Spring 2012 - Capstone Design Course on Sensor-based Systems and Applications

Available Projects:

1) Underwater acoustic communications, anything from the Phy to Transport layer (communication project): My lab (CPS) has acoustic modems and this project will be quite hands-on and fun to work on as it's in collaboration with the RU IMCS (among other things, we use underwater communications for coordination of underwater gliders). There will be field trips on boats to deploy gliders in real ocean monitoring missions.

2) Swarming algorithms for autonomous submarines to be used for online background monitoring of lakes and rivers (there is a RF multihop communication part, but the focus is on coordination to support swarming for team forming and steering, plus online visualization of collected data): My lab has small underwater submarines that we are making autonomous to support 3D adaptive sampling (using Linux-based boards as Gumstix to implement the algorithms, programming using ROS, etc.)

3) Learning how to use packet-based discrete-even simulators (such as ns-2, ns-3) to assess the performance of wireless networks (this project requires very good C/C++ programming knowledge and interest).

4) Programming Android platforms (e.g., smart-phones and tablets available in my CPS lab) to create a mobile grid framework to form an "elastic pool of computational resources" in such a way as to enable distributed computation-&sensing-intensive applications (e.g., distributed pollution estimation, rainfall monitoring via participatory sensing, online triage for healthcare monitoring, etc.)

5) Wireless body area networks for healthcare triage in motion: from raw vital sign data (e.g., measure non-invasively ECG, core temperature, oxygen saturation, blood pressure/flow) to information (extract derived parameters such as hearth rate variability) and then finally to knowledge (assess fatigue/stress of patients and study how this depends on the physical activity and the environment/context): This project is hands-on but has also a theoretical components based on DSP and machine learning.

6) Datacenter monitoring using online sensing technology (via coordinated thermal cameras, scalar temperature and humidity sensors, airflow meters): The objective of this project is to use the great amount of data collected and to extract meaningful features so to 1) localize thermal hotspots, and 2) detect and classify anomalies (such as misconfigurations, failures, and attacks).

7) Workload (or VM in virtualized datacenters) smart placement in green datacenters for computation and cooling energy optimization (software project in collaboration with the other sites of the NSF Center for Autonomic Computing).