Technology Review recently highlighted research by Margaret Martonosi and colleagues from AT&T, Rutgers University, and Loyola University who have devised a way to mine cellphone data without revealing callers’ identity.
The researchers are working with billions of location data points from AT&T mobile phone calls and text messages made in Los Angeles and New York City. The team is creating a “mobility model” of the two cities that “aggregates the data, produces representative ‘synthetic call records’—then mathematically obscures any data that could tend to identify people,” Technology Review reports.
“Noise is injected into the model at points in order to reduce the likelihood of individuals being identifiable,” says Martonosi, who is the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton.
In other news, a research paper coauthored by Martonosi and Sharad Malik, George Van Ness Lothrop Professor of Engineering, has been identified as one of the 25 most significant papers from the first 20 years of the International IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines.
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Engineering Dean H. Vincent Poor *77 has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Poor is a leading researcher in the areas of statistical signal processing, stochastic analysis and information theory — particularly as they apply to wireless networks. As EQN has pointed out before, two giants in Poor’s field of research also have an Edinburgh connection. The physicist James Clerk Maxwell and the inventor Alexander Graham Bell were both educated at Edinburgh.
In 2011 Poor received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh (see photo above).
David MacMillan, James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry, also was elected a fellow of the RSE this year.
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Robert Kahn *64, widely credited with being one of the fathers of the Internet, is one of the winners of the first-ever Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
Fellow award winners are Louis Pouzin, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, and Vint Cerf, with whom Kahn invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
Kahn, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1964, is part of Princeton’s luminous legacy in the field of computer science and in the development of the Internet. Alan Turing, Alonzo Church and John von Neumann all spent time at Princeton. Recent Internet innovators who were Princeton Engineering undergraduates include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Google executive Eric Schmidt.
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Engineering alumna Laura Ray, now a professor of mechanical engineering at Dartmouth, and her students helped create Yeti, a robot that is making Arctic and Antarctic exploration safer and more effective.
Yeti uses ground-penetrating radar to map crevasses, the deadly gaps hidden in ice fields that have been the bane of explorers since people first ventured into frozen lands. In a news release, the National Science Foundation, which funded Ray’s work, noted that Yeti “opens the door to making polar travel safer for crews that supply remote scientific research stations.”
“Polar exploration is not unlike space missions; we put people into the field where it is expensive and it is dangerous to do science,” said James Lever of the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, which helped lead the Yeti project.
Ray and her students at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering designed and built a predecessor to Yeti called Cool Robot. Researchers plan to deploy Cool Robot this summer on the Greenland ice sheet where it will take atmospheric samples as it travels. “The solar-powered, four-wheel-drive Cool Robot led to Yeti’s success, while helping the researchers meet NSF’s goal of integrating research and education,” the NSF said.
The NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory also funded the development of Yeti.
Ray earned her bachelor’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton in 1984 and, after receiving her master’s at Stanford, returned to the Princeton MAE department for her Ph.D. She was a student of Professor Robert Stengel, a renowned figure in the field of flight control systems, who is now applying his numerical expertise to a range of problems in biology.
The cover story of the March issue of Optics & Photonics News features research by Branko Glisic on a new wave of sensors that will help ensure the long-term safety of buildings and bridges.
Glisic, who is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, along with colleagues installed pair of novel fiber-optic sensor systems into the concrete of Streicker Bridge, a newly built pedestrian walkway between two areas of the Princeton campus. Read more about Streicker Bridge here.
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The Princeton Theatre Experiment, in collaboration with the Arts Council of Princeton, on Saturday, March 9, is presenting a comedy mashup featuring several Princeton faculty. The event, called “An Evening of Physico-Mathematica-Logical Music and Comedy,” is a warm up to the town of Princeton’s annual Pi Day, a celebration of geekdom that occurs on the anniversary of the birthday longtime Princeton resident Albert Einstein. That date is March 14, or 3.14, the equivalent of pi, a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
The United States Engineers Without Borders organization has named Princeton’s EWB chapter a 2013 Premier Project winner for its library project in Ashaiman, Ghana. In the summer of 2011, five students from Princeton Engineers Without Borders traveled to Ashaiman, to finish the construction of a community library. This trip was the culmination of a three-year project to provide the area with improved education and digital resources. The finished structure is now fully operational and open to the public. The library features electric lighting and fans, 37 netbooks and a charging station, and more than 7,000 labeled and catalogued books. This video by Jeremy Blair chronicles the group’s final visit. The travel team members were Buse Aktas ’14, Jeremy Blair ’13, Cole Freeman ’14, Elizabeth O’Grady ’13, and Akhil Reddy ’13.
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Three Princeton Engineering faculty members are part of a newly announced $194 million government-industry initiative called the Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research network (STARnet), a consortium of six new university research centers whose mission is to maintain U.S. leadership in microelectronics.
The five-year cooperative effort between academia, government and industry is being directed by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
Sharad Malik, Margaret Martonosi, and Naveen Verma will conduct research as part of the STARnet Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR), which is led by the University of Michigan. Malik will serve as the center’s associate director. C-FAR will be developing scalable next-generation computing platforms that will power applications such as computer vision, speech recognition, enhanced graphics, and big-data analysis.
Malik and Verma are also affiliated with the Systems on Nanoscale Information fabriCs Center (SONIC), which is led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. SONIC aims to achieve unprecedented levels of robustness and energy efficiency through statistically-driven applications, architectures and circuits.
More coverage on all six STARnet centers here via SRC and here via EE Times.
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Red Bulletin magazine has named Mike McAlpine one of the world’s 20 mightiest minds. He is in good company: Stephen Hawking and Tim Berners-Lee also made the cut.
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The Princeton Fung Global Forum conference on the future of the city takes place January 30 to February 1 this year in Shanghai, China. The conference showcases the work of a number of Princeton Engineering faculty and affiliated faculty, including Howard Stone, James Smith, Sigrid Adriaenssens, Branko Glisic, Denise Mauzerall, Guy Nordenson and Maria Garlock.
The Princeton-Fung Global Forum was established in 2012 as part of a $10 million gift by William Fung, who earned a BSE in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1970.
This short beautiful film of Shanghai was made by Princeton molecular biology graduate student Zach Donnell.
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