SUMMER 2018
Summer 2018, Vol. 23, No. 2
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A Vision Of The Future Warren B. Nelms foresaw “smart” innovations
Connected World
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UF engineers focus on the internet of things
Cloud Roots
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MIST Center focuses on hardware that enables the internet of things
iDrive
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I-STREET testbed deploys the internet of things for traffic research
Peak Comfort
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The internet of things could make the office sweater obsolete
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Precision Navigation Indoor GPS accurate to 5 centimeters
Phish In A Barrel
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Cyber attacks target the most vulnerable
Mouth Monitor
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Mining data from the human mouth
Forecasting Haiti
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An internet of things solution brings weather data back to Haiti
Dr. Kent Fuchs President Dr. David Norton Vice President for Research Board of Trustees James W. Heavener, Chair David L. Brandon Mori Hosseini Leonard H. Johnson Thomas G. Kuntz Smith Meyers Daniel O’Keefe Rahul Patel Marsha D. Powers David M. Quillen Jason J. Rosenberg Robert G. Stern Anita G. Zucker Explore is published by the UF Office of Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida. Š 2018 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu Editor: Joseph M. Kays joekays@ufl.edu Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Ivan J. Ramos Writer: Cindy Spence Photography: John Jernigan Web Editor: Jewel Midelis Copy Editor: Bruce Mastron Printing: StorterChilds Printing, Gainesville Member of the University Research Magazine Association www.urma.org
Florida's R&D Powerhouse
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y any measure, the University of Florida is the state’s leader in research, recently reporting a record $801 million in research expenditures for fiscal year 2017. These activities are vital to the future of the state, unearthing new discoveries and applying that knowledge to the betterment of society and the economic prosperity of our state, now and in the future. UF research in emerging technologies, such as the internet of things research highlighted in this issue of Explore, is vital in positioning Florida as a leader in the emerging information economy. The important relationship between university research and economic development in our state was highlighted in April in two reports released by the Florida Council of 100 — “Best Practices in Business-Academic R&D Collaboration” and “100 University Ideas for Enhancing Business-University Collaboration in Florida.” The reports from the Council of 100 highlight three factors that are key to research universities contributing to the economic future of the state — recruitment of world-class faculty; presence of a robust basic and applied R&D machine; and commitment to excellence in the commercialization mission. Not surprisingly, UF is already driving hard in all three areas in its efforts to rise in prominence among research universities nationally. With the support of Florida’s elected officials and the UF Board of Trustees, we have recruited hundreds of top faculty over the past few years and we have plans to recruit even more faculty in the next few years. Among the 53 members of the National Academies of Sciences in Florida, nearly half are from the University of Florida. As noted earlier, the UF research enterprise is thriving, with expenditures exceeding $800 million. UF faculty are tackling the most challenging issues and opportunities in areas ranging from medicine to agriculture, and engineering to the basic sciences. Through UF Innovate, our commercialization arm, we have been a national leader in technology commercialization for many years. In fact, UF was recently ranked third nationally in a major technology transfer and commercialization index. Among the 13 Florida universities studied in the Council of 100 report, UF accounted for 30 percent of the patents issued; 48 percent of licenses executed; 75 percent of licensing income; and 27 percent of startups formed. We are grateful to the Council of 100 for providing this report about where Florida stands in research and development, and for promoting policies that will grow the R&D enterprise, like recruiting even more top researchers to the state and increasing seed money for promising startup companies. As a top 10 public research university, UF is committed to continuing our leadership role in growing Florida’s 21st century economy. David Norton Vice President for Research
4 Summer 2018
A Vision of the Future Warren B. Nelms foresaw “smart” innovations
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n the 1970s, if you wanted a smart house, it was a do-it-yourself proposition, likely to require an engineering degree. Luckily, Warren B. Nelms had one, from the University of Florida. Using binary assembly language and microprocessors advanced for their time, he filled his family’s home with gizmos and gadgets to save time and energy. “I remember times when my mom or we kids would ask which button to push, what would happen,” says son David Nelms, whose gift to the UF College of Engineering established the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World in his father’s honor. The family home in Odessa was so highly engineered, Nelms says, that when it was time to sell it, he had to “de-engineer” it, pulling wires and circuit boards out of closets. No one else would have been able to figure out how to work the customdesigned system. David and his sister, Sandra, caught the technology bug, David getting a mechanical engineering
degree and Sandra getting a computer engineering degree, both from UF. “They are their father’s children,” says Patsy Flanagan Nelms, their mother. “They like to work with gadgets.” David Nelms says he has his father’s notebooks from high school, when his father worked in a shop, helping a guy repair pinball machines. Naturally, his father automated the workflow, using a rotary dial telephone to operate machinery. When he decided the rotary dial took too long, he invented a push-button system. “I always say I wish he had patented the idea for the push-button phone,” Nelms says. Some of his father’s inventions had a fantastical, Rube Goldberg feel, Nelms says. Others were purely practical, such as a watt-hour counter he invented after his retirement from Westinghouse. The device was a blue box with dials that controlled thermostats, water heaters and lights and showed how much energy was being used. “I was in high school, and my sister and I were the manufacturing
line. I remember soldering those devices,” Nelms says. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chair John Harris says labs are filled with undergraduates and graduate students with the same inclinations for engineering that Nelms displayed early on. A 150,000-square-foot, $70 million Data Science and Information Technology Building approved by the Florida Legislature earlier this year will house faculty and researchers from the colleges of engineering, medicine and agriculture who specialize in analyzing massive amounts of data to tackle complicated problems, Harris says. “Whether it’s IoT products, sensors and communication systems, cloud processing or machine learning,” Harris says, “this institute will bring together all the tinkerers who can imagine a better way of getting things done.” Nelms says his dad would not have been surprised by most of the internet of things innovations, and with his head start, he likely would still be on the leading edge. He certainly envisioned a future when the things he custom built would one day be available as off-the-shelf components. His father also would have been excited by the research opportunities, Nelms says. “We have lots of devices that can do cool things, but interconnecting them is hard,” Nelms says. “Getting my Alexa to work with my Sonos speakers, for instance. They will be much more useful when they can talk to each other.” At the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World, they’re working on it. Cindy Spence
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Connected World
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UF engineers focus on the internet of things by Cindy Spence
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n Jan. 4, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake hit northern California at 2:39 a.m. Instantly, Fitbit data spiked, as anyone wearing the wristband fitness and sleep tracker was jolted awake. The spike was largest in Berkeley, the epicenter, and the quake’s impact on San Francisco and San Jose could be mapped according to the sleep data Fitbit collects.
Who needs U.S. Geological Survey infrastructure? “Fitbit knew there was an earthquake before the U.S. Geological Survey, because in the wee hours of the morning everybody in this region simultaneously woke up,” says University of Florida researcher David Arnold. “And you could tell the severity by location using Fitbit data. “A year ago nobody would have thought of this,” Arnold says. “But it’s a distributed sensor network in a real-world condition; a fast and powerful demonstration of a new way to use anonymized fitness tracker data.” Welcome to the internet of things, where the tiny sensor is about to flex its muscle.
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Wireless World
Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World
MIST Multi-functional Integrated System Technology Center
— John Harris
Today, the novelty of the internet of things enchants us. It’s cool to check our refrigerator for milk as we stroll the grocery aisles or convenient to take a cellphone picture of a check, the funds magically appearing in our bank account. But these are small feats, already old news. The growing connection of the physical world to the cyber world is tantamount to an Industrial Revolution, and it’s about to change everything, says John Harris, chair of UF’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Literally everything. “It’s a scary time,” Harris says. “There is a world of potential, and we will need multidisciplinary teams with help from experts in psychology and law to make real progress.” Harris says UF is emerging as a leader in assembling teams of researchers to explore the science of the internet of things. The cyber-physical intersection is job one for the newly created Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World and keeping it secure is the mission of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research. In March, a brand-new center, the National Science Foundation Center for Big Learning, with UF as the lead institution, was funded. And, at only three years old, the MIST — the Multi-functional Integrated System Technology — Center is a veteran in technologies that enable the IoT. Sandip Ray, who came to UF from the semiconductor industry, says UF’s strong suit is an ability to collaborate among disciplines in a research environment that is speeding up and needs to move even faster. Traditionally, he says, hardware is developed and then software follows. Today, hardware and software are co-evolving, and that compliFlorida Institute cates everything. for Cybersecurity “If you need to build the Research hardware and the software together, how do you do that?” asks Ray, one of four Endowed IoT Term Professors. “How do you validate a software that is supposed to run on a hardware that has not yet National Science been built?” Foundation Center for Big Learning The advantage of academic research, as opposed to industry, he says, is the variety of disciplines that can contribute to a solution.
IoT
“There are traditional pillars in electrical engineering and computer science, and we can take the research from all of them to work together to meet the needs of the connected world,” Ray says.
“What we are seeing is this convergence of engineering and science, all these pieces coming together at this point in time.” — David Arnold
Defying Definition
do in 1985 was allow computers at UF to talk to computers at NASA. It’s so much bigger than that. What is the internet? Now I can sit in my car at a traffic light and do a banking transaction. “So anyone who looks you in the eye and says this is what IoT is, I wouldn’t believe them. They don’t know; nobody really knows. It’s a very squishy, smushy definition, and that’s the problem.” What is known is that IoT brings together technologies that mostly were unavailable a decade ago. Sensors have gotten smaller and more powerful, wireless transmission capabilities are commonplace, and the computing power needed to collect data and analyze it is new. “Before, even if I had sensors that could measure everything on campus, the computing power to make sense of it didn’t exist. What would I even do with all that data? How would I make sense of millions and millions of data points? “What we are seeing is this convergence of engineering and science, all these pieces coming together at this point in time,” Arnold says.
Sensors won’t rule this brave new world alone. They will need connectivity — to each other and the internet — and they will need computing power. It takes all three attributes to make our devices “smart.” Already there are more smart devices in the world than people, and the National Science Foundation forecasts 50 billion smart devices will exist by 2020. Before long, NSF predicts, there will be 1 trillion sensors at large in the internet of things. Defining the internet of things is tricky. Ask a UF researcher for a definition and you get a grimace or a shake of the head. No one will do it. Yier Jin, the first hire for the Nelms Institute, says it is too big to define. “To define it accurately, it literally means everything, and then the definition loses its meaning,” says Jin, an Endowed IoT Term Professor. “That’s why we do the work without arguing about what it is.” Arnold says it’s like defining an elephant by touch: the definition depends on which part of the elephant you are touching. “If you go back to 1985 and tell people, ‘There’s this thing coming; it’s called the internet; it’s going to be exciting,’ it would be hard to explain the significance," Arnold says. "Now you say ‘internet’ and everybody knows what it is. Interestingly, what everybody thought the internet would
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Secure Connections
UF received 70 million to 80 million emails last year. Of those, about 64 million were phishing emails, and most of those attacks were from bots, surfing the internet, waiting for someone to click on an email that seems innocent but isn’t. — Mark Tehranipoor Each dot represents 10,000 emails. Orange dots represent phishing emails.
