Engaging Community College Students in Computer Engineering Research through Design and Implementation of a Versatile Gesture Control Interface
- Conference
- Location
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Tempe, Arizona
- Publication Date
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April 20, 2017
- Start Date
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April 20, 2017
- End Date
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April 22, 2017
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topics
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Diversity and Pacific Southwest Section
- Page Count
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14
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--29214
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/29214
- Download Count
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426
Paper Authors
Jeffrey Thomas Yan
James LeRoy Dalton Cañada College
James is a 2nd year electrical engineering student at Cañada College in Redwood City, California with hopes to transfer to UC Berkeley in fall 2017.
Kattia Chang Engineering Student at Cañada College
Kattia Chang is a sophomore student at Cañada College in Redwood cIty, majoring in Electrical Engineering. Her interests include embedded systems and robotics.
Bianca Corine Villanueva Doronila Canada College
Bianca Doronila is currently a sophomore at Canada College in Redwood City, CA, majoring in Computer Engineering. She hopes to transfer to obtain her B.S. in C.E. and eventually pursue a career involving gaming design and enhancement.
Victor Josue Melara Alvarado Canada College
I'm a Applied Mathematics transfer student. I wish to work on computer vision as I believe it's really interesting the idea of teach a computer to see the way we do.
Christopher Thomas
Ian M Donovan San Francisco State University
Kartik Bholla
Amelito G Enriquez
Canada College
orcid.org/0000-0002-1259-0680
Amelito Enriquez is a professor of Engineering and Mathematics at Cañada College in Redwood City, CA. He received a BS in Geodetic Engineering from the University of the Philippines, his MS in Geodetic Science from the Ohio State University, and his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include technology-enhanced instruction and increasing the representation of female, minority and other underrepresented groups in mathematics, science and engineering.
Wenshen Pong P.E. San Francisco State University
Wenshen Pong received his Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He joined the School of Engineering at San Francisco State University in 1998. He teaches courses in Civil/Structural Engineering.
Dr. Pong is a registered Professional Engineer in California. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineers Association of California. He has published over fifty technical papers in the areas of Structural Control and Earthquake Engineering. Dr. Pong has been the Director of the School of Engineering at SFSU with 20 full-time faculty and over 25 part-time faculty since 2009.
Zhaoshuo Jiang P.E.
San Francisco State University
orcid.org/0000-0002-4931-1622
Prof. Jiang graduated from the University of Connecticut with a Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering. Before joining San Francisco State University as an assistant professor, he worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) LLP. As a licensed professional engineer in the states of Connecticut and California, Dr. Jiang has been involved in the design of a variety of low-rise and high-rise projects. His current research interests mainly focus on Smart Structures Technology, Structural Control and Health Monitoring and Innovative Engineering Education.
Cheng Chen San Francisco State University
Dr. Cheng Chen is currently an associate professor in the school of engineering at San Francisco State University. His research interests include earthquake engineering, structural reliability and fire structural engineering.
Kwok Siong Teh San Francisco State University
Kwok Siong Teh received his B.S., M.S., Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and University of California at Berkeley in 1997, 2001, and 2004, respectively. He is currently an associate professor of mechanical engineering, as well as the Associate Director of the School of Engineering at San Francisco State University. His primary research interests are in the direct synthesis, characterization, and applications of nanocomposites and nanostructures for energy generation and storage.
Hamid Mahmoodi San Francisco State University
Hamid Mahmoodi received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 2005. He is currently a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the School of Engineering at San Francisco State University. His research interests include low-power, reliable, and high-performance circuit design in nano-electronic technologies. He has published more than one hundred technical papers in journals and conferences and holds five U.S. patents. He was a co-recipient of the 2008 SRC Inventor Recognition Award, the 2006 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society VLSI Transactions Best Paper Award, 2005 SRC Technical Excellence Award, and the Best Paper Award of the 2004 International Conference on Computer Design. He has served on technical program committees of Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, International Symposium on Low Power Electronics Design, and International Symposium on Quality Electronics Design.
Hao Jiang San Francisco State University
Hao Jiang received the B.S. degree in materials sciences from Tsinghua University, China, in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, San Diego, in 2000.
Hao Jiang has been with San Francisco State University since August 2007 as an assistant professor in electrical engineering. Prior joining SFSU, he worked for Broadcom Corporation, Jazz Semiconductor and Conexant Systems Inc. His research interests are in the general area of analog integrated circuits, particularly in ultra-low-power circuits for biomedical applications.
Kazunori Okada San Francisco State University
Dr. Okada has broad research interests in the areas of intelligent computing: computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data mining. He has been active in the research fields of medical image analysis, statistical data analysis, cognitive vision and face recognition. His earlier work on face recognition has produced a winning system in the well-known FERