This work-in-progress paper reports on a new innovation model that extends Pasteur's Quadrant by adding an axis called Contemplation of Sentiment, which reflects the human-centered aspects of innovation. Human-centered designers and artists have played an integral role in innovation throughout history up to the present day. However, engineering education programs have not often included this integration - relying on a focus on “STEM” even though leaders in industry from Amazon and Apple to Qualcomm and SpaceX have left this exclusionary approach behind. Pasteur's Quadrant is a model adopted by industry and US government agencies to point to the relationship between basic and applied scientific research. To describe the implications of this model, we share the qualitative methodology and early results collected in over 30 individual interviews with thought leaders in industry reacting to da Vinci's Cube. We are exploring the question, “What is the connection between artists, designers, and broad societal innovation in relation to economic and job growth?” Early findings show that managers place themselves, their company, and their hires on relational intersections that include our added axis of “contemplation of sentiment”. We discuss these findings in the context of an NSF-RED team that developed a notable exception to the narrow curricula typical of electrical and computer engineering undergraduate programs.

This workshop introduces threshold concepts as a framework to design an integrated first-year course that covers a wide range of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from circuits to software. We discuss an interaction plan to engage participants in distilling fundamental projects for ECE courses into their fundamental components and looking for opportunities to make explicit connections across disciplines. While ECE is used as the guiding example, other disciplines can benefit from a similar approach.11This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1623067.

This special session introduces threshold concepts as a framework to design an integrated first-year course that covers a wide range of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from circuits to software. We discuss an interaction plan to engage participants in distilling fundamental projects for ECE courses into their fundamental components and looking for opportunities to make explicit connections across disciplines. While ECE is used as the guiding example, other disciplines can benefit from a similar approach.

This innovative practice paper introduces the use of personas as a design technique to guide the large-scale curriculum reform of an Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program at [University X], a large Mid-Atlantic research-intensive institution. The team has created five personas to explore the potential breadth of the curriculum and expand the faculty perspective on who could be a successful ECE student in the department. The concept of personas originated in the field of human-computer interaction to represent subsets of potential users as abstracted sets of characteristics. Drawing from qualitative data including observations of team meetings and document analysis, this work describes the ethnographic inquiry designers used to develop profiles not solely based on their biases. Responses to personas during implementation show that they can be used to engage the boundaries of culture, bringing to light not only characteristics of students who are not typically present in the program, but also faculty members' assumptions about characteristics needed for success.

In response to a call from the National Science Foundation, “Revolutionizing Engineering Departments” (RED), several departments across the United States are engaged with reforming their curricula, program structures, and culture. This work-in-progress paper presents a preliminary causal loop diagram (CLD) drawing from the engineering education literature. A CLD consists of variables and positive and negative relations between them describing the dynamics of a system. One RED team in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech developed a CLD to conceptually connect project goals and the challenges associated with change. The challenges were hypothesized to be linked to a perception of rigor in the department creating a “culture” that exacerbated difficulties in the change effort, which was supported by the literature. Goals of the grant including broadening participation in Electrical and Computer Engineering and adopting alternative pedagogical strategies were tied to the culture of rigor. Extending the model as a tool for the change effort is discussed.

Making curricular decisions about critical content is fundamental to the operation of any academic unit in an institution with teaching responsibilities. The literature provides a wealth of information about how instructors plan for instruction and assessment but does not detail how instructors identify core concepts. This work in progress explores curricular decision-making from the instructor's perspective within the context of large-scale programmatic change in an Electrical and Computer Engineering department. We thematically analyzed existing data from a Content Representation (CoRe) instrument used to capture instructor pedagogical content knowledge and teaching strategies for big ideas in a curriculum. The emergent themes for teaching the big ideas concerning the faculty member's perceptions of student attitudes were: instructors valuing systems thinking (but not seeing it in students) and appreciating versatility/adaptability, as well as seeing students struggling with the value of concrete vs. abstract, and having a low tolerance for ambiguity. Teaching strategies were dominantly instructor-centered. This work in progress builds upon what is known about curricular decision-making while offering insights about faculty perceptions of content knowledge and strategies for teaching it.

Virginia Tech is in the process of an intensive restructuring of its Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, driven by an NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Department (RED) grant. As a natural first step, discussion has centered on how the curriculum can be meaningfully enhanced to go beyond a mere reshuffling of core content without tangible changes in pedagogy. Accordingly, we have adopted the threshold concept framework, initially developed by Meyer and Land, as a lens to view elements of the curriculum that are often considered “troublesome” for students to learn and are both transformative and integrative in nature. We opted to frame the discussion of threshold concepts in terms of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the knowledge associated with communicating concepts in such a way that others — primarily students — can understand. To capture PCK, we used an instrument called a “content representation” (CoRe). This paper describes one element of our sequential qualitative investigation, which had three primary stages: an individual reflection with CoRe, a series of focus groups discussing and synthesizing the CoRes, and the development of a culminating card sort workshop. The findings from the focus groups will be presented, which include the set of big ideas and the associated threshold concepts within ECE from the literature.

This position paper posits the use of an individual's affective response to musical cues as a means of designing an implicit communication channel between the user and their immediate computing infrastructure in the form of an intelligent environment. Interaction design for a sensor-rich intelligent environment is a challenging problem, often arising from the dynamic nature of such pervasive systems having no fixed set of interaction devices or users. However, the knowledge of a user's affective responses to known musical cues may provide a learning framework for inferring affective states such as stress or frustration. This, in turn, may be used by the intelligent environment to assess the user's (dis)approval of the services it provides, helping it to refine its services to better suit the user's immediate needs.

Determining the relevance of services from intelligent environments is a critical step in implementing a reliable context-aware ambient intelligent system. Designing the provision of explicit indications to the system is effective in communicating this relevance, however, such explicit indications come at the cost of user's cognitive resources. In this work, we strive to create a novel pathway of implicit communication between the user and their ambient intelligence by employing user's stress as a feedback pathway to the intelligent system. In addition, following a few very recent works, we propose using proven laboratory stressors to collect ground truth data for stressed states. We present results from a preliminary pilot study which shows promise for creating this implicit channel of communication as well as proves the feasibility of using laboratory stressors as a reliable method of ground truth collection for stressed states.

Hofstede's theory of national cultures has been widely used to analyze cultural differences. In this pilot study we describe our experiences applying an instrument based on Hofstede's work to determine whether his dimensions of national cultures can be mapped to academic disciplines. In this paper, we present information about Hofstede's model as well as critiques of both the model and the instrument used. We also report initial results of a pilot survey based on Hofstede's model that we administered to a sample of 687 undergraduate engineering students. Preliminary results show that the instrument is reliable and valid; in addition, we present preliminary results regarding how different engineering majors map to Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

This paper presents a feasibility study of a wearable computing system to protect construction workers from carbon monoxide poisoning. A pulse oximetry sensor has been integrated into a typical construction helmet to allow continuous and noninvasive monitoring of workers' blood gas saturation levels. To show the feasibility of monitoring for carbon monoxide poisoning without subjecting users to dangerous conditions, a prototype for monitoring blood O2saturation was constructed and tested during a user study involving typical construction tasks to determine its reliability while undergoing motion. As monitoring for O2and CO simply differ in the number of wavelengths of light employed, if monitoring O2is feasible, then monitoring for CO will be feasible as well. Using this equivalency, the results of this initial study show that integrating an oximeter into a construction helmet will warn the user of impending carbon monoxide poisoning with a probability greater than 99%. Note to Practitioners-This work addresses the issue of carbon monoxide exposure on construction sites. A noninvasive blood oxygen saturation sensor, called a pulse oximeter, was integrated into a typical construction helmet to investigate the reliability of continuous monitoring of construction workers. The pulse oximetry sensing technology was shown to be reliable under typical construction tasks such that a worker would be alerted of impending carbon monoxide poisoning before becoming impaired. Additional work is required with more complex tasks as well as isolating the sensor from motion artifacts generated by head movement.

This paper presents a feasibility study of a wearable computing system to protect construction workers from carbon monoxide poisoning. A pulse oximetry sensor has been integrated into a typical construction helmet to allow continuous and non-invasive monitoring of workers' blood saturation levels. To show the feasibility of monitoring for carbon monoxide poisoning without subjecting users to dangerous conditions, a prototype for monitoring blood O2was constructed and tested during a user study involving typical construction tasks to determine its reliability while undergoing motion. Because monitoring for blood O2and CO involve the same principles and technologies, if monitoring O2is feasible, then monitoring for CO will be feasible as well. The results of this initial study show that integrating an oximeter into a construction helmet will warn the user of impeding carbon monoxide poisoning with a probability greater than 99%.

