Our congratulations to the following people who have been awarded an Innovation Grant in 2009.

Development Grants

Iain Murray - Curtin University
Olearia on the iPhone

Students with vision impairment or print disabilities (eg dyslexia) have, in the past, been supplied with audio or talking books to access required texts in their studies.

Traditionally talking book libraries utilised analogue cassette tapes as the media of choice. These cassettes are now no longer in production and a move to digital formats is underway. The recognised standard for Digital Talking Books (DTBs) is "Daisy" (see http://www.daisy.org).

This project aims to develop a full featured DTB player for use on the iPhone 3GS. Existing Daisy devices are generally custom hardware and therefore expensive and may be used for playback only. By utilising standard devices, a single device may perform many other tasks at a lower cost to the vision impaired user.

The ability for vision/print impaired students to access their texts and lecture material in an accessible format on a potable device is the major benefit of this project. Olearia, a DTB player for the Mac developed at Curtin University, has been well accepted by the vision impaired community and porting to the new accessible iPhone 3GS is often requested.

Cesar Ortega-Sanchez - Curtin University
Interfacing iPod Touches with FPGAs

iPod Touch is a wonderful example of embedded system. However, its set of embedded sensors and actuators, as varied and versatile as they are, allow very little opportunity for students to understand the problems and challenges involved in the development of hardware.

The aim of this project is to develop a set of hardware and software tools and interfaces to expand the repertoire of sensors and actuators of the iPod. The main objective is to interface the iPod with Field-Programmable Gate-Array (FPGA) development boards.  

FPGAs are powerful tools for the development of complex digital systems. Most universities are using FPGAs in the Electronics and Computer Engineering laboratories these days. FPGAs can implement from very simple, uncomplicated logic up to complete embedded systems including processors, peripherals and software components.  

This project aims at combining the flexibility and power of the iPod Touch with the flexibility and power of FPGAs to produce a platform for the design and test of embedded systems.

Possible applications of such platform are limited only by the imagination. Some examples of projects are:
- iPod as user interface for FPGA-based projects.
- iPod-controlled robots.
- Distributed sensing using iPods (Intelligent home applications)
- FPGA-based projects that use iPod's sensors.
- Wireless control using iPods.
- Dynamic reconfiguration of hardware as a response to iPod's sensors.

Michael Bulmer - University of Queensland
Virtual Environment for Learning and Teaching Statistics

It is important for students learning statistical reasoning to see data in context. One of the best ways of achieving this is to involve students in data production and so in the past ten years we have had first-year students undertake real experiments of their own choosing as part of our introductory statistics course.

However in practice students are limited in what they can do. Many want to conduct experiments involving human subjects, requiring ethics approval, while even those not wanting to use humans may have general health and safety issues.

Epidemiological studies have really not been possible at all.  We have successfully developed an open-ended virtual environment, the Island, to help overcome these limitations while still engaging students with study design and data collection.

Students work with a population of virtual humans living on the Island and are able to conduct a wide variety of experiments with them as subjects. The islanders also live in villages, have ancestors and die from a range of diseases, allowing students to study the epidemiology of the island as well.

We have received interest in this system from other institutions. The first aim of this project is to develop the hardware and software infrastructure to make the Island available to a large number of students across AUC member institutions.

This will involve establishing a dedicate server to support the processing requirements of the real-time environment as well as incorporating a new authentication systems and timezone localisation for wide deployment.  

Since the Island exists in real time, we have also identified a need for easier access by students for monitoring and interacting with the Islanders. Inspired by the AirStrip app, the second aim of this project is to develop a mobile interface to provide flexibility for students when using the Island for their experiments.

 

David Perry - University of Melbourne
iPhone OS-based Tools for Vestibular Diagnosis and Rehabilitation

It is anticipated that a number of student research projects will be generated, for both Masters of Audiology and Engineering final year students. These will be both development projects (developing tests and analysis software), as well as clinical projects to demonstrate their validity in controlled studies.

 

Andrew Sorenson - Queensland University of Technology
Impromptu

Impromptu is a software development platform that is used in a number of Universities around Australia (and the world) in both computer science and arts disciplines.  There are a number of current and past AUC projects that use the Impromptu development environment including:  Jam2Jam Toby Gifford Ben Swift.

 

Graeme Salter - University of Western Sydney
Educational Tools and Templates for the iPhone

An increasing number of indicators, such as the popularity of the iTunes U, suggest that mobile learning devices have the potential to transform a number of our traditional educational paradigms.

Already a range of higher educational institutions have made substantial investments in the use of iPhones as mobile learning devices. However, other institutions (such as UWS) are reluctant to follow their lead.   This is due, in part, to a well-founded caution about rushing too fast into the use of any new technology.

Nevertheless, the rate of adoption is also influenced by the software and functionality available. The large uptake of the iPhone by the general public has been heavily influenced by the diversity and number of applications available through the iTunes store.  

The applications available at the store include educational tutorials and productivity tools, such as EverNote, which can be very useful in higher education. However, teachers and lecturers tend to be eclectic and often prefer to develop their own suite of learning resources which reflect their own interests and expertise.

Unfortunately, creating iPhone applications is beyond the technical capabilities of most acadmics. There are some existing tools and templates for developing education iPhone applications, but these tend to be too expensive (eg. SumTotal ToolBook, US$2795) , quite limited (eg. Cram, which allows you to develop flash cards and quizzes) or aimed at a K-12 audience rather than higher education (eg. Educate).  

This project aims to develop several generic tools and templates for use by academic staff to put the development of educational applications within their reach.  This will not only increase the number of quality educational applications available but also provide an added incentive for higher educational institutions to consider adopting iPhones as their chosen mobile learning device.

 

Kuan Lun Huang - University of New South Wales
An Apple iPhone-based System for Participatory Sensing Networks

The theme of the proposed project is "participatory sensing". Participatory sensing is an emerging new sensing paradigm, which exploits the recent proliferation of smart-phones to collect data that are useful to humans.

Participatory sensing allows developers to take advantages of the opportunistic nature of user presence and rich array of sensors found on mobile devices with powerful processors, to design innovative sensing applications.

The recent introduction of a batch of new smart-phones, such as Apple iPhone, further fuels the research momentum in this area. As such, we are proposing the use of Apple iPhone as a mobile platform for participatory sensing.

In particular, we intend to design a system architecture that exercises the collection of sensors on-board an Apple iPhone, e.g., audio, video, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, accelerometer, and digital compass, for data collection purposes. 

We envision that both the system itself and the data collected by the system can be of high educational relevance. For example, the School of Computer Science Engineering (CSE) at UNSW provides a course on Wireless Sensor and Mesh Networks with a module on participatory sensing.

Our system can be provided to students of this course in lab sessions so that they can obtain hands-on experience with the concept. Alternatively, the vast amount of sensory data collected by our system can be released as tutorial/lab exercises for a data-mining course.

The materials can be made available on course websites so that other AUC institutions can incorporate all or part of our work within their curriculum. We also like to point out that we will be developing several projects for thesis students as extensions to this work.

 

Ian MacColl - Queensland University of Technology
Tinker Tools: Using ubiquitous computing for environmental education

Tinker Tools aims to develop a system for teaching and learning mobile and ubiquitous programming, particularly for middle school environmental education. The project targets K-12 education but is likely to be useful for teaching mobile and ubiquitous computing in higher education.