It’s almost impossible to think of the days when cell phones were used solely for calls, text messaging and photographs ever since the complex iPhone came out two years ago.
Recently, students in a high school program at UCLA adapted the Google Android Smartphones to monitor everything from people’s reactions of extreme social awkwardness to phone localization without a GPS system.
On Friday, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing High School Scholars Program presented the research of 15 high school students and two Pierce College undergraduate students in a poster symposium held in the CENS courtyard of Boelter Hall. Cameron Ketcham, a fourth-year computer science student, and Rakhee Patel, a statistics graduate student, worked as supervising mentors.
Designed to introduce underrepresented high school students from the L.A. area to the realm of wireless sensor research, the CENS has admitted less than 25 percent of its summer applicants to the high school program, said Karen Kim, public relations representative for CENS. The students receive a small stipend for working alongside undergraduate computer researchers and faculty mentors.
The students divided into groups and presented their work to parents, teachers, mentors and faculty. Among these projects were the Omni-directional Wi-Fi Localization and Breaking the Norm. The Omni-directional Wi-Fi Localization used three GPS-enabled cell phones to locate a fourth phone with only a Wi-Fi connection.
“The three phones use their GPS to calculate their distance to the fourth phone, which we call an anchor,” said Nate Schloss, an incoming senior at Milken Community High School and student researcher in the OWL project.
At a speed of one second, this “social GPS,” as dubbed by Schloss, is reported to work at a much faster speed and with more accurate results than Skyhook, another popular localizing technology that uses Wi-Fi.
Although this technology seems to endanger the privacy of the many Wi-Fi-enabled cell phone users of today, Schloss said that to locate any given phone, virtually every phone would have to use OWL.
Privacy concerns were another topic of interest at the CENS High School Scholars Program. The Breaking the Norm project aimed to recreate a scene using only non-photography cell phone applications to protect subjects’ privacy rights.
“We performed various acts that are distinctively out of the norm like drinking out of a bucket and paying with pennies,” said Jennifer Zefdiner, an incoming senior at Palisades Charter High School. “We were pretty much acting like dorks.”
In addition to the 17 students from the program, the work of 20 undergraduate students was also featured in the poster exhibition, Kim said.
The program lets students get acquainted with the college atmosphere and make new friends, but most importantly, it lets them immerse themselves in active research with important societal implications, she added.
“We’ve been here since the end of June,” Zefdiner said. “(A) lot of the time has been spent on just getting comfortable with what we’re doing.”
“I don’t know if our technology will ever be used in the real world … but we got to mimic and improve technology that is already available,” Schloss said.