A clear association has been demonstrated between gait stability and falls in the elderly. Integration of wearable computing and human dynamic stability measures into home automation systems may help differentiate fall-prone individuals in a residential environment. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the capability of a pair of electronic textile (e-textile) pants system to assess local dynamic stability and to differentiate motion-impaired elderly from their healthy counterparts. A pair of e-textile pants comprised of numerous e-TAGs at locations corresponding to lower extremity joints was developed to collect acceleration, angular velocity and piezoelectric data. Four motion-impaired elderly together with nine healthy individuals (both young and old) participated in treadmill walking with a motion capture system simultaneously collecting kinematic data. Local dynamic stability, characterized by maximum Lyapunov exponent, was computed based on vertical acceleration and angular velocity at lower extremity joints for the measurements from both e-textile and motion capture systems. Results indicated that the motion-impaired elderly had significantly higher maximum Lyapunov exponents (computed from vertical acceleration data) than healthy individuals at the right ankle and hip joints. In addition, maximum Lyapunov exponents assessed by the motion capture system were found to be significantly higher than those assessed by the e-textile system. Despite the difference between these measurement techniques, attaching accelerometers at the ankle and hip joints was shown to be an effective sensor configuration. It was concluded that the e-textile pants system, via dynamic stability assessment, has the potential to identify motion-impaired elderly.

Electronic textile research often centers on the concept of introducing electronics to apparel such as shirts jackets, gloves, and health vests. Another less researched concept incorporates electronics into large textile surfaces such as carpets and upholstery. In this paper we explore methods and challenges of building a large surface area electronic textile floor for cooperative mobile device interaction. We systematically construct both a 100ft by 50ft textile simulation and a 3ft by 8ft working prototype using readily available materials. We introduce the broadly applicable embedded workload of human gait tracking as a means to defining the requirements for the textile physicals, networked computing node, and distributed execution environment subsystems. Through this effort we begin to establish a working model for combining inexpensive electronic textiles with a scalable execution environment that supports mobile device to floor interactions.

This paper describes an autonomous, wearable location awareness system that determines a user's location within a building given a map of that building. The system uses a moderate number of ultrasonic range transceivers as the sensing elements. Given a set of range readings from these sensors, the system attempts to match those actual readings to expected readings associated with a set of candidate locations for the wearer. These expected readings are calculated using a simulation model of the propagation of ultrasonic signals within a building. A complementary algorithm is given for determining the wearer's movement between rooms, allowing for the uncertainty associated with sensor readings in complex, multiroom environments. A wearable prototype system is described and results from this system in a range of scenarios are presented and analyzed

We present a novel, quality-driven, architectural-level approach that trades-off the output quality to enable power-aware processing of multimedia streams. The error tolerance of multimedia data is exploited to selectively eliminate computation while maintaining a specified output quality. We construct relaxed, synthesized power macro-models for power-hungry units to predict the cycle-accurate power consumption of the input stream on the fly. The macro-models, together with an effective quality model, are integrated into a programmable architecture that allows both power savings and quality to be dynamically tuned with the available battery-life. In a case study, power monitors are integrated with functional units of the IDCT module of a MPEG-2 decoder. Experiments indicate that, for a moderate power monitor energy overhead of 5%, power savings of 72% in the functional units can be achieved resulting in an increase in battery life by 1.95 x.

The goal of dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is to reduce CPU energy consumption without degrading applications' quality-of-service (QoS). In general-purpose systems, in which a variety of tasks are scheduled by a traditional dynamic priority-based task scheduler, existing DVS schemes tend to degrade the QoS by causing urgent tasks having low priorities to starve because these schemes ignore the behavior of dynamic priority-based task schedulers. In this paper, we propose the 'double-interval-based DVS scheme for priority-based task scheduling systems (DIP)', which better manages time-sensitive tasks' QoS by bridging the gap between CPU speed scheduling and dynamic priority-based task scheduling. We describe how DIP determines an appropriate CPU speed for a group of coexisting tasks considering tasks' priorities, using an improved interval-based algorithm so that the CPU-time requirements of the low priority time-sensitive tasks in the group can be satisfied. Another novel feature of DIP is that it separates QoS-control from throughput-control via two different interval-based algorithms, which allows more energy savings when throughput is not a primary concern. Trace-based simulations show that, depending upon target systems' primary concern, DIP generally provides better energy savings at comparable QoS or better QoS at comparable energy savings, respectively, compared to existing DVS schemes.

