Cell Phone / Pollution Monitoring Project in North County Times

The CitiSense project led by computer scientists at the Jacobs School is in the news. Brad Fikes from the North County Times covered the CitiSense project on April 26, which is supposed to provide up-to-the-minute information on outdoor and indoor air quality, based on environmental information collected by hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sensors attached to the backpacks, purses, jackets and board shorts of San Diegans going about daily life.

Cell phones will serve as info-shuttlers that move info from the sensors to centralized computing centers, and then back out to individuals.

In the North County Times story, computer science professor Ingolf Krueger says that the system will probably first be set up to monitor pollution relevant for people with asthma.

The Next Silicon Revolution

The next silicon revolution is underway, and electrical engineers from the Jacobs School (pictured above) are in the thick of things.

"On-demand video delivered wirelessly is a tidal wave that is sweeping through communications networks on a worldwide basis, and it creates tremendous technical challenges at all layers of the network,” said Lawrence Larson, Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “In order to accommodate this soaring demand, wireless communications devices will have to operate at higher frequencies and wider bandwidths in order to supply the data. Visualize the link between the cell phone tower and your smartphone as a straw. That only lets a limited amount of data through at any one time. In the next few years, we are trying to turn the straw into a fire hose.”

And research into just how to turn a straw into a fire hose led to 23 accepted UCSD papers at IMS and RFIC 2010. This new research is from the labs of electrical engineering professors Gabriel Rebeiz, Lawrence Larson, Peter Asbeck and James Buckwalter. The largest number of papers is from the Rebeiz lab. The 23 papers are “… a factor of two more than any other university, and show the dominance of UCSD in this field,” explained electrical engineering professor Gabriel Rebeiz. Seven of the 28 papers in the IMS student paper award category are from UCSD. “This shows the quality of the UCSD papers,” Rebeiz said. In addition to papers, the UCSD electrical engineers will present in six workshops and two panel sessions. At IMS, Prof. Rebeiz will also receive the 2010 IEEE MTT Distinguished Educator Award.

Wireless in the Wilderness

"Wiring the Wilderness" is the NSF headline for their story about UC San Diego's HPWREN.

Photo caption: An HPWREN automated digital camera on Lyons Peak, Calif., captured an image around 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 23, 2006, that shows the extent of the Horse Fire. The camera remotely collected many images that day, which the researchers were able to use to better understand the wildfire. Photo credit: HPWREN

HPWREN is a National Science Foundation funded network research project, which also functions as a collaborative cyberinfrastructure on research, education, and first responder activities. It includes creating, demonstrating, and evaluating a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties. The network includes backbone nodes at the UC San Diego and San Diego State University campuses, and a number of "hard to reach" areas in remote environments.

Wireless Research Featured in Technology Review

The "taking the Why out of Wi-Fi" research (see post below) landed on the front of the Technlogy Review page this week. Check out the story here


Watching Wi-Fi: This schematic illustrates the Wi-Fi access points (in red) and the radios (in black) that monitor traffic in the computer-science building at UCSD. Below: two traffic-monitoring radios on a wall. Credit: University of California, San Diego

Taking the Why out of Wireless

"People expect WiFi to work, but there is also a general understanding that it’s just kind of flakey,” said Stefan Savage, one of the UCSD computer science professors who led development of an automated, enterprise-scale WiFi troubleshooting system for UCSD’s computer science building. The system is described in a paper presented last week in Kyoto, Japan at ACM SIGCOMM, one of the world’s premier networking conferences.


“If you have a wireless problem in our building, our system automatically analyzes the behavior of your connection – each wireless protocol, each wired network service and the many interactions between them. In the end, we can say ‘it’s because of this that your wireless is slow or has stopped working’ – and we can tell you immediately,” said Savage.

"Our system is the ultimate laboratory for testing new wireless gadgets and new approaches to building wireless systems. We just started looking at WiFi-based Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phones," Savage said.

You can read more about this here.

Stefan Savage is a UCSD computer science professorand one of the leaders of the UCSD wireless monitoring project.