Dr. Srihari Nelakuditi, along with Dr. Romit Roy Choudhury at Duke University, is a recipient of the prestigious Google Faculty Research Award for their project titled “Google Glass meets Smartphones: Recognizing Humans without Face Recognition” which proposes to identify individuals based on their clothes and motion patterns when seen via Google Glass.

Congratulations to Ms. Sanorita Dey and Mr. Nirupam Roy. Their poster titled “Leveraging Imperfections of Sensors for Fingerprinting Smartphones” won the Second Prize in the Poster Session of HotMobile 2013. The panel of judges for this award includes researchers from Google and Microsoft.

Mr. Sanjeev Singh has won travel grants from the Graduate School and USC Office of Research to attend conferences.

Mr. Hossen A. Mustafa won Upsilon Pi Epsilon scholarships for graduate study. UPE is the Honor Society of the Computing Sciences, of which USC has a local chapter.

Dr. Xu, working with Dr. Helmuth from the Biology department, spent her Summer on a beach in Oregon testing wireless sensors that would monitor environnemental conditions. The research is being coverend in local news: Dr. Xu is developing a sensor that looks like a Mussel that can be deployed and will relay information in realtime. The field test is designed to see how the current sensor behaves under real conditions and what changes need to be made to make it successful. If the sensor can be developed, researchers will have access to realtime information and will be able to see how changes in the environment are impacting the marine organisms. This could unlock a treasure trove of information for researchers worldwide. Notice that the sensor is in the shape and color of a Mussel. It is attached to the Mussel bed by an epoxy that hopefully will keep the sensor intact through breaking waves as the tide advances.

Automatic Tagging of Photos Taken with Smartphones
Chuan Qin and Prof. Srihari Nelakuditi in collaboration with Systems and Networking Research Group at Duke University developed a system called TagSense for tagging photos taken with smartphones. TagSense leverages multiple sensors on smartphones carried by people to identify them in a picture and tag it with their names and activities. Articles about TagSense appeared in media outlets such as Popular Science. Visit here for more information on TagSense.

Posters of Bin Ni and Chase Gray were selected for Student Research Competition (SRC) at MobiCom.

Wenyuan Xu received the NSF CAREER Award.

Naveen Santhapuri received the Summer Dissertation Fellowship.

Naveen Santhapuri won the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Study.

Bin Ni won the 3rd prize for his research presentation on Graduate Student Day at USC.

James Bedenbaugh received Magellan Scholarship.

Dylan Kane received Magellan Scholarship.

Maliek Mcknight got a Mini-Grant from USC Office of Undergraduate Research.

Chase Gray received bi-annual USC Graduate School Outstanding MS Thesis Award.

Naveen Santhapuri presented a paper on Message in Message (MIM): A Case for Shuffling Transmissions in Wireless Networks at HotNets.

Many new young and energetic members joined the ARENA.

Srihari Nelakuditi presented a paper On Bit-Rate Selection for Opportunistic Routing at WiMesh.

Bin Ni presented a paper on Selection of Bit-rate for Wireless Network Coding at WiNC.

Qin Chuan presented a paper on I2MIX: Integration of Intra-flow and Inter-flow Wireless Network Coding at WiNC.

Chase Gray successfully defended his MS thesis.

Bin Ni won third prize for his research presentation on Graduate Student Day at USC

Naveen Santhapuri presented a paper On Spatial Reuse and Capture in Ad Hoc Networks at WCNC