Recent advances in dynamic power management (DPM) techniques have resulted in designs that support a rich set of power management options, both at the hardware and software levels. This has resulted in an explosion of the design space when analyzing the system-level tradeoffs of candidate DPM strategy designs. This paper proposes a design space exploration methodology based on a high-level, multi-layered modeling framework that facilitates rapid estimation of system-wide energy by providing the designer with a global view of the system. The framework is based on the extended finite state machine formalism and abstracts the component power modes, the operating environment and the DPM architecture into interacting, concurrent layers within a single, unified model. The modeling framework is coupled with a symbolic simulation engine to allow for rapid traversal of the large design space. We first illustrate how the proposed model can be constructed by making reasonable assumptions on the system and workload parameters, and then we show how analysis of various candidate strategies can be performed using this model. Our aim is to provide a high-level model that can be used to quickly assess the impact of various power management decisions on the system-wide energy. The framework can also be a formal basis for design of energy efficient power management systems.

Encryption algorithms can be used to help secure wireless communications, but securing data also consumes resources. The goal of this research is to provide users or system developers of personal digital assistants and applications with the associated time and energy costs of using specific encryption algorithms. Fouriblock ciphers (RC2, Blowfish, XTEA, and AES) were considered. The experiments included encryption and decryption tasks with different cipher and file size combinations. The resource impact of the block ciphers were evaluated using the latency, throughput, energy-latency product, and throughput/energy ratio metrics. We found that RC2 encrypts faster and uses less energyithan XTEA, followed by AES. The Blowfish cipher is a fast encryption algorithm, but the size of the plaintext affects its encryption speed and energy consumption. Faster algorithms seem to be more energy efficient because of differences in speed rather than differences in power consumption levels while encrypting.

This paper describes our design of a simulation environment for electronic textiles (e-textiles) and our experiences with that environment. This simulation environment, based upon Ptolemy II, enables us to model a diverse range of areas related to the design of electronic textiles, including the physical environment they will be used in, the behavior of the sensors incorporated into the fabric, the on-fabric network, the power consumption of the system, and the execution of the application and system software. This paper focuses on two aspects of the system, modeling the motion of a person wearing the e-textile and modeling the effect of faults in the e-textile system. To partially validate this environment, we compare simulation results against results from two different physical prototypes, a large-scale acoustic beamformer and a pair of shape-sensing pants.

Sleep deprivation attacks are a form of denial of service attack whereby an attacker renders a pervasive computing device inoperable by draining the battery more quickly than it would be drained under normal usage. We describe three main methods for an attacker to drain the battery: (1) service request power attacks, where repeated requests are made to the victim for services, typically over a network - even if the service is not provided the victim must expend energy deciding whether or not to honor the request; (2) benign power attacks, where the victim is made to execute a valid but energy-hungry task repeatedly, and (3) malignant power attacks, where the attacker modifies or creates an executable to make the system consume more energy than it would otherwise. Our initial results demonstrate the increased power consumption due to these attacks, which we believe are the first real examples of these attacks to appear in the literature. We also propose a power-secure architecture to thwart these power attacks by employing multi-level authentication and energy signatures.

Medical monitors have benefited from technological advances in the field of wireless communication, processing and power sources. These advances have made possible miniaturization and prolonged operating times of medical monitors, as well as their global integration into telemedical systems. This allows patients to have real-time feedback about medical conditions while going about their normal daily activities. System designers are facing specific issues related to monitor acceptability, application requirements, power consumption and system connectivity. In this paper we discuss system design issues, present a survey of existing systems and sensors, and introduce two taxonomies of medical monitoring applications for wearable computing.

