.Projects.
The beautiful mountains of San Jacinto surrounding the James Reserveis the home of 259 species of vascular plants, 35 species of bryophytes, 6 species of amphibians, 18 species of reptiles, 125 species (60% nesting) of birds, 35 species of mammals, and approximately 1,000 species of invertebrates.
In our studies we focused primarily on the avian (or bird) species that regularily inhabit the man-made nestboxes in the reserve. Our project spanned two years, during which we deployed over 30 imagers to explore the nesting behavior of these birds.
Our collaboration extended beyond UCLA. Mike Hamilton and Sharon Coe of UC-Riverside laid the biological foundation for our work. We learned that avian nesting cycles are fairly deterministic - ie, they follow distinct stages starting from nest building to laying eggs to incubation and then finally the hatching and raising of the youngs. What we hoped to measure through our network of imagers were
statistics about the nesting cycle , in particular the presence/absence of the birds, the number of eggs laid, and the duration of each stage.
4.24.08.
With the ever growing pervasiveness of bluetooth devices, in this project we explore how it can be used to provide contextual information such as the whereabouts of a person and the social dynamics experienced by a person in their day-to-day interactions. Sampling techniques can be applied to reduce energy consumptionwhile meeting accuracy constraints. Clustering algorithms can be used to make associations amongst the devices and the social implications of the interactions.
5.25.08.
Studies have shown a correlation between how people walk and their of falling. Costing over $20 Billion, fall related injuries are one of the most expensive health accidents. And close to a third of the cost comes from individuals above the age of 65. The elderly are more prone to falls since they typically experience degredation in visual, auditory, and muscular sensory systems all which play an important role in retaining balance and abulatory motion. Here we study the use of pressure sensors placed inside the insoles of the shoe to determine the degree of abnormality in a person's abulatory pattern and warn them using smart phone, like an iPAQ.
5.25.08.
In this project we envisioned a "distributed" Google, a search engine that would allow arbitrary search queries to be run in a distributed fashion. Using Chord and SFSlite (libasync libraries) we constructed the WebScan framework. At it's core WebScan is a distributed priority queue enabling the nodes to determine what webpages to crawl next. Unlike most search engine, ours allows the user to specify both the "page rank" algorithm as well as the "decision" process. Although this might make the searching more complicated it gives the end-user much greater flexibility, a tradeoff we were willing to make. A more detailed report can be found
here.
5.25.08.
Three brave students decided to bring Jabber to UCLA, namely Shaun Ahmadian, Jason Schroeder, and Wing-Kai Chan. You can decide for yourself if they were successful in their endeavour.
In the summer of 2004, student representatives from ACM proposed the idea of developing a Jabber based IM service for CourseWeb. Since SEASnet was already exploring chat services, it was agreed that ACM and SEASnet would work together to adapt existing Jabber technology to provide an IM service for CourseWeb and the classes it supports.
4.24.08.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)