Mark Tehranipoor, the co-director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, recalls a story about a consultant who was asked to evaluate the security of voting machines in Virginia. The consultant broke into the system in 10 seconds. The password was “abcdef.” There’s no substitute for vigilance — or a good password — in cyberspace. Tehranipoor says educating users would eliminate some problems. Other problems will require more of the kind of work done at the institute. “Attacks are getting more and more sophisticated every minute,” says Tehranipoor. “Roughly every minute, there are about 1,000 new malwares generated.” If you think you have issues with suspicious emails, consider UF. Tehranipoor says UF received 70 million to 80 million emails last year. Of those, about 64 million were phishing emails, and most of those attacks were from bots, surfing the internet, waiting for someone to click on an email that seems innocent but isn’t. Once a bot penetrates your computer with a worm or a virus, it is in control. It can lurk for a while, monitoring your activity, spying on your bank accounts and passwords, then encrypting your files. One common attack is ransomware, an area Tehranipoor predicts will grow, in which your device or your data is held hostage until you pay up. That’s what happened to the city of Atlanta in March, when ransomware locked up all of the city’s major computing systems.
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Don’t click on an email if you don’t recognize the sender.
Internet Security Basics
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On a more personal level, a bot that detects that you are on vacation could open your garage door and turn off your alarm system, then blackmail you until you pay up. Bots can also lock you out of your laptop, restoring access for a fee. This could be an easier fix, Tehranipoor says, if you are following good cyber hygiene, backing up your system daily. Then the threat is empty. You simply reformat your computer and use your backup to retrieve your data. If you are prone to clicking “try later” when your operating system reminds you to update, Tehranipoor says, break that habit now. “You should accept the update,” Tehranipoor says. “You don’t know exactly what they’re updating, but I assure you, more often than not, they are trying to patch vulnerabilities.” Part of the issue with security of IoT devices is providing the power to perform security functions on top of the computational functions for which a device is designed. Providing that level of security requires about 20
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Avoid connecting to unsecured Wi-Fi.
Create a strong password.
to 30 percent more power, and more power means the device will be more expensive, or less convenient, especially for battery-powered smart mobile devices. For example, adding security to a pacemaker would make the battery discharge more quickly. Would a patient choose security if it meant undergoing surgery in two years to replace the battery, or convenience, and delaying surgery for four years? “Most IoT devices have enough power to connect and send data, but not enough power to run complex security algorithms,” Tehranipoor says. If you have 20 devices connected to the internet, it only takes one with weak security for all of them to be compromised. Still, staying off the internet is not an option. The internet of things will not be avoidable, says Tehranipoor. “There is great potential for great disruption,” Tehranipoor says. “Anything connected to the internet inherently becomes insecure.” While Tehranipoor and other researchers work on the security of
hardware, software and networks, he says three pieces of advice could help almost any user of a smart device: don’t click on an email if you don’t recognize the sender; create a strong password; and avoid connecting to unsecured Wi-Fi. Ray says it makes sense that in the burgeoning world of connected devices, even a small percentage of bad actors can cause significant harm. “If there are billions of devices connected to the internet, then there are probably millions of devices that are malicious,” says Ray. “So every device has to work in this environment.”
Black Hats, White Hats Ray and Jin are a team of sorts when it comes to hacking smart devices, an offense vs. defense approach. “I am the blue team to Yier’s red team,” Ray says. “His job is to find the vulnerabilities, and my job is to make a system secure so he cannot attack me.” That’s a tall order, considering that Jin is known for his ability to crack the security systems of common IoT devices, including the Nest thermostat. Much has changed since Jin and a team of students hacked a Nest thermostat in 2014. One of his students said his grandmother had just received one as a gift. The team bought one and went to work, testing the device to see what would happen. They noticed some vulnerabilities and suggested a fix to the company, which snubbed them. “I thought, ‘Maybe we should put on our black hat, and see what the issue is,’” Jin says.
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The hack — officially called penetration testing — was successful, and the team published their research in a journal. The reaction from Nest was immediate. Today, companies are more receptive to learning about vulnerabilities in their devices, says Jin, who has catalogued the security flaws in a variety of commercial IoT devices in addition to the Nest. “We feel it’s our duty, and we are happy that people eventually do take security seriously,” says Jin, who has a Nest thermostat in his own home. Ray worked at NXP Semiconductors on technology for the vehicles of the future and says one challenge is that traditional approaches to security don’t work for technologies that enable self-driving vehicles. For example, if you are surfing the internet and your computer detects a suspicious website, it prevents you from accessing it. “But think about a car going 70 mph that gets a communication about something suspicious,” Ray says. “You cannot just stop the car. When you have real-time requirements, you must address the situation much more gracefully.” The road to fully autonomous cars is complicated. Today is level 2, he says, with some automation, for example, taking our foot off the gas pedal for cruise control. The driver, however, is responsible, and must be alert. At level 3, the car gains more responsibility, perhaps steering itself, and humans can remove their hands. At level 4, humans can take their eyes off the road, and at level 5, take their minds off the road. Another challenge is that we don’t change cars the way we change smartphones. 12 Summer 2018
Eric Zamora
Today, companies are more receptive to learning about vulnerabilities in their devices. — Yier Jin
“It’s not like we can take all the current vehicles off the road and replace them with autonomous vehicles,” Ray says. “So there will be a combination of the cyber world and physical world. When an automatic car is driving, you cannot assume the other cars have the same level of automation.” Still, for the sake of road safety, automated driving is a worthy goal, Ray says. About 94 percent of accidents today are because of human error. Other philosophical issues also will need to be addressed, Ray says, such as how a car should perform in certain situations. “Suppose the car has one passenger, a driver, and suddenly it senses a whole bunch of children crossing the road. Does it veer off the road and kill the driver or does it drive into the children?” Ray says. “What is the car supposed to do? “Humans don’t have to decide because humans don’t react quickly enough,” Ray says. Harris, who has just taught his teenagers how to drive, says he believes they will not need to teach their own children to drive. Ray sees rich research opportunities. “This is an area we know is critical, we know we don’t have the science for it, and we know we need it very, very quickly,” Ray says. “There is nothing more exciting. As a scientist, we thrive on uncertainty. Is it scary? Yes, it is very, very scary, but it’s good to do something that scares you. As a researcher, that’s a good maxim.”