The invention of the Jacquard weaving machine led to the concept of a stored "program" and "mechanized" binary information processing. This development served as the inspiration for C. Babbage's analytical engine-the precursor to the modern-day computer. Today, more than 200 years later, the link between textiles and computing is more realistic than ever. In this paper, we look at the synergistic relationship between textiles and computing and identify the need for their "integration" using tools provided by an emerging new field of research that combines the strengths and capabilities of electronics and textiles into one: electronic textiles, or e-textiles. E-textiles, also called smart fabrics, have not only "wearable" capabilities like any other garment, but also have local monitoring and computation, as well as wireless communication capabilities. Sensors and simple computational elements are embedded in e-textiles, as well as built into yarns, with the goal of gathering sensitive information, monitoring vital statistics, and sending them remotely (possibly over a wireless channel) for further processing. The paper provides an overview of existing efforts and associated challenges in this area, while describing possible venues and opportunities for future research.

This paper describes nonideal properties of batteries and how these properties may impact power-performance trade offs in wearable computing. The first part of the paper details the characteristics of an ideal battery and how these characteristics are used in sizing batteries and estimating discharge times. Typical nonideal characteristics and the regions of operation where they occur are described. The paper then presents results from a first-principles, variable-load battery model, showing likely areas for exploiting battery behavior in mobile computing. The major result is that, when battery behavior is nonideal, lowering the average power or the energy per operation may not increase the amount of computation that can be completed in a battery life.

This paper introduces a systematic approach to power awareness in mobile, handheld computers. It describes experimental evaluations of several techniques for improving the energy efficiency of a system, ranging from the network level down to the physical level of the battery. At the network level, a new routing method based upon the power consumed by the network subsystem is shown to improve power consumption by 15% on average and to reduce latency by 75% over methods that consider only the transmitted power. At the boundary between the network and the processor levels, the paper presents the problem of local versus remote processing and derives a figure of merit for determining whether a computation should be completed locally or remotely, one that involves the relative performance of the local and remote system, the transmission bandwidth and power consumption, and the network congestion. At the processor level, the main memory bandwidth is shown to have a significant effect on the relationship between performance and CPU frequency, which in turn determines the energy savings of dynamic CPU speed-setting. The results show that accounting for the main memory bandwidth using Amdahl's law permits the performance speed-up and peak power versus the CPU frequency to be estimated to within 5%. The paper concludes with a technique for mitigating the loss of battery energy capacity with large peak currents, showing an improvement of up to 10% in battery life, albeit at some cost to the size and weight of the system.

This paper explores the system-level power-performance tradeoffs of dynamically varying CPU speed. Previous work in CPU speed-setting considered only the power of the CPU and only CPUs that vary supply voltage with frequency. This work takes a broader approach, considering total system power, battery capacity, and main memory bandwidth. The results, which are up to a factor of four less than ideal, show that all three must be considered when setting the CPU speed.

The purpose of this paper is to report the power and performance of an application on a real system as the CPU frequency varies.Previous work in CPU speed-setting considered only the power of the CPU and only CPU's that vary supply voltage with frequency.This work takes a broader approach, considering total system power, battery capacity and main memory bandwidth.The results, which are up to a factor of four less than ideal, show that all three must be considered when setting the CPU speed, whether the speed is fixed at a single value or varied dynamically during operation.

The advent of mobile computing has made power consumption a critical design factor. There has been little systematic consideration of the power sources for mobile computing systems. This paper presents a class of system-level metrics intended to make a systematic study more feasible and to more accurately reflect the trade-off between battery life and performance. An example involving the clock frequency of a CPU shows the possible impact of the nonlinearity, an impact not predicted by existing metrics. Results of an initial attempt to verify the example are presented and explained. The paper concludes with drawbacks of the metric and possible extensions to overcome these drawbacks.

The paper describes the evolution of an Interdisciplinary Concurrent Design Methodology (ICDM) and the metrics used to compare four generations of wearable computer artifacts produced by the methodology at each stage of ICDM's growth.The product cycle is defined, its phases, and the design information representation for each phase.Six generic axes of design activity are defined, and the concept of benchmarking a complete design methodology using these axes is introduced.In addition an approach for measuring design complexity is proposed.When applied to the four generations of the CMU wearable computers, the ICDM has demonstrated two orders of magnitude increase in design and efficiency. A. Conceptual Product.During the conceptualization stage, the multidisciplinary design team establishes a common vision of the end product.This vision provides a consistent set of design goals for all disciplines to maintain