The researchers are working with billions of location data points from AT&T mobile phone calls and text messages made in Los Angeles [...]]]> 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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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) [...]]]>

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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Yeti uses ground-penetrating radar to map crevasses, the deadly gaps hidden in ice fields that have been the bane of [...]]]> 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.

Glisic, who is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, along with colleagues installed pair [...]]]> 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 five-year cooperative effort between academia, government and industry is being directed [...]]]> 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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