Write-up in Case Daily

If you are clicking through from Case Daily, welcome! There was a nice write-up about my award at IEEE Sensors Conference in Friday's issue. Here's the text below with some additional hyperlinks and clarification:

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Bradley Farnsworth, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, won first place in the Best Student Paper competition as part of the 2008 IEEE Sensors Conference in Lecce, Italy, in October. The award included a prize of 750 euros. Farnsworth, who is part of Professor Darrin Young's Wireless Microsystems research group, is working on the paper for his thesis topic and is collaborating on this project with the Advanced Platform Technology (APT) Center at the Cleveland Louis Stokes VA Medical Center. The full citation for Farnsworth's paper is B. D. Farnsworth, R. J. Triolo, and D. J. Young, "Wireless Implantable EMG Sensing Microsystem." In addition, he received a top prize at the 2008 Research ShowCASE for the poster about his research; the award included a $1,000 account for research activities and a $250 check. He used a portion of these funds to attend the conference in Italy, along with assistance from the APT Center and ENSCO, Inc.

IEEE Sensors Conference

I recently attended the IEEE Sensors Conference in Lecce, Italy and had a wonderful time learning about technology and meeting colleagues from around the world. The area was very beautiful, especially visiting the coastline and seeing all the architecture. I also ate some really wonderful local food!

I am honored to announce that I won the First Prize in the Best Student Paper competition. It feels very nice to have my thesis work noticed and appreciated. Below, you can see a photo of me accepting the award.



It was my first time out of the U.S. and was very enjoyable. I don't know if I'll ever go back to Lecce, but I can't wait to travel some more!

SICK LMS 291 LabView LIDAR Driver

Hello! As you probably know, I worked on sensors for DEXTER in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The first software I worked on was a LabView driver for the LMS 291 LIDAR laser scanner along with Amaury Rolin. We cleaned up and submitted our driver to National Instruments, and you can now download it from the NI Developer Zone. Hopefully this program will be useful to others! Good luck! :)

Open Source IEEE Bibliography XSL Style Sheet for Word 2007 Available

Thanks to everyone who downloaded, commented upon, and helped improve my IEEE style sheet for Office 2007! Reader Wesley Allen has pointed out that there is a free, more fully-featured, open-source IEEE style sheet available on CodePlex. It supports more reference formats than my version and seems to be getting feature improvements. Please go check it out, and thanks for all your support and comments.

Update: Good news! Office 2007 SP3 now includes an IEEE XSL style sheet built-in! You can download Office 2007 SP3 here or use Windows update, and read the Office 2007 release notes here. Thanks to all of you who downloaded my version over the past few years, it's been fun!

Missing Money - Unclaimed Funds

Do yourself a favor and search for your name (and friends and relatives) here on Missing Money and directly with your state from a link on unclaimed.org. Apparently state governments can capture funds from "inactive" accounts through a process called escheatment. I heard about this from my bank, ING Direct (highly recommended, btw). Your grandparents will thank you when you find that long-lost bank account money for them.

Team Case on Robocars

Tonight is the big night for Team Case on The Science Channel. Episode 2 of Robocars is tonight and Case is one of the featured teams. I should have a bit of airtime too! I'll be watching it with Scott in Baltimore and many Case folks will be gathered at Johnny Malloy's in Coventry for a Case Alumni Association sponsored event. So, if you have digital cable, tune it to the Science Channel tonight at 10 PM. See you there!

Scott and Erin's Wedding

Hello, faithful readers! I just got back to Cleveland from Scott and Erin's wedding in Cincy. I was a groomsman and had a great time! I also got to help Nick write his best man's speech, which was a lot of fun. Nick delivered it brilliantly... if he doesn't make it as a MD-PhD, BME, or artist... maybe he can be a stand-up comic.

I also got a chance to put my new Canon EOS 40D digital SLR with 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens to the test. I took about half as many pictures as the professional photographer (who had a Nikon 200D with various lenses and a nice external flash). The image stabilization in my lens helped me get a lot of non-blurry shots inside that would have otherwise been hard to get. It's clear to me that the next accessory I should get is an external flash. The built-in flash in my camera has a slow recycle rate and casts unnatural shadows behind the subjects. I did manage to get some great photos, though! You can click on any of them to view them in full (printable) resolution. I haven't done any post processing on them, so feel free to touch them up if you're interested.

Here is Scott and Erin's first dance as husband and wife:

All the bridesmaids wanted a piece of the action:

Erin was the center of attention and looked beautiful in her wedding dress:

And here's a picture of me in my tux:


I'll be posting a lot more pictures to my Facebook, so feel free to add me. Bye for now!

