Mayank Lahiri, a PhD student in the Computational Population Biology Lab, has received the Provost's Award for his project on automatic identification of zebras from photographs, a project he has started in Kenya as a student in the Field Computational Population Biology course this semester. He will use the award to go back to Kenya to validate, fine-tune, and deploy the system where it is most needed: in the field, so the nature conservancy staff, field assistants, researchers, and scouts can use it to do their job studying and saving zebras.
BITS Lab, in collaboration with UIC Facilities Management, recently launched the UIC Shuttle Tracker, which provides the real-time location of the UIC Bus Service as well as CTA buses within the UIC campus. The UIC Shuttle Tracker is available at http://bus.uic.edu/. In addition to real-time locations, the system also provides approximate arrival time predictions for all stops on the shuttle routes.
Zebras at the Ol' Pejeta conservancy in Kenya where in January 2010 UIC
computer science students joined Princeton biology students in a unique
field course in computational population biology (co-taught by Professor Tanya Berger-Wolf). Among other projects, students studied zebra social behavior and designed software for automatic identification of
individual zebras by stripes.
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory is helping plan missions and analyse the data of the NASA funded ENDURANCE project which is using an autonomous submarine to collect data from under ice covered Lake Bonney in Antarctica.
EVL students JD Pirtle, Arthur Nishimoto, Karan Chakrapani, Todd Silvia, and Philip Pilosi received Honorable Mention for "20 Foot Canvas." The project pays homage to traditional painting, enabling artists to paint on a large-scale digital “canvas” by touching the wall with fingers or traditional brushes.
EVL's Interactive RainTable was featured at the Field Museum in 2009 as
part of Water: H2O= Life, and has travelled with the exhibit to the
Science Museum of Minnesota and the Great Lakes Science Center in
Cleveland.