Sun Campus Ambassador @ University of Southern California Christopher Leung

  

It's hard to believe it's been two weeks since the Semester Project Preliminary Design Review (pictured above).  This meeting is exactly what it was titled--a checkpoint review of the preliminary design of each software project that Semester Project teams are taking on this semester at USC.

This program, which (I am proud to mention) is sponsored by the Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador Program as well as the Sun Microsystems SunSPOT Project, consists of 25 students divided into 5 teams, taking on 5 projects, led by 5 software developers (one from Google, two from Amgen, and two from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory).  "5" also happens to be my favorite number.

The goal?  Spend 12 weeks developing empowering open source software for disabled persons, following a software development process inspired by the aerospace industry (if that makes you grumble, not to worry--we're likely to try a different development process the next time around).

The software projects we're taking on:

• Assistive Technology Search Engine - Search engine solely for locating enabling technology for disabled persons
  
• Mobile Currency Reader - Have your cell phone tell you how much your money is worth
  
• SunSPOT Framework and Language for Action Recognition - Put simply, use SunSPOTs to control everything around you :)
• Web Captioning System - An easy way to add subtitles to any video, anywhere, accessible by anyone
• Word Prediction - An intelligent service that predicts words based on context (n-grams)

Of absolutely no coincidence, the SunSPOT team, led by David Woollard, is doing an amazing job on their project and were awarded two of the four prize categories during this meeting (best overall performance during this phase, and best wiki).  Web captioning picked up the "most enthusiastic" award, and Assistive Technology Search picked up an award for "most improved".

Me and the SunFLARE Team: David Woollard (Lead), Sean Bachelder, Irina Abramova, Winnie Yip, and Praveen Kansara.  Not pictured: Nikhilesh Kruthiventi.  Jacquelyn Leong, the Semester Project Manager, can be seen smiling in the background :)

A brief description of the SunFLARE project: "Our project concept is to use the wireless capabilities and accelerometers of the SunSPOT platform to record and recognize human gestures for command and control applications. Users with limited mobility often have difficulty using traditional computer input devices such as keyboards and mice. Our gesture recognition framework, which we call the SunSPOT Framework and Language for Action Recognition, or SunFLARE, will allow users to dynamically capture movements that they are capable of making (tailoring to a number of physical disabilities) and associate these movements with actions."

I'm sure many of you are itching to find out more about this project--especially you SunSPOT fans--and after the completion of the Semester Project, we will be sure to make available all of the dirty details of their work off Java.net and the Project:Possibility website.  For now, keep yourself busy at David Simmons's blog, who can be thanked along with Arshon Poursohi, for getting us several of these SunSPOTs in the first place. :-)

I should also mention (and thank) an impressive board of reviewers we had present at this meeting to give feedback to each of the student teams.

• Marc Allen, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Charles Sanglimsuwan, USC/Microsoft
• Murali Annavaram, USC Professor
  
• Avinash Sridharan, USC Ph.D Candidate
• Jinbo Chen, Northrop Grumman
• Richard French, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

 

On April 2nd, we will be holding a Critical Design Review, which will be the last review before the Product Readiness Review on April 30th, which is the final meeting of the Semester Project where we award all of the participants for their hard work during the semester.  If you are in the Los Angeles area, you are welcome to drop by and join us for any of these events! (Contact me for details.)

For more pictures from the Semester Project, check out the Picasa Album here.