Billions to Trillions The NSF prediction that we are mere years away from unleashing a trillion sensors on the world has spawned an annual meeting called the Trillion Sensor Summit, at which UF’s Toshi Nishida has presented. The question is more than theoretical. As data proliferates, zipping into cyberspace for interpretation, then back to the physical world in the form of information we can use, the humble sensor will take center stage. Already we can implant and swallow sensors, sensors on our infrastructure can tell us the condition of roads and bridges, and newer home appliances can sense our environment. We may need a trillion sensors to make sense of this new world, scientists say. By one measure, humans create as much information every two days as they created from the time of cave paintings to 2003.
THE EVOLUTION OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
LEVEL 2 Cars have some automation, for example, humans can take their foot off the gas pedal for cruise control.
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We are here
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LEVEL 1 Cars have no automation.
LEVEL 3 The car gains more responsibility, perhaps steering itself, and humans can remove their hands. LEVEL 4 Humans can take their eyes off the road. LEVEL 5 Humans can take their minds off the road.
“When we talk about sensor networks with trillions of data connection points, those are giant numbers,” says Arnold. “How would we even manufacture a trillion devices? How do we crunch the data? “To unleash the full potential of the IoT, it’s not like one professor or one team of professors could do this,” Arnold says. “The real power is putting out extraordinary numbers of sensors in real-world situations and then seeing what happens.” John Harris Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering harris@ece.ufl.edu David Arnold George Kirkland Engineering Leadership Professor darnold@ufl.edu Yier Jin Endowed IoT Term Professor yier.jin@ece.ufl.edu Sandip Ray Endowed IoT Term Professor sandip@ece.ufl.edu Mark Tehranipoor Co-director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research tehranipoor@ece.ufl.edu Related websites: iot.institute.ufl.edu fics.institute.ufl.edu www.mist-center.org
“As a scientist, we thrive on uncertainty. Is it scary? Yes, it is very, very scary, but it’s good to do something that scares you. As a researcher, that’s a good maxim.” — Sandip Ray Explore 13
Cloud Roots
MIST Center focuses on hardware that enables the IoT by Cindy Spence
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hen you think about the internet of things, you likely think of signals zipping through air and space, computing in the clouds. But the signals in the ether need roots, and at the University of Florida the internet of things is deeply rooted in the MIST Center. “Here in the MIST Center, we provide the nuts and bolts, the hardware technologies for smart systems,” says Toshi Nishida, director of the center, which was funded by the National Science Foundation in 2014. MIST stands for multi-functional integrated system technology. David Arnold, MIST Center co-director, describes the internet of things as a tree and the MIST research as its roots, underground and unseen but vital for the nutrition of the tree as a whole. For example, Arnold says, a smartphone can operate in the internet of things, but only thanks to what’s inside.
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— Toshi Nishida
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—David Arnold
A MIST team is designing a charging system that can be placed in the middle of a table and charge multiple devices at a distance.
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“Ever thought of what’s inside your iPhone, what makes your smartphone smart? That’s what we do,” Arnold says. “Before, it was a dumb phone. What makes it smart? Well, it’s the touchscreen and the compass and the GPS and accelerometer, and that’s the kind of stuff we work on.” One MIST team is working on flexible and stretchable electronic substrates, which could be integrated into fabrics or automotive surfaces. Another team is working on ultralower-power memory storage technology to extend cellphone battery life. Since the center works with industry partners, many projects seek to solve a commercial issue.
For example, Boeing is seeking to reduce the noise and fuel consumption of its aircraft. MIST is working to develop tiny, stick-on sensors that can withstand the harsh environment of an aircraft flying at 30,000 feet at temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. So far, the newly designed sensor is less than a millimeter thick. Eventually the data collected could help in designing quieter and more fuel-efficient aircraft. Miniaturizing hardware is important, too, and a team is working on reducing the size of the rooftop modules on self-driving cars. Today, these modules weigh about 80 pounds. Using MEMS, microelectric-mechanical systems, the team
A team is developing stick-on sensors to monitor noise and fuel consumption on aircraft.
Smaller devices would help with drone navigation.
A team is working on reducing the size of the rooftop modules on self-driving cars.
hopes to create a module about the size of a cellphone, maybe smaller, that has all the same functionality. The smaller devices also would be helpful for airborne navigation and mapping. Military drones could carry them for surveillance or mapping of underground tunnels. In the civilian world, quadcopter drones equipped with the smaller modules could deliver packages, or pizza. “This would be a radical leapfrog in technology,” Arnold says. A project to enhance wireless power could lead to better options for charging not only cellphones but all the emerging IoT gadgets: wireless earbuds, hearing aids, implantable medical devices, and more.
