The Department of Computer Science presents
Dr. Hock M. Ng
Technical Staff Member
Bell Labs
Alcatel-Lucent
April 2, 2013
Education Building Rm. 113 (tentative)
11:30am – 12:30pm
Refreshments to follow the presentation
iRoom: Experiments with an Intelligent Room
In this talk, I will describe our iRoom research project which shares the vision of smart environments responding to human presence and activity. The goal of iRoom is to make the room environment itself become the human computer interface. For example, the iRoom can determine the identity, location, and visit duration of a person entering the room using inputs from a variety of networked sensors and cameras. We use sensor fusion to determine context from sensor inputs and produce actions responding to the identity and/or activity of the visitor in the room. The iRoom generates in real-time several abstractions of contextual messages that developers can subscribe to in order to build third-party applications. I will describe the architecture, sensors, messaging protocols, algorithms, and potential applications of the iRoom.
Biography:
Dr. Hock M. Ng is a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent in Murray Hill, NJ. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 1994, 1997, and 2000, respectively. Currently, his research interests are in the area of sensor fusion, computer vision, data visualization and pervasive computing. Prior to 2008, his research contributions were in the field of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) of wide bandgap semiconductor materials and devices, with a focus on GaN and ZnO. His work was recognized by the Electrochemical Society with the 2006 Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award and by the North American MBE conference with the inaugural 2006 Young Investigator Award. He is also an alumnus of the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (2004). He is a senior member of the IEEE. In his spare time, he likes to tinker with robotics and 3D-printers.