CSCE 486 & 488: Computer Science & Computer Engineering Professional Development

Transit-related mobile-phone apps

Star TRAN, Get on Board page: The senior-design class last semester developed the first set of mobile phone apps to work with Lincoln's Star TRAN Get on Board. There are many opportunities for further development of this and other apps related to an automatic vehicle location (AVL) vehicle tracking system.
Lincoln Police Department's Proactive Police Patrol information (P3i) resulted from a collaboration between our Department and the LPD. There may be further opportunites for projects related to this.
New App to Crowd-Source NYC Subway Delay Information

CMU's Tiramisu:

Travel Assistance Device: GPS enabled cell phone app to help disabled persons making trips on fixed route systems to plan and navigate
BusTrack Windows Phone 7 App: Bus tracking application (there is a short demo video)
Download Mobile phone app to report issues around your city you would like to see resolved: Available on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry right now.
A similar app, called Citizen Sourcing, provided by the city of Boston. Other similar apps are also available for LA, Do-it-Yourself Democracy - California, Portland (with Blog article). Read/Listen to an NPR story about these here.
IEEE Spectrum, June 2010 article: Cross-Platform Smartphone Apps Still Difficult
Cycling Through Data (CACM, September 2010): Sensor equipped bicycles provide valuable data to cyclists, city planners, and computer scientists.
Increasing fuel efficiency with a smartphone, MIT news, Aug. 25, 2011

DARPA Grand Challenges and Followup

Wikipedia page on DARPA Grand Challenge providing the history and background and a summary of the two Grand Challenges (2004 and 2005) and the Urban Challenge (2007) with a good complement of interesting links that you might expect to see in a good Wikipedia article.
DARPA's page on the Urban Challenge
NOVA program, The Great Robot Race, on the first and second DARPA Grand Challenge Competitions that took place at Mojave desert in 2004 and 2005.

Autonomous Vehicle Roadmap 2010-2020: This is a video of a presentation at RoboBusiness 2008. It provides a a very nice summary of the DARPA Grand Challenge series of competitions, highlighting several emerging sensor and navigationsal technologies as a consequence of the competitions. The first part of the presentation is a bit hokey and the roadmap in the last part for civilian autonomous vehicle is highly speculative. However, I found this 40-minute video worth watching.
Google autonomous car

Google Cars Drive Themselves, inTraffic (NYT article, 2010/10/10)
Autonomous Car Driving through heavy City Traffic - You Tube video (uploaded Oct 10, 2010)
What we’re driving at (Official Blog)

LaTeX Resources

Some Previous Projects

Spring '11 (See the common Wiki page for all the team projects documenting progress):

OBDMe: On-board diagnostics using embedded hardware, Bluetooth communication, mobile applications, a web service
backend, and a web application front end (Brett Baumert, Curtis Johnson, and Michael Kelly): Final Presentation, Written Report
parkChecker: Parking Lot Detection (Aldo Arizmendi, Jake Reisdorff, Jason Armstrong): Final Presentation, Written Report
Mobile-phone app for GetOnBoard (AVL system from Lincoln's Startran bus system)

iPhone team: Final Presentation, Written Report
Android team: Final Presentation, Written Report
Windows-7 team: Final Presentation, Written Report
Backend-Development team: Final Presentation, Written Report

Spring '10: (Overview by Prof. Vuran):

Home Automation System (Nick Ebert, Tim Echtenkamp, Ray Page, Matt Rosno)
Wireless In-Ear Audio Monitor (Erin Bartholomew, Paul Bauer, Nate Lowry, Sabina Manandhar)
Carlos: The Fire-Fighting Robot (Anne Neilsen, Justin Popek, Lyle Shearer)

Spring '08:

Dancing Robots (Adam Eck, Paul Bradley, and Daniel Podany), Inspiring Music Education and Interest in Technology through Dancing Robots: Final Presentation, Written Report, Wiki Page

Life 'N Touch (Kyle Dobitz, Jeremy Muehlbauer), Spring'08, Life 'N Touch provides a heads-up display on which data can be relayed to the user: Final Presentation, Written Report, Wiki Page.

Spring '07: The Car Monitor System Final (Joshua Rupiper, Tyler Andrews, James Dicke), Connects the driver to the car by providing in-depth information including mechanical and positional data through a simple and easy-to-use web interface: Final Presentation, Written Report.

