Engineering Projects: Just another Course or Revolutionary?

During the Engineering Open House this semester, I went to check out the Engineering Student Project Laboratory, which is home to some of the successful and award winning senior design projects in the past few years. I was awestruck by some of the projects that were showcased in this lab. One such product called the “Audeo” was being demonstrated by a student there. He was sitting on a wheelchair and the wheelchair was magically moving in directions as if it was being controlled by a remote control. Upon further inquiry, I was startled to find out that the remote control in this case was the user’s mind. By mind, I do not mean that the user speaks and the wheelchair moves. Speech recognition is old technology. On the other hand, the “Audeo” can listen to the neurological signals of the brain without the speaker talking as seen in this video.

Upon further research, I found out that the “Audeo” was actually a product built by Michael Callahan (also on the photo), currently co-founder of multi-million dollar Ambient Corporation and back in 2004, an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois. Callahan began building the “Audeo” for his senior design project in 2004 when he was studying Neural Engineering.

Isn’t it amazing that a senior design project started out on a small scale and executed during the course of a semester here at the University of Illinois can go on to become a multi-million dollar idea? The University of Illinois houses a number of senior design/research projects that have immense potential to become business ideas in the future. What is amazing about these projects is that companies both large and small can directly sponsor these projects, pay the minimal costs required for research and then recruit these innovators in their design teams. According to an article that featured Myron Salamon, associate Dean for administrative affairs at the College of Engineering, one of the fascinating features of the senior design/research program is that small and large companies can directly step in and take advantage of the technology that has been invented and then give it the right direction that it needs for continued success in the future. Program sponsors include corporations such as 3M, Boeing, Caterpillar, Ford Motor Co., General Electric, Hewlett Packard, John Deere and many smaller regional companies. But who tracks when these companies come in? Is there an already existing framework within the Senior Design Program at the College of Engineering which networks with companies and connects them with these senior design students?

The University of Illinois has the highest number of research groups in the United States that are involved in specialized research and usually consist of several professors and sometimes alumni and industry specialists. For example, the Bluewaters which will go on to become the fastest supercomputer in the world which will be capable of doing things like advanced image recognition, is managed by a research group consisting of several Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science professors and several industry specialists from IBM. However, besides these specialized research groups, students are also involved separately in senior design/research projects in which the students work in groups to build a new product or solution to an existing problem with or without minimal help from their professors or other specialists in the field.

This kind of “I built my own remote-controlled car using PIC microcontrollers” mindset is what many companies are looking for when they come here to recruit students for jobs. For example, my colleague Ryan Rogowski from the Eta Kappa Nu Electrical and Computer Engineering Honors Society with the help of his senior project mentor Professor Douglas Jones, who is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department built a headset that can differentiate moving sound from stationary sound. “My receivers have sound motion sensors in all three directions- x, y and z and this is processed to realize 3D sound” said Ryan. Ryan was very excited to talk about his project which he is planning to turn into a business venture in the future by reaching out to angel investors in the market. He also told me that recruiters from Research in Motion, the creators of Blackberry came down to campus to check out his project and were interested in funding any further research in his project and also offered him a summer internship. However when I asked Ryan whether it was through the Senior Design Program that he got in touch with the recruiters, he replied “Not at all! The only reason I got in touch with these recruiters was because I am involved in Eta Kappa Nu and Research in Motion came here to do an info session with us”.

Other senior design/research students go through the whole phase of putting their idea on the market for angel investors to invest in, marketing their idea to these investors through reports, demonstrations, etc. and then go on to attain money to start a business based on their patented idea. As he approached his senior year at Illinois, Callahan read of a robotic prosthesis that had the ability to intercept neuronal activity at the vocal cords. This inspired his idea to work on a new type of computer-assisted communications system as his senior design project. Callahan began working with a team to develop a system for gathering neurological information detectable near a patient’s head and neck. “By 2005, Callahan and his teammates had produced a successful prototype able to turn signals into language with approximately 70 percent accuracy” reads an article from the Lemelson MIT program webpage, a program which granted Callahan a $30,000 award for his findings and to fund further research in this area. In October of that year, Callahan established his own company, Ambient, to further develop and commercialize the "Audeo" system. The rest is history.

Yet other senior design/research students market their ideas to research groups at the University of Illinois in hopes to generate additional funding. Another potential successful senior design pertains to another fellow Electrical Engineering major, Martin McCormick. He was involved in a senior thesis project where he used a method called Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to discover whether a computer can decipher specific human thoughts. To test the method, the subject wears a cap with electrodes that are covered in conductive gel and connected to the computer. The voltage between different electrodes is measured, amplified and converted into a digital signal that the team analyzes mathematically. The computer then prompts the subject to imagine moving either his left or right arm while not physically doing so. Different brain waves stimulate the electrodes depending on the direction an individual is imagining. The computer picks up on this and a ball pictured on the screen will move to the right if the subject is imagining his right arm moving and vice versa. Martin worked on this idea with the Statistical EEG Signal Processing for Brain-Machine Interfaces group and today a major portion of what this group is involved is heavily based on Martin’s initial findings. Martin plans to work on this idea in the future when he will be pursuing his Masters degree at MIT. “We are basically trying to reconstruct models of the brain and eventually want to build a framework that can comprehend simple things that the brain thinks” said Martin. Martin plans to pursue his Ph.D at MIT and then might return to academia or end up becoming an entrepreneur selling a product similar to Callahan’s that uses this discovery which he plans to hone in the future years.

From Callahan’s Audeo prototype to Martin’s mind reading algorithm to Ryan’s cool speakers, there is one evident phenomenon. Senior design projects and research at the University of Illinois have the potential to be revolutionary and to become successful business ventures. Based on the success and value of these senior design projects, the College of Engineering should implement a course or program to further encourage students to become involved in such projects and to develop their interests preparing them for a more successful senior design project in addition or alongside the Senior Design Program. Assistant Dean, Sarah Marie Zehr who is also with the Engineering Career Services agrees but also sees a problem, “I do think it would be nice to connect students to companies directly, but that may not be feasible in that the instructor must ensure the project will fullfull the goals of the course and they would have to approve the project". In addition, engineers should have a better medium to showcase their unique projects and designs to other students, interested research groups, companies, and angel investors. With these implementations in place, not only will the engineering community benefit from successful projects but also the College of Engineering will receive better accolades from reviewing committees that evaluate the curriculum and overall potential of the school.