So true its funny.  See more at http://www.phdcomics.com.

My paper was accepted today for IEEE SAS 2011!  It is a great paper for my research and apps.  5 years in the making.  This is a great conference, can’t wait to present and see the other session. 

The “Justin Bieber Hair for Everybody: The iPhone App No One Asked for” (Time)

… but everyone is talking about. 

Krapps - “Steve Jobs … truly magical with his revolutionary iBieber mane! Homer goes Bieber … simply amazing!”

Great news for us at iBroomCloset, the app is going viral!  Give it a try – it is a fun app. 

Krapps has an excellent review and has fun with the app.

“Steve Jobs … truly magical with his revolutionary iBieber mane!
Homer goes Bieber … simply amazing!”

Check out all the latest reviews.

Krapps - “Steve Jobs … truly magical with his revolutionary iBieber mane! Homer goes Bieber … simply amazing!”

Time - "We lead the world in iPhone app innovation!"
Gizmodo
Krapps
JBSource
Huffington Post

I was sitting in a coffee shop, grabbing a bite to eat – trying to find the place where I was going to meet some friends. 

I was at Highland Coffee – they had free wireless.

Bring up Google maps – where am I?  What was that positioning software that worked off geolocation for triangulation? 

Geosense for Windows

Windows 7 introduced the new Sensors and Location platform that would let Windows automatically respond to environmental changes sensed by light, orientation sensors, or GPS chips.  This makes your computer more aware of its surroundings and change itself accordingly.  The location platform is especially interesting, as it brings the potential of automatic location based search and maps to your PC.  Unfortunately, most laptops today are not equipped with GPS chips.  Thanks to Geosense, however, you can still use the location platform.

Geosense uses IP lookup, WiFi and Cell tower triangulation, and more to find your location as accurately as possible.  Geosense lists itself as a sensor in the Windows Sensors and Locations, so once you’ve installed it, all location-aware applications and services will be able to pickup your location from it.  Please note that Geosense only works on Windows 7 Home Premium and higher, as Windows 7 Starter doesn’t include the Sensors and Locations platform.

When it is finished installing, you are ready to use Geosense.  First, lets make sure Geosense is enabled.  Enter “Location” in your Start Menu search, and select “Location and Other Sensors”.

Here you should see Geosense listed as a sensor.  If it is not enabled, click the check box beside it and click Apply.

Location-aware Google Maps

A location aware application is a Google Maps app available from the Geosense site.  This will automatically open a Google map at your current location, so you can easily search for directions and nearby businesses.  This was very useful at the coffee hotspot to pinpoint my location.

Conclusion:

Geosense and the Windows 7 Location Platform gives you a great way to make your mobile computing experience even more interesting.  Geosense brings location awareness to a much broader audience than previously possible, so watch my blog for unique and innovative uses in the near future to see my ideas on situation awareness.

Many research projects use Java applets to show and demonstrate simulations.  By day, I’m a Microsoft developer.  I would like to keep synergy between my day job and my research so both can take advantage of items created and learned.  So I will introduce a series of tutorials on using Silverlight for Research Simulations over the next few months.

Its difficult to find research simulations using Silverlight; there are a few basic examples (bugs).  Like they say, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” – so I will try to imitate and convert the Substrate applet as inspiration and direction (picture above).

There are some Prerequisites that you must have:

• A Silverlight compatible browser (you can see the Silverlight sytem requirements here)
• Download the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight (this will also install the SL3 developer runtime + sdk). 
• Download the Silverlight Toolkit (which adds additional controls).
• Your favorite text editor (yes, initially I will use Notepad++ so we can walk through the basics).

Once you have these installed, you can test your Silverlight application by going to Microsoft’s Silverlight home page and ensure if all its content renders correctly.

Create the Container

Since Silverlight depends on the browser for delivery, it makes sense to first create an HTML page. So, let’s start by showing the entire HTML and dissect it. Create a file named Research000.html and put this HTML in that file (or download it here):

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Silverlight Research</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Inline XAML Content. -->

<script type="text/xaml" id="xamlResearchContent">
    <?xml version="1.0" ?>
    <Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007">
	    <TextBlock Text="Silverlight Research"/>
    </Canvas>
</script>

<!-- Silverlight Object Container. -->
<object type="application/x-silverlight" id="researchControl" width="200" height="200">
    <param name="source" value="#xamlResearchContent" />
</object>
</body>
</html>

See it in action… click here…  There… pretty simple.  Similar to Flash, the Silverlight control lives as an embedded object in the page. Thus, we need to add the <object> tag. 