Research Showcase 2008 - Grand Prize!

Howdy folks! Yesterday was the 2008 Research Showcase at Case Western Reserve University. I presented a poster on my M.S. research topic, Wireless Implantable EMG Sensing Microsystem. Out of about 600 posters from across the university, I was one of 10 grand prize winners, which includes a cash stipend for me and some additional funding to support my research. Next stop, graduation (hopefully)!

Quicksilver.

I've been using LaunchBar on my Macs for a long time now... maybe 5 years. I've always heard rumblings about that other keyboard shortcut program, Quicksilver. Well, a CIM Mac-using student came in to tech support on Saturday with his Mac tricked out with QS. I installed it today, and it is totally sweet. Especially by turning on "proxy actions," enabling access for assistive devices in the Universal Access control panel, and creating a short "trigger," I now have a keystroke (option-space) that gives me keyboard access to all the menu items of the application in focus.

For example. I'm in Safari and I want to open the downloads window. I don't remember the keystroke (it's cmd-opt-L, by the way). So, I hit opt-space, do, enter and viola! The downloads window appears. I also have access to all my bookmarks since they are in the bookmarks menu.

This is so cool. If you have a Mac and want to speed up your computer usage and/or reduce your mousing time, try this out!

Uploading some DEXTER Videos

More to come soon! Here are some DEXTER videos that I uploaded to YouTube.

IEEE Bibliography XSL Style Sheet for Word 2007

Please read the updates at the end of this post!

I spent about 4-5 hours this afternoon making an IEEE style bibliography XML / XSL file for Office 2007 for my thesis. That means you can use Word's built in reference tracker and IEEE style references! It looks good for journal and book references but I haven't tried anything else yet. I built it by modifying Word's built-in ISO 690 Numerical format. Also, don't blame me if it shreds your thesis... make a backup first! :)

Just unpack this file to:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style\

Here are the references I used to get started:
Bibliography & Citations 1011
Word 2007 citations, should be simple, but... (solved)

If you have any interest in refining this further, or if you find any bugs / inconsistencies / areas for improvement, please let me know (or even better, fix it and send me the updated version).

Enjoy!

Update: There is another IEEE style sheet available on CodePlex from another developer with some additional formatting support. Good luck!

Update 2: Good news! Office 2007 SP3 now includes an IEEE XSL style sheet built-in! You can download Office 2007 SP3 here or use Windows update, and read the Office 2007 release notes here. Thanks to all of you who downloaded my version over the past few years, it's been fun!

Caption this photo...

If you're in Ohio or Texas, remember to vote March 4th!

New DARPA Arm Video

Howdy folks! I have more than a passing interest in the DARPA arm project since it's related to my research. DEKA Research (Dean Kamen's company) is one of the primary developers. They just posted a new video, so check it out! They are using a combination of myoelectric (EMG) control from residual limb and other sites, plus tactile inputs from toes and wherever they can get a signal, really. Luke Skywalker, watch out!

Kubuntu on SPARC II

Well, I got Ubuntu installed on my Ultra 5! I had some confusion at first about why I didn't have a desktop environment, as I had selected the "SPARC-Desktop" download ISO. Of course, after some head scratching, I realized that whether you choose "Desktop" or "Server" for SPARC, you get the server ISO (I couldn't find a SPARC desktop ISO). So, this gave me a choice... Gnome (standard Ubuntu) or KDE (Kubuntu)? I've used both in the past and somewhat preferred KDE. So, I ran sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, worked on something else for an hour, and viola! Desktop Linux on my old Sun. Woot!

Linux fun

I'm feeling a bit masochistic today, so I thought I'd have a second go with Linux.  My first experience was a dual-boot of Debian on my Athlon XP 2 GHz machine at home a few years ago.  I had some help getting it started but I had some issues getting it to talk to my Apple Cinema Display at 1920 x 1200 and I never got sound or 3D graphics working properly (my help bailed on me once I got it booting to the desktop -- "check the forums!").  So, I just use XP on that machine these days.

I also have this Sun Ultra 5 workstation (400 MHz 64-bit UltraSPARC with 128 MB RAM) that I got for free with Solaris installed... and I don't think it's worth my time to learn Solaris (ugh).  Since I have some famailarity with Debian, and I've heard good things about Ubuntu playing nicely with Sun machines, I figured I'd give that a shot. Right now, I'm in the middle of the install process and it seems to be going pretty smoothly. Wish me luck!