You follow the rules and arrive at the airport an hour and a half before your flight is scheduled to leave. The first thing you do when you get inside the airport, of course, is check the schedule to see if your plane is leaving on time. Just your luck; that dreaded word, DELAYED, is flashing on the screen next to your flight number.
What are my options? you ask yourself. You could sit there watching the other flights take off or you could find a restaurant and grab something to eat, since you missed lunch anyway trying to get to the airport on time. Then again, you might find a TV and catch the second half of the Iowa State—Nebraska football game.
You decide you’d really like to see the rest of the game, but you hesitate because all of the TVs are on the other side of the airport, and you don’t want to take a chance on missing your flight.
“It’s too bad you can’t check the flight schedules on your cell phone,” you say to the college student standing beside you, who also happens to be disappointed because his flight is delayed as well.
That day, he responds, isn’t too far away.
He’s right, and it might be because of four Iowa State computer engineering students who created a product they call JANIX (an acronym for Janus Adaptable Network of Integrated qbX) as part of the Sixth Annual Computer Society International Design Competition (CSIDC). The team is one of only 10 in the world that has qualified for the final round of the competition, run in association with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. More than 200 entries were submitted for the contest, so being a finalist is quite a feat in itself.
The foursome—Christopher Hagen (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), Andrew Lundberg (Blue Grass, Iowa), Janice Wong (Hong Kong), and Chun “Reggie” Yu (Clinton, Iowa)—will take their project to Washington, D.C., June 26–28. Besides Iowa State’s entry, the only other team from the U.S. to qualify for the finals is from North Carolina State University. China has two teams in the competition, while the rest come from Columbia, India, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, and the United Arab Emirates.
Arun Somani, Jerry R. Junkins Endowed Chair and current chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State, serves as the group’s mentor, while Professor John W. Lamont is the project facilitator.
Teams in the CSIDC were challenged to design and implement computer-based solutions to real-world problems, while at the same time emphasizing teamwork. Students used ingenuity and originality to create a system for PCs or hand-held computers that performs a socially useful function. Each team was required to submit a final report documenting the design and implementation of its product. Experts from industry and academia then evaluated those reports to determine which 10 teams would compete in the finals.
What makes the Iowa State team’s product different from other wireless information-distribution systems, Lundberg says, is this product doesn’t require special hardware or software for the user. “They can just walk into the airport,” he explains, “and they’ll be immediately contacted by the system and asked if they want to receive the available information.”
Somani points out another advantage of JANIX. If the user doesn’t want the information, he says, the “No” option can be chosen and the system will stop sending messages.
JANIX was born out of a senior design project that the group started working on a year ago. Lamont and Assistant Professor Pat Patterson told the group that their project fit the scope of CSIDC and encouraged them to submit a report and take part in the competition.
After some research and tinkering with the senior design product, the group decided it wasn’t quite what they wanted. “We ended up having to develop a second project that was different than what we were doing on our senior design,” Lundberg says, “because we didn’t feel that one could win.”
“We didn’t want to put in all that work unless we were going to win,” Hagen adds. “So over the semester break last winter, Reggie and I came up with two or three ideas about how to use our technology more effectively than we had been.”
When the break ended, the group sat down to talk about their options and eventually came up with JANIX. Since their first report was due in about five weeks, they had to get to work on the new project quickly. Each team member was given a secondary responsibility to go along with a primary job. “We wanted to make sure somebody could pick up the slack if we lost someone,” Lundberg explains.
Lundberg stayed busy working on the system’s server software and the sensors, while Hagen made those sensors functional and interpreted the data they provided. Wong worked on the user-interface side. “I wrote menus for a cell phone so it communicates with our system,” she says. Yu, meanwhile, developed the firmware (computer programming instructions) inside the JANIX system.
While the foursome did the work, they received insight and support from members of their department. Several of the electrical and computer engineering faculty helped out when asked, and the team held weekly meetings through the spring semester with professors to discuss different issues that caused problems or confusion. “They provided ideas on where we could go to solve those problems and they helped keep us on schedule,” Lundberg says.
Somani, the team mentor, helped by simply pointing out potential challenges, making sure he didn’t interfere with the group’s efforts. “(The students) need to learn to take responsibility and understand the value of their time, the value of planning, and the value of documentation,” Somani says. “I don’t try to control their operation at all, and I never tell them anything literally. I just tell them there is an issue coming up and they need to think about it. This group does that very well.”
Assistant Professor Zhao Zhang says he and other educators helped by listening to the ideas coming from the group and then providing feedback.
“We provided a little direction,” Somani adds, “but we wanted them to come up with their own ideas. I want my students to feel like they’re doing the work on their own.”
That plan seems to have been successful, since the foursome has made it to the finals. After a dinner on Sunday, June 26, each team will demonstrate its product to a judging committee over the next two days. The awards dinner will be held on Tuesday, June 28, where the winner will be announced.
If nothing else, the team has learned many valuable lessons while working on the project. But, the entire team stresses, it wasn’t just engineering they learned. “It was also about the people,” Hagen explains. “We’re all really good friends now and we probably will be for a long time. Plus, working with all these faculty members has really helped a lot.”
