This Innovate Practice Work-In-Progress paper describes a novel, knowledge sharing environment that addresses several current problems in technical education. This environment is called the Kista Mentorspace, and is hosted by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. Although the problems it deals with are many, this paper focuses on the following areas.1.How to provision applied learning and practice to support technical theory.2.How to do this in a way that shows convincing value from higher education institutions.3.How to extend this value and contribution in a very broad sense.The Mentorspace provisions applied learning and practice by combining students from different schools in order to share their knowledge with engineering students. Knowledge sharing leads to applied practice including tool use, but that aspect is secondary. The Mentorspace increases the value of engineering education by tying applied practice to local needs and opportunities for graduates within the community. To extend this value in a broad sense, the Mentorspace brings in business and community developers to add local economic and social factors to the engineering curriculum. Success of the space is measured through academic and personal accomplishment, and contribution to community and social development. Long term mentoring by all participants regardless of age or social position is a cornerstone of the Mentorspace.

Providing high resolution tangible user interface components without batteries such as dials and sliders that support dynamic user interface arrangement is challenging. Previous work uses RFID to support limited resolution custom-built components. We demonstrate improved techniques using commercial off the shelf input controls incorporated into passive RFID tags using an on-off key subcarrier to encode state information into the RFID signal. Our method supports high resolution components that do not require power cables or batteries. We provide exemplars demonstrating how the technique supports a range of user interface components including buttons, dials, sliders, flex and light sensors. Compared to previous work, we obtain a higher resolution, only limited by sample time, for all components and demonstrate 115 discrete dial positions. Our technique allows the TUI components to be freely placed and rearranged without hardwiring or batteries.

A new night-time lane detection system and its accompanying framework are presented in this paper. The accompanying framework consists of an automated ground truth process and systematic storage of captured videos that will be used for training and testing. The proposed Advanced Lane Detector 2.0 (ALD 2.0) is an improvement over the ALD 1.0 or Layered Approach with integration of pixel remapping, outlier removal, and prediction with tracking. Additionally, a novel procedure to generate the ground truth data for lane marker locations is also proposed. The procedure consists of an original process called time slicing, which provides the user with unique visualization of the captured video and enables quick generation of ground truth information. Finally, the setup and implementation of a database hosting lane detection videos and standardized data sets for testing are also described. The ALD 2.0 is evaluated by means of the user-created annotations accompanying the videos. Finally, the planned improvements and remaining work are addressed.

In this paper, we propose a new methodology for detecting lane markers that exploits the parallel nature of lane boundaries on the road. First, the input image is pre-processed and Altered to detect lane marker features. Then, using the Polar Randomized Hough Transform that is introduced in this paper, lines are fitted through the detected features and the orientation of each line is evaluated. By finding near parallel lines separated by a constraint specified distance, false signalling caused by artifacts in the image is greatly reduced. The proposed system was tested using a real world driving videos and showed good results despite the presence of neighboring vehicles, shadows, and irregularities on the road surface.

In this document, a new and efficient method to specify the ground truth locations of lane markers is presented. The method comprises of a novel process called Time-Slicing that provided the user with a unique visualization of the video. Coupled with automation via spline interpolation, the quick generation of necessary ground truth information is achieved. Videos recorded from a vehicle while driving on local city roads and highways are marked with ground truth information for use in testing. The performance of a variety of lane detection systems is compared to the ground truth and the error is computed for each system. Finally, quantitative analysis shows that the reference lane detection system presented in produces the most accurate lane detections which is depicted by the smallest error.

In this paper, we present a new methodology for detecting lane markers that is able to withstand many challenging situations like scattered shadows, illumination changes, and presence of neighboring vehicles to name a few. At first, the input image undergoes a perspective removal followed by a color space conversion. Then, the core elements consisting of template matching, lane region merging, and elliptical projections are explained. Finally, the developed system showed good results when tested on 15 minutes of real-world driving videos containing variations in illumination, traffic, and road surface conditions.

In a previous paper, a simple approach to lane detection using the Hough transform and iterated matched filters was described. This paper extends this work by incorporating an inverse perspective mapping to create a bird's-eye view of the road, applying random sample consensus to help eliminate outliers due to noise and artifacts in the road, and a Kalman filter to help smooth the output of the lane tracker.

We present a new model of interactive audio for entertainment and communication. A new device called the DJammer and its associated technologies are described. The DJammer introduces the idea of provisioning mobile users to interact cooperatively with digital audio streams. Users can augment the audio in real time and communicate the result in several ways resulting in a new form of multimedia communication across diverse devices and multiple networks. This paper describes the technologies incorporated into the DJammer, and discusses the actual implementation of the prototype DJammer. Future enhancements are also described.

In the Swedish Walkstation project a device for mobile hosts and base stations is realized by the same kind of hardware but with different kinds of communication software. This device, called MINT (Mobile IP Router), consists mainly of three parts, one for the connection to the host or backbone net (Ethernet), one for connecting to wireless LANs (radio or infrared), and a processing part for computing the communication protocols. This device serves as more than a mobile modem, i.e., it actually routes packets over potentially multiple paths with varying connectivity and quality. By using Ethernet as an input channel, it should not be necessary to install special purpose wiring dedicated to mobile communication. Instead the existing network, which normally is globally available, is used to select suitable sites for base stations. To realize a large scale field trial the new router must be low cost, small in size, and have a low power consumption while offering high performance. The current phase of the project involves building a 68030 based router with multiple interfaces, including as host interfaces: SCSI, Ethernet, serial, parallel; and as wireless interfaces: IR, microwave-radio, or a-second Ethernet (supported for software development).>