Wired charging, plugging into an outlet, has given way to charging pads, but a device must be perfectly centered on a pad and cannot be used while charging. A MIST team is designing a charging system that can be placed in the middle of a table and charge multiple devices at a distance. What’s more, the station charges even through clutter, juicing a device in a purse or a backpack. Arnold says it’s a revolutionary technology that operates at an ultralow frequency. Working with defense contractors, another MIST team is developing antennas that cannot be jammed or hacked, a big issue for military
security and for safety. Bad weather and hacking can both disrupt signals to GPS, so ability to operate at the level of an antenna is important for navigation and for using drones. “Others are focused on the networking, the big data, what you do with all this data society is generating,” Arnold says. “We’re focused on hardware. “The internet of things is evolving around us,” Arnold says. “We’re trying to build a disruptive battery technology or the next-generation sensor that is the foundation of the internet of things.” Nishida says the initial vision of cloud computing that takes place far from the source is being replaced by a newer term, fog computing, now that more sensors are able to handle some computing. “So fog computing is closer to the ground, closer to the source,” Nishida says. As luck would have it, an even newer term, mist computing, is taking hold. “We can now do some processing at the sensor node, at ground level, so we don’t need to transmit as much information to the fog or to the cloud, and that reduces the amount of power you need, too,” Nishida says. “Fortuitous for us, since we are the MIST Center and we are working on the enabling technologies for mist computing.” Toshi Nishida Director, MIST Center nishida@ufl.ed David Arnold Co-director, MIST Center darnold@ufl.edu Related website: www.mist-center.org
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iDrive
I-STREET testbed deploys the internet of things for traffic research by Cindy Spence
F
lorida and the University of Florida are leaders in driverless vehicle research, and UF Transportation Institute Director Lily Elefteriadou says there’s no better place than Gainesville for that work. “In Gainesville, we have so much variety in transportation — cars, buses, pedestrians, bicycles — and we have relatively low speeds,” Elefteriadou says. “That makes it a little easier to do testing.” The institute’s latest initiative is I-STREET, a real-world testbed for emerging transportation technologies, such as autonomous vehicles. I-STREET will deploy almost 200 sensors in locations around the UF campus and Gainesville and will collect a variety of information from the sensors. The goal is to optimize the infrastructure for operating both conventional and autonomous vehicles together on city streets, alongside pedestrians, bicyclists and scooters. One part of the project is the Gainesville Trapezium, which uses sensors, called roadside units, installed along four corridors that 18 Summer 2018
form a trapezium surrounding the UF campus. Another part of the project is a stretch of I-75 from Wildwood to High Springs, which will have roadside units each mile. Experiments also have already taken place on Florida’s freeways on truck platooning, which uses truck-to-truck communication to maintain distance between trucks, allowing for better traffic movement and fuel savings. A demonstration project includes testing movements through 13 signalized intersections and seven midblock crossings on the UF campus. One of the first “intelligent” intersections will be Gale Lemerand Drive and Stadium Road, which will be outfitted with sensors and cameras. The idea is to collect information and figure out how best to disseminate it in real time to keep traffic moving and safe. “Bus drivers or private vehicle drivers could get warnings, ‘Watch it, there is a pedestrian on your right side,’” Elefteriadou says. “Another possibility is that a pedestrian could have an app on their phone that
would locate them and send a signal to the infrastructure, such as the signal controller at the intersection, and the intersection could communicate that to a vehicle or bus driver.” Part of the research will be determining the best way to communicate information to drivers to avoid distractions. Long-range, Elefteriadou says, communications should happen among all modes of transportation on city streets and at intersections. Vehicles and the infrastructure need to communicate with each other, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication matters, too. Pedestrians, bicyclists and scooters would be able to transmit information about their locations and speeds and receive information about the traffic around them. That transportation ecosystem will include a driverless shuttle by August, following a test run in May. The unassuming little shuttle — seating 12 and traveling at up to 25 miles per hour for about a mile with a safety driver on board — is likely the first real-world test of a driverless
“In Gainesville, we have so much variety in transportation — cars, buses, pedestrians, bicycles — and we have relatively low speeds. That makes it a little easier to do testing.” — Lily Elefteriadou
shuttle traversing city streets alongside human-driven vehicles, Elefteriadou says. Other driverless shuttles exist, but on more lightly traveled streets and in closed-track systems. The shuttle eventually will travel from campus to Depot Park. “The internet of things is very much a part of this,” Elefteriadou says. “Electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles, and enhancements in sensors of all kinds, these things allow us to connect and gather a significant amount of information.” Lily Elefteriadou Director of the Transportation Institute elefter@ce.ufl.edu www.transportation.institute.ufl.edu/istreet
— Lily Elefteriadou Explore 19
Peak Comfort The internet of things could make the office sweater obsolete by Cindy Spence
U
niversity of Florida researcher Prabir Barooah has a message for office workers: You don’t have to freeze to death. Not only that, but keeping you comfortable could save energy. “Most people are uncomfortable most of the time,” says Barooah, a specialist in control systems and real-time decision-making. “And comfort isn’t just about comfort; it’s a matter of productivity and health.” More than 95 percent of the lifecycle cost of a commercial building is salaries, Barooah says. Improving comfort — and therefore productivity — by even 1 percent can represent a huge financial return. Barooah says buildings and their HVAC systems — heating, ventilation and air conditioning — can be smarter. In most buildings, the HVAC systems are designed for peak conditions to account for the hottest day the building could encounter, midday in August, for example. Day to day, however, peak power is not needed.
— Prabir Barooah
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“Ninety percent of the time you are experiencing temperatures way lower than peak,” Barooah says. “But the buildings don’t have situational awareness, and that makes them extremely inefficient. Even doing a little bit here and there can save an enormous amount of money.” Barooah found out how much small measures can save in a test in Pugh Hall on campus. He and his students outfitted the building with 50 sensors that could detect whether an office was occupied or vacant. Based on that one variable, the HVAC system adjusted the airflow. A one-week study showed a 40 percent drop in the building’s energy use. Next, Barooah plans to outfit UF’s new Innovation Hub building with a more sophisticated sensor called a personal comfort node, or PCN. The PCNs have a touch screen and a bar that slides left and right on a scale from minus 10 to plus 10, to indicate whether a person at a work station is too hot or too cold. The middle is just right. In the background, the sensors also measure humidity, temperature, carbon dioxide level, volatile organic compounds and lighting. “If you are working during the day and at some point, you feel uncomfortable — hot or cold — you can move the slider bar and give the system information,” Barooah says. “All that information is where IoT comes in.” The sensors provide feedback to the system, and by the end of the year, Barooah predicts, the algorithms that allow the system to respond to the information will be ready, making it possible for the HVAC system to change settings to make each person comfortable.
“The idea is we should control the AC to take care of people in the condition they experience,” Barooah says. “But your idea of comfort is different from my idea of comfort.” Comfort also translates into energy savings. “As the system learns to manage comfort, it also learns about the power demand on the building and how it varies,” Barooah says. “You might learn that this part of the office is mostly active in the morning but not so much in the afternoon.”
