Sun Campus Ambassador @ University of Southern California Christopher Leung

Aside from my work as a Campus Ambassador, I'm also the chair of a non-profit organization, Project:Possibility. Due to great fortune, I have been able to combine my role as a Campus Ambassador with my work in the field of assistive technology to provide a very unique experience for USC students.

That said, I'm pleased to announce that a program I've organized in collaboration with Project:Possibility--the Semester Project--is off to a promising start as of the kick-off meeting on February 13, 2008!

From the Semester Project home page: "The Semester Project is an opportunity for university students and industry professionals to team up over a course of a semester and develop open source software projects for the disabled."

We have five volunteers from Google, Amgen, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory leading five student teams of five developers (five is also my favorite number). For my Sun colleagues and Sun fans: one team will be developing assistive technology using SunSPOTs!

We were lucky to get a handful of SunSPOTs for these teams to use. In addition to the SunSPOT that I was given as a campus ambassador, Arshan Poursohi and his team at Sun have generously donated three SunSPOTs to Project:Possibility for use specifically for the Semester Project. Additionally, Bhaskar Krishnamachair of the Autonomous Networks Research Group at USC has lent a few SunSPOTs for use in this program as well.

As part of this kick-off meeting, I gave a demo on the SunSPOTs. For those of you who want the nitty-gritty details, I started the demo off by showing the bounce demo (if you don't know what this is, check out a demo on YouTube at about 1:10). I asked an audience member to join me up front to play with one of the SunSPOTs and take a guess as to how it was all happening. When he couldn't figure it out, someone in the audience answered "accelerometer" correctly. After going through the slideset, I showed off an augmented version of a demo program that comes with the SunSPOT--I have added a 3D cube in Java3D that responds to accelerometer movements..

We had over 30 participants, and I'm sure a lot of them wished they could be on the SunSPOT team this semester. Maybe for the next semester project, we'll have enough to go around :)