security Agency for the project “Innovative GenCyber Learning Experience for K-12 Teachers Through Storytelling + Teaching + Gaming + Doing.” Bo Chen (CS), Guy Hembroff (SoT), and Tim Van Wagner (SoT) are Co-PIs on this project.
By Karen Johnson, ICC Communications Director
What if an everyday surface, like a table, could be transformed into a rich, interactive surface that can remotely operate things like computers, entertainment systems, and home appliances?
That’s what Michigan Tech Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) researchers Keith Vertanen and Scott Kuhl set out to do with a $44K seed grant from Electrical and Computer Engineering alumnus Paul Williams ’61.
Vertanen, assistant professor of computer science, and Kuhl, associate professor of computer science, are members of the ICC’s Center for Human-Centered Computing, which integrates art, people, design, technology, and human experience in the research of multiple areas of human-centered computing. They were assisted in this research by PhD candidate Siva Krishna Kakula, Computer Science, and undergraduate Zachary Garavet, Computer Engineering.
The team’s research goals were threefold: to create machine learning models that can precisely locate a user’s taps on a surface using only an array of inexpensive surface microphones; demonstrate the feasibility and precision of the models by developing a virtual keyboard interface on an ordinary wooden table; and conduct user studies to validate the system’s usability and performance.
The researchers are working on a related technical conference paper to present to their peers. Their outcomes included a prototype virtual keyboard that supports typing at rates comparable to a touchscreen device; possibly the first-ever acoustic sensing algorithm that infers a continuous two-dimensional tap location; and novel statistical models that quickly adapt to individual users and varied input surfaces.
Further, their results, hardware, and data sets can be applied to future collaborative work, and were used in the researchers’ $500K National Science Foundation proposal, “Text Interaction in Virtual and Augmented Environments,” which is under review.
Future applications of the research include enriched interactions in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), compared to existing vision-only based sensing; and on-body interaction, like using your palm as an input surface.
Vertanen and Kuhl plan to continue this research, working to improve the accuracy of tap location inference, build richer interactions like swiping or tapping with multiple fingers, develop wireless sensor pods that can be quickly and easily deployed on any flat surface, and explore the display of virtual visual content on surfaces via Augmented Reality smartglasses.
View a video about this research at https://youtu.be/sF7aeXMfsIQ. Download a summary of the research from the ICC website at icc.mtu.edu/downloads.
Seed grant donor Paul Williams is also the benefactor of the Paul and Susan Williams Center for Computer Systems Research, located on the fifth floor of the Electrical Energy Resources Center. The 10,000-square-foot, high-performance computing center—the home of the ICC—was established to foster close collaboration among researchers across multiple disciplines at Michigan Tech
Research by Kuilin Zhang (CS) was featured in the story “MTU Researchers develop optimization model to fill in the gaps in connected vehicle data in the April 26, 2019, issue of Green Car Congress. View the article here: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/04/20190426-mtu.html
Announcement and Call for Poster Abstracts
June 15 – June 17, 2019
Michigan Technological University Campus
Houghton, Michigan
http://pages.mtu.edu/~zhengfux/Overview.htm
Download a PDF of this announcement.
Purpose — The primary focus of the proposed interdisciplinary symposium is to provide an update on recent important contributions to computational and numerical methods in biomedical problems.
Topics — Poster presentations are solicited on (1) Novel image formation/reconstruction/processing methods and their applications in biomedical problems, (2) Novel mathematical algorithms enabling multi-scale and multi-physics simulations related to biomedical problems, (3) Scientific visualization and analytics of (BIG) biomedical data (4) Novel machine learning and statistical analysis methods and their application in (BIG) biomedical data and (5) Applications of computational modeling to significant biomedical and healthcare problems. Applying novel mathematics and modeling techniques to extract new or additional information from complex bio-medical datasets are particularly encouraged.
Meeting venue — Michigan Tech campus hosts all meeting activities. Our campus in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior. The local airport is the Houghton county regional airport (code: CMX).
Meeting dates and times — Symposium registration will open at 7:00 a.m. on June 15. The technical sessions will be held on June 15 – June 17, beginning at 8:00 a.m. and ending at 5:00 PM.
Interest in attending — As soon as possible, please contact us by emailing symposium-cmipbp@mtu.edu to inform us of your interest in attending the Symposium or present a poster. Please provide your full name, affiliation, postal and email addresses and phone and fax numbers. If planning to present a poster, please also provide a tentative title and submission date for the abstract.
Abstracts — Abstracts should be submitted electronically to symposium-cmipbp@mtu.edu and must be received by May 25 for technical review by the Organizing Committee. Prospective speakers will be informed on a rolling basis regarding the acceptance of their abstracts for presentation. No specific format requirement for solicited abstract. However, abstracts should be limited to one-page.
For additional information, contact:
Prof. Zhengfu Xu, 906-487-3332, zhengfux@mtu.edu
Dr. JJ (Jingfeng) Jiang, 906-487-1943, jjiang@mtu.edu
By Karen Johnson, ICC Communications Director
Underwater acoustic communication has been in use for decades, but primarily for military applications. In recent years, private sectors such as environmental monitoring, off-shore oil and gas exploration, and aquaculture have become interested in its possibilities.
But existing research about underwater acoustic communication networks often relies on human-operated surface ships or cost-prohibitive autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). And these cost barriers can limit academic research evaluation to computer simulations, constraining research innovation towards practical applications.
Recognizing the above gap, Michigan Tech Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) researchers Zhaohui Wang, assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Nina Mahmoudian, adjunct professor, Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, saw an opportunity to combine their areas of expertise: for Wang, underwater acoustic communications, for Mahmoudian, low-cost marine robotics and AUVs.
Also part of the research team were PhD student Li Wei, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and post-doc research engineer Barzin Moridian, Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics. The team also collaborated with scientists at Michigan Tech’s Great Lakes Research Center.
With a $50K seed grant from Electrical and Computer Engineering alumnus Paul Williams ’61, the team took the research beneath the surface to develop a low-cost marine mobile infrastructure and investigate the challenges and possible solutions in engineering a leading-edge AUV communication network.
They broke it down into three areas: the development of low-cost, high-modularity autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), each equipped with a collection of sensors and serving as surrogates for AUVs; equipping each ASV with an acoustic modem and implementing communication and networking protocols to facilitate underwater communication among the vessels; and conducting field experiments to collect data about the fundamental challenges in mobile acoustic communications and networking among AUVs.
The team’s outcomes included two low-cost, autonomous, on-the-water boats; an experimental data set, data analysis, and preliminary results; a technical paper presented at the 2018 IEEE OES Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Symposium; and a marine mobile wireless networking infrastructure for use in continued research.
Just half of their seed grant has been used, and this summer Wang and Mahmoudian will work to improve the boats and the communications system, and conduct more field research. In addition, they are planning to write two National Science Foundation proposals to take their research even further.
Download a summary of the research from the ICC website at icc.mtu.edu/downloads.
Seed grant donor Paul Williams is also the benefactor of the Paul and Susan Williams Center for Computer Systems Research, located on the fifth floor of the Electrical Energy Resources Center. The 10,000-square-foot, high-performance computing center—the home of the ICC—was established to foster close collaboration among researchers across multiple disciplines at Michigan Tech
The ICC, founded in 2015, promotes collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and learning experiences in the areas of cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity, data sciences, human-centered computing, and scalable architectures and systems. It provides faculty and students the opportunity to work across organizational boundaries to create an environment that mirrors contemporary technological innovation.
Five research centers comprise the ICC. The ICC’s 50 members, who represent 15 academic units at Michigan Tech, are collaborating to conduct impactful research, make valuable contributions in the field of computing, and solve problems of critical national importance.
Visit the ICC website at icc.mtu.edu. Contact the ICC at icc-contact@mtu.edu or 906-487-2518.