“Most people are uncomfortable most of the time. And comfort isn’t just about comfort; it’s a matter of productivity and health.” — Prabir Barooah Figuring out how to manage variations in energy use also is key to integrating renewable energy into the power grid. The power grid requires a supply of energy that is balanced, without extreme highs or lows, which can cause a power outage. The intermittent nature of renewables, solar power for instance, causes problems for balancing power supply. One answer would be to use batteries, storing energy until it is needed. But batteries are costly. Barooah says the need for batteries can be reduced by embracing the flexibility of power consumption across many systems, especially HVAC systems. Once an HVAC system’s algorithms learn how buildings — or groups of buildings such as campuses or cities
— use power, it can distribute power with minimal disruption. Millions of buildings together can provide great flexibility for the power grid. And with renewable energy integrated, such a system would not have to operate at peak efficiency. “With fine-grained information, you can manipulate the power demand of millions and millions of buildings, and you won’t need batteries,” Barooah says. “Even if we lose a little energy, it doesn’t matter, because we are replacing dirty energy with clean energy.” Older buildings are constructed with ventilation systems that provide a constant air volume, or CAV. Newer buildings have VAV, variable air volume, and each damper has its own IP address, standing by. All it needs is a command. “They’ve been like that for a very long time. We just didn’t have the algorithms to put them to good use,” Barooah says. “There is a lot we can do that we are not doing right now.” Prabir Barooah Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering pbarooah@ufl.edu
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— Andy Li
22 Summer 2018
Indoor GPS accurate to 5 centimeters by Cindy Spence
C
hances are, you love your GPS, the technology that makes sure you never get lost in the world, as long as you have your cellphone with you. But what if you need GPS indoors? Perhaps you visit the Louvre, and want to get from the Mona Lisa to the Venus de Milo. Or you are turned around in the Atlanta airport, trying to get from Terminal E to the nearest cab stand. Or you simply want to navigate a big box store like Ikea, or a large parking garage. The nifty satellites that get you where you want to go outdoors don’t work indoors. Their electromagnetic waves are blocked by walls. The great indoors requires a new solution, and University of Florida researcher Xiaolin Andy Li and his colleagues have just patented one, an indoor microGPS that works without satellites. “For the first time, we can pinpoint a smartphone user within centimeters,” Li says. “With this, we know exactly where you are,” Li says. “With microGPS, if you are standing in front of the Mona Lisa, we know you are there, and we can push information about the Mona Lisa to you.” The microGPS system is named Guoguo, which is Chinese for grasshopper, and it uses acoustic signals that can be detected by any smartphone. A smartphone microphone receives acoustic signals from a
“With microGPS, if you are standing in front of the Mona Lisa, we know you are there, and we can push information about the Mona Lisa to you.” — Andy Li microchip. The system is accurate to 5 centimeters, or about 2 inches. One of the challenges of developing the system was improving on the level of accuracy of traditional GPS. Outdoor GPS is accurate only to about 5 meters. That’s fine when you’re driving a car and trying to find a home or a shop, but indoors, a 5-meter range of accuracy for navigation is almost useless. Li and his colleagues decided to try for a level of accuracy of 1 foot, and then improved the system from there. “Indoors, you want to be sure you can navigate with every step you take,” Li says. “With Guoguo, you can navigate like a car. If you want to get a Coke, you can pinpoint which aisle it’s on and even which shelf.” Li successfully tested Guoguo with blind people as an aid for indoor navigation and with patrons at UF’s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art as an aid for museum tours. While QR codes were popular for a while in museums, Li says people no longer want to use QR codes. They want simpler methods of getting information. He also thinks it can help family members monitor elderly parents, or
even help with monitoring personal health. “With Guoguo, we can say, ‘We know the pills you need to take are on that shelf, and we know you did not go to that shelf.’ Or, if you pick up a Coke, Guoguo will know you have touched a Coke and recommend that you buy something healthier,’” Li says. The system won a National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) award in 2015, placing first out of 24 teams, including teams from Berkeley, Harvard and MIT. Li and his colleagues patented the innovation in February. “Outside, we have been used to GPS. But indoors, scientists have been working on it for 20 years, sort of a worldwide open challenge,” Li says. “This is one solution, a fundamental positioning system. With this level of precision, you can literally go anywhere.” Xiaolin Andy Li Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Director, NSF Center for Big Learning andyli@ece.ufl.edu Related website: www.andyli.ece.ufl.edu
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Phish in a Barrel Cyber attacks target the most vulnerable by Cindy Spence
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omewhere in cyberspace, someone is creeping on your Facebook page, studying your LinkedIn account, scoping out your company’s website and Googling your name. Using information you trust, she is crafting the perfect email, and it’s headed for your inbox. In one click, a split second, you hand over the keys to your little kingdom: passwords, retirement accounts, credit cards. But what if this personal crisis became a national crisis? What if you are the CEO of a multinational corporation or a top-level politician? In that case, the livelihood of millions might be at stake, or democracy threatened. In their studies on phishing — and spear phishing, in particular — University of Florida Professors Daniela Oliveira and Natalie Ebner have found that older adults are particularly vulnerable to phishing. And their status as leaders of industry or politics make them favorite targets
for phishing attacks known as spear phishing. Phishing is a form of social engineering — using deception to get someone to reveal personal or financial information, which can then be used fraudulently. “When I started researching phishing and aging with Natalie, I learned how important this demographic is,” says Oliveira, a term professor in the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World. “It was like a spiritual awakening.” At the annual research conference of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, Oliveira gave a presentation titled, “Why You Should Care About Older Adults’ Susceptibility to Phishing — Implications for Corporate Security and Democracy.”