Now, that we have the Silverlight control created, we need to make it write out “Silverlight Research”.  Silverlight renders UI elements declared in XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language). 

We declare a Canvas control. Think of a canvas as similar to the client area of a window on your desktop. Although you can draw anything on it, its mainly lives to hold other controls. The TextBlock control simply declares a text placeholder, and because our TextBlock resides within the Canvas declaration, the text appears within the Canvas.

• Canvas element documentation
• TextBlock element documentation

As shown, we put the XAML inline to keep things simple.  Finally we link up the XAML with the Silverlight control by placing the XAML id (xamlResearchContent) within the value property of the object tag.

We will stop here for the #000 tutorial.  Get this working and on our next tutorial I will show how to draw on the canvas.

Thank You for listening.

As of August 2009 I am officially done!  It was a long trail, 5 years.  It was an exhausting and amazing journey filled with incredible events and struggles.  How I did it: a wonderful support system. 

My first weekend with no dissertation writing and no job related work!  I’m out of here. 

Thank You for listening.     

Bridging the gap between industry and academia is a task that I struggle with every week.  I work as a systems architect leading the development of large scale solutions.  I research sensor networks, studying ways to optimize large scale deployments.  To accomplish more with less time, I try to find the synergy between my two dimensions.

The search to find synergy and narrow the gap is my way of fostering greater cooperation and collaboration.  Issues dealing with scaling are common across dimensions.  How can I leverage the private and academia sectors to advance my research, education, and technology goals?  Is there a way to work them together to become more effective and accomplish more?  What can I do in academia that will help the industry?  What can I do in industry that will help academia?  Where to from here?

This week, I have been dealing with multi-objective optimization in my research.  This is the process of simultaneously optimizing two or more conflicting objectives subject to certain constraints.  My industry and academia dimensions are conflicting objectives.  I’ve come to realize there is no single solution.  What I’m now looking for is a solution where each of my worlds are optimized to the extent that if I try to optimize it any further, then the other will suffer as a result. 

From my previous post, this is where balancing life must be addressed.  When I was out of balance, one side or the other did suffer.  So I’m working on a sufficient solution where I may satisfy both worlds and have time for my family.  I will keep you posted on my progress.

Thank You for listening.

I presented at the Sensor Applications Symposium conference in February.  The conference has been a great enabler for my research.  Many of the topics were focused on applying sensors, so it aligned with my research.  It was great meeting the other researchers and their studies. 

My paper received an IEEE Best Student Paper Award!  I thank IEEE and the SAS committee for recognizing my research.  It is indeed an honor.

Thank You for listening.

Our paper, "A Probabilistic Model for the Deployment of Sensors", has been accepted!  Dr. Ragade and I will be presenting it at the IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium.

Stay tuned, I will post the full paper at ChipSoftTech shortly.

I have been awarded an IEEE Travel Award!  Thank You SAS and IEEE.

Paper Abstract:

Coverage is an important optimization objective in sensor deployment problems. This paper addresses the issue of covering a set of target points in an area with a finite set of sensors. A probabilistic model is proposed which takes in account the detection probabilities of the sensing devices which may decay with distance, environmental conditions, and hardware configuration. The objective is to deploy sensors so that the distribution of the sensors meets the probability of detection requirements while minimizing costs. The expected points to cover and the deployment points are assumed to be stationary
and known a priori. A probabilistic coverage matrix is defined and the deployment is optimized using a genetic algorithm. Our experimental results verify that the proposed probabilistic sensor deployment model finds more efficient solutions requiring fewer sensors compared to other deployment schemes.

EvoLisa

Found an interesting application using a Genetic Algorithm to evolve a picture from a set of triangles.  EvoLisa a good example of optimization and developing a fitness function.  It appears they are looking for a way to parallalize the model to lower the runtime.  Stay tuned, I have the framework and will be publishing a paper on it soon.

Update: May 10th, 2009

I had a few ask where they could get the source code:
http://code.google.com/p/alsing/downloads/list

The version of the code I used for this article: 
EvoLisaSource.zip (214.11 kb)