On Technical Communication:

Others:

Mars Rovers (Opportunity & Spirit) - Disasters, Solutions, Miracles

NASA Rover site
Steven Squyres, the principle scientist behind the Mars Exploration Rover Project, discusses the engineering challenges that had to be met in getting the rovers to Mars.
Bad Day at Mission Control
National Geographic Special Issue
Mars Time All the Time another article on Perpetual Jet Lag

Drilling for Certainty, is a May 27, 2010 op-ed piece in New York Times by David Brooks. Prompted by the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the author discusses the difficulty of risk assessment "crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology". It provides a nice complement to the chapters in the textbook, Inviting Disasters. Also worth reading is a much earlier article, cited by Mr. Brooks, Blowing Up by Malcom Gladwell, New Yorker, January 22, 1996.

Modern Marvels - Engineering Disasters

Fukushima Nuclear Accident in Japan:

"A simple and accurate explanation" by Barry Brook, Energy Colllective, Posted March 15, 2011.
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Wikipedia article.
IEEE Spectrum, May, 2011, special issue with several articles dedicated to the accident.

Disaster Wise, Comments about technological history, system fractures, and human resilience from James R. Chiles, the author of Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology

Week	Start Date	Monday		Wednesday		Friday
Week	Start Date	Topics	Assignment	Topics	Assignment	Topics	Assignment
1	8/22	First day-486: Syllabus, etc. First day-488 CPN Lab Research	HW 0 (self-promotion) out	Previous projects, individual presentations	HW 1 (individual research) out	Individual presentations
2	8/29	Kinect Projects (Anita Sarma)		City of Lincoln Projects (Ian Cottingham) Student Technology Training (Sourabh Chakraborty)		Underground Sensor Networks and Pheasant Tracker (Can Vuran)	HW 2 (oral team presentations based on textbook and reading materials) out. HW2 Chapter/Topic Assignments
3	9/5	LABOR DAY	LABOR DAY	Pheasant Tracking (TJ Fontaine) UAV Project (Sebastian Elbaum) HW 1 Due. HW 2 Topic preferences due.		HKS Medical Systems Projects (Paul Kenyon)
4	9/12	Holland Computing Center Projects (David Swanson and Ashu Guru)		Viewing of "Modern Marvels -Engineering Disasters" video in preparation for HW 2 presentations, starting next week.		Nebraska Global (Doug Durham)	Be sure to fill out the survey on Bb to express your project preferences asap.
5	9/19	Project and Project-group assignments
6	9/26
7	10/3
8	10/10
9	10/17	FALL BREAK
10	10/24
11	10/31
12	11/7
13	11/14
14	11/21			THANKSGIVING BREAK		THANKSGIVING BREAK
15	11/28
16	12/5	LAST WEEK OF CLASSES (Outreach activity: visits/demos by teams to 155 sections)
17	12/12	Wednesday, December 14, 7:30-9:30 AM: Project proposal presentations and miniproject demos

CSCE 486 & 488, Fall 2011

Computer Science & Computer Engineering
Professional Development

Instructors:
CSCE 486
Sharad C. Seth, Avery Hall, Room 359

CSCE 488
M. Can Vuran, Schorr Center, Room 107

Teaching Assistant:

Required Text Book: Inviting Disasters: Lessons from the Edge of Technology by James R. Chiles, Collins; Reprint edition (September 1, 2002), ISBN: 0066620821. (Link to the book on Amazon.com and at the publisher's website)

Syllabus: Often, answers to your questions about grading etc. can be found in the syllabus, therefore make it a habit of reviewing it from time to time.

Course Schedule

Lecture Schedule

Web Links:

CSCE 486 & 488, Fall 2011

Computer Science & Computer Engineering Professional Development

Instructors: CSCE 486 Sharad C. Seth, Avery Hall, Room 359

CSCE 488 M. Can Vuran, Schorr Center, Room 107

Teaching Assistant:

Required Text Book: Inviting Disasters: Lessons from the Edge of Technology by James R. Chiles, Collins; Reprint edition (September 1, 2002), ISBN: 0066620821. (Link to the book on Amazon.com and at the publisher's website)

Syllabus: Often, answers to your questions about grading etc. can be found in the syllabus, therefore make it a habit of reviewing it from time to time.

Course Schedule

Lecture Schedule

Web Links:

Computer Science & Computer Engineering
Professional Development

Instructors:
CSCE 486
Sharad C. Seth, Avery Hall, Room 359

CSCE 488
M. Can Vuran, Schorr Center, Room 107