— Daniela Oliveira
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20%
65 or Older
By 2020, 20 percent of the U.S. population will be 65 or older.
50%
$ Financial Wealth
The 65 or older demographic controls more than half of the nation’s financial wealth.
— Natalie Ebner
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In their studies on phishing — and spear phishing, in particular — University of Florida Professors Daniela Oliveira and Natalie Ebner have found that older adults are particularly vulnerable to phishing.
While older adults are connected to the internet at a lower rate than younger adults, by 2020, 20 percent of the U.S. population will be 65 or older, and this demographic, Oliveira points out, controls more than half of the nation’s financial wealth. Age often equates to political status, too. “People in this age group occupy many positions of power,” Oliveira says. “Many societal decisions related to finance, politics and law are made by older adults. “But unfortunately, as we age, our cognitive abilities decline,” Oliveira says. Older people are high in crystallized intelligence, which is based on experience and ability to see the big picture. But fluid intelligence — how fast our brains process information and how our memory works — declines with age, and that can make older adults susceptible to spear phishing. “Research shows that sensitivity to deception decreases as you age, and you become more trusting,” Oliveira says. “What a dangerous combination.” Oliveira’s and Ebner’s research groups set out to understand how susceptible people are to weapons of influence in social engineering. They examined seven weapons of influence: • Authority: People tend to say yes to requests from authority figures. • Scarcity: An offer or opportunity seems more valuable when it is perceived as scarce. • Commitment: Once people take a stand, they have difficulty behaving in a way inconsistent with that stand. • Liking: People comply with requests from people they perceive as similar to them (age, country of origin, alma mater).
• Reciprocation: People tend to return a favor. • Social proof: When in doubt, people follow what others do. • Perceptual contrast: When two items are presented consecutively in a way that makes the first item appear more attractive than it actually is. One or more of these seven weapons can be used across one or more of six life domains: legal, ideological, social, health, security and financial. The researchers recruited 158 participants, who were told they were participating in a study of how people use the internet. The participants received emails for 21 days. Once a day, they received a simulated phishing email that varied according to weapon of influence and life domain. In one, for example, the researchers emailed the participant a notice of a parking violation, and sent a link for paying or disputing the fine. The email looked and sounded official, and combined authority as the weapon of influence in the legal life domain. In another, they used commitment as the weapon in the ideological life domain, asking email recipients to sign a petition for animal rights, again a seemingly harmless and official-looking email. In the study, 43 percent of participants fell for at least one of the phishing emails. The study also found older adults were more likely to fall for a phishing email than younger adults, and older women were the most susceptible of all. Participants also were asked to rate their own susceptibility to phishing. Although older adults self-reported that they would not click a phishing email, their actual behavior showed the exact opposite. “The problem occurs when social
THE SEVEN WEAPONS OF INFLUENCE Commitment: Once people take a stand, they have difficulty behaving in a way inconsistent with that stand.
Social proof: When in doubt, people follow what others do.
Scarcity: An offer or opportunity seems more valuable when it is perceived as scarce.
Perceptual contrast: When two items are presented consecutively in a way that makes the first item appear more attractive than it actually is.
Authority: People tend to say yes to requests from authority figures.
Liking: People comply with requests from people they perceive as similar to them.
Reciprocation: People tend to return a favor.
engineering via deceptive arguments influences us into performing an action that could go against our best interests and benefit the social engineer,” Oliveira says. “Influence is the key to social engineering, and research shows influencing people is a piece of cake.” Social media, Oliveira says, can be a social engineer’s best friend. Things that seem innocuous provide fodder for phishing attacks, such as company employees taking pictures of their cubicles and coworkers, or posting pictures that contain company badges, or clients tagging a company on Twitter or Facebook. The blending of personal and professional social media also works to the social engineer’s advantage. Imagine, Oliveira says, that you are an older gentleman, a stamp collector, and the CEO of a major company. You don’t have a Facebook account, but your daughter does and comments regularly on family life and her yoga classes. You get an email
from someone who says, “Hi, I’m in your daughter’s yoga class. My grandfather has a huge collection of stamps from the 1950s, and he wants to sell them. Here’s a link to a website, so you can see them.” The phishing attack appeals to scarcity — it’s not every day rare stamps become available — and the person appears to know your daughter. You click. “The generation that is turning 65 and still active includes people who make important decisions for us — politicians, supreme court justices, CEOs. These people are targets, and the attacks are becoming more sophisticated,” Oliveira says. “We say ridiculous things, like don’t click links. How do you operate on the internet if you don’t click links?” Daniela Oliveira Internet of Things Term Professor daniela@ece.ufl.edu Natalie Ebner Associate Professor, Department of Psychology natalie.ebner@ufl.edu
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MOUTH MONITOR Mining data from the human mouth by Cindy Spence
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he scene is familiar to sports fans who keep an eye on the sidelines. An athlete is pulled out of a game, and a team physician is face-to-face with him, asking questions and running tests. Minutes tick by, and the athlete gets back in the game, only to come out after another hit for more tests. Is it a concussion or just a really hard tackle? In the internet of things, the answer will be instantaneous and leave no room for guessing. University of Florida researcher Y.K. Yoon has developed the first internet of things device that works inside the human mouth. It’s a mouth guard that measures three components of athlete health: head impacts, heat stress and heart stress. He calls it H3, and it comes complete with sensors and Bluetooth. In the mouth guard’s current form, Yoon and doctoral researcher Todd Schumann used an everyday sports mouth guard and inserted a tiny chip with sensors on the side, where the mouth guard meets the gums. They covered the chip with a layer of biocompatible elastomeric polymer for comfort. The chip has 11 sensors, including an accelerometer to measure impact and a gyroscope to measure the rotation of the head. Another sensor measures temperature and still another heart rate.
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In one design, the device remains in a low-power state until the athlete shakes it, which “wakes up” the sensors. Another design relies on a magnet to wake up the microcontroller. Once it’s turned on, the sensors begin collecting data, which the microcontroller sends to an app, which can be installed on a cellphone, tablet or laptop. Trainers and coaches can roam the sidelines, keeping an eye on the app. A spike on a graph means a nasty collision, a high body temperature reading could mean it’s time for a water break. While football players have had access for several years to helmets with impact sensors, Yoon says the helmets can have enough of a gap between the helmet and the head to distort the sensors’ readings. A helmet could shift back slightly, while the head moves forward just a little. A mouth guard is more tightly fitted, so it can give a more accurate real-time reading. The mouth guard also can be used by athletes, such as soccer or basketball players, who do not wear helmets. Schumann says he tested the mouth guard on a treadmill and found other interesting data. The sensors could detect whether he was stepping with his right foot or his left, something that might be interesting to examine for gait analysis.
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Yoon, a native of South Korea, says the mouth sensors also might have applications for linguistics, because they can detect differences in tongue movements that affect how words are pronounced. Koreans, he says, don’t distinguish between a “p” sound and an “f” sound, but a sensor can detect that issue and improve pronunciation. For sports uses, the protective function of the mouth guard remains important. But in other uses, such as linguistics or gait analysis, the mouth guard could be made very small, only as big as it needs to be to hold the chip. The sensors could even be attached to a tooth, Yoon says. So far, their prototype focuses on physical sensors. But already, Yoon says, he sees applications for using the IoT mouth guard with biochemical sensors since saliva offers a wealth of information. Yoon says mouth sensors could monitor blood sugar or detect disease. Saliva also is a unique signature that keeps the data linked uniquely to the person generating it. That means an athlete yanked from a game after his mouth guard indicates a concussion, for instance, cannot use a teammate’s mouth guard to get back in the game. You can’t fool the IoT mouth guard. Y.K. Yoon Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering ykyoon@ece.ufl.edu
— Todd Schumann and Y.K. Yoon
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Forecasting Haiti
An internet of things solution brings weather data back to Haiti by Cindy Spence hen University of Florida engineering Professor Bill Eisenstadt visited Haiti in 2016, he was asked for advice on how to fix a weather monitoring network devastated by earthquakes and hurricanes. “I looked at the old weather stations, with their really old design. I knew we could fix them, but they just weren’t worth it,” says Eisenstadt, who is working on a team with the U.S. Agency for International Development and UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences to boost the agricultural capability of Haitian farmers. “I said ‘Scrap them.’ We can do better.” Eisenstadt and a team of students did just that, using off-the-shelf components, open source code, and the flexibility of the internet of things. With parts that can be bought online, they assembled a weather monitoring station for about $300, the solution as sensible as it is simple. Four are now operating in Haiti, and they replace a hodgepodge of legacy electronic weather monitoring stations. The clunky old stations were manufactured by an assortment of companies. The designs were proprietary and the parts and computer data were not interchangeable. When they were broken, they often stayed broken. “These old systems were made to be indestructible and last 10 years,” Eisenstadt says. “By contrast,
30 Summer 2018
the internet of things is made with the latest parts, and the latest parts are very, very good and very, very powerful.” While a more sophisticated weather monitoring network – such as UF/IFAS’ FAWN, the Florida Automated Weather Network with its 35 stations – is nice, the expense and upkeep put that out of reach in Haiti. Haiti needs something that can be fixed on the fly and with inexpensive parts. “FAWN is not cheap. It works and gives excellent data in a commercial agricultural environment like Florida’s,” Eisenstadt says. “But Haiti needs a different solution.” Every two minutes, each station’s sensors record temperature and humidity, pressure, wind speed, precipitation and soil moisture. The data are uploaded to the Weather Underground website and stored on an SD card, a new feature in the latest station version and an adaptation to Haiti’s fickle Wi-Fi. If a farmer misses a day’s data, he can retrieve the SD card, pop it into his laptop or tablet, download the data, and replace the SD card for the next time the Wi-Fi goes down. Or, when the Wi-Fi comes back up, he can click a button on the website. “There’s a program that we will build that says, ‘Kick us the station — Bill Eisenstadt
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data from yesterday; we didn’t get it,’” Eisenstadt says. Electricity, too, is fickle in Haiti, and the whole station is powered with a solar panel. When it rains, a series of cones shields the electronics and funnels water down. In July, Eisenstadt and the team plan to add a mesh network of soil sensors that can take readings up to 100 feet away, then transmit them back in a bucket brigade fashion to the weather station for transmission to farmers and Weather Underground. Bluetooth communication with cellphones also is planned.
“With the internet of things, we can add these additional capabilities at a low cost,” Eisenstadt says. Eventually, the Haitian Ministry of Meteorology would like to have a couple of hundred stations, and the country, though small, likely needs that, Eisenstadt says. The elevation ranges from sea level to 7,000 feet, and the country’s coastline and regional climates vary. The need is even more critical, considering that long-range data is important in gauging the effects of climate change. As the old-school weather stations fell into disrepair, Haiti’s climate and weather data disappeared, making it difficult to plan to adapt to climate change long-term or plant crops for the next season as well. “There are some monasteries with hand-written data, but that’s not really a database you could access,” Eisenstadt says. “There is no real weather history in Haiti.”
Eisenstadt acknowledges that Haiti is a rough environment, so the design needs to be robust as well as nimble. It also needs to work when he and his students are back in their lab in Gainesville. They’ve conducted training workshops, so that Haitian farmers and others can troubleshoot the system, order a part and do a repair. When he returned from his first trip to Haiti, he had no problem finding students to help. “I told them, ‘You guys have had all these classes; let’s go build something.’ “They like the social impact,” Eisenstadt says. “They’re not making another game on their cellphone; they’re actually making something to help people.” William Eisenstadt Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering wre@ece.ufl.edu
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