Spring Break
Expo shows off student innovations
Engineers' senior projects culminate with Engineering Expo, Robo*Palooza fair
Nick Vardanega
Issue date: 5/14/07 Section: News
Parked outside was a working electric car. Students popped open the hood to display the cheaper and more efficient controller made to convert battery power into signals that controlled different parts of the engine.
"It's working very well," said Kevin Kaatz, an electrical engineering senior. "We have a working electric car and we drove it here."
There were also several computer and Internet-related projects on display. Alex Polvi, a senior in computer science, and his group created face-recognition software called "Who." Polvi demonstrated during the expo how, using a camera phone, someone's picture can be taken and uploaded to a database, where the computer will attempt to match it with another of the pictures already stored. If it can't find a match, it sends a text message back to the phone to ask who the person is. When the person responds with a name, that name is assigned to the unidentifiable photo.
"Today's been good to test it out with a bunch of people," Polvi said. "It's not guessing incorrectly."
Polvi said that in the future this technology may be able to be integrated with social networking Web sites like Facebook, meaning a user could take a photo of a person with his phone and have the Who software match the photo with the person's Facebook profile.
Working as part of the Heli Development Project, computer engineering major Brian Hay and his group developed adaptable software that was being used to control small motorized vehicles wirelessly through the Internet. The end goal of the project is to use this technology to create a helicopter that can be flown autonomously without a pilot.
"It's working very well," said Kevin Kaatz, an electrical engineering senior. "We have a working electric car and we drove it here."
There were also several computer and Internet-related projects on display. Alex Polvi, a senior in computer science, and his group created face-recognition software called "Who." Polvi demonstrated during the expo how, using a camera phone, someone's picture can be taken and uploaded to a database, where the computer will attempt to match it with another of the pictures already stored. If it can't find a match, it sends a text message back to the phone to ask who the person is. When the person responds with a name, that name is assigned to the unidentifiable photo.
"Today's been good to test it out with a bunch of people," Polvi said. "It's not guessing incorrectly."
Polvi said that in the future this technology may be able to be integrated with social networking Web sites like Facebook, meaning a user could take a photo of a person with his phone and have the Who software match the photo with the person's Facebook profile.
Working as part of the Heli Development Project, computer engineering major Brian Hay and his group developed adaptable software that was being used to control small motorized vehicles wirelessly through the Internet. The end goal of the project is to use this technology to create a helicopter that can be flown autonomously without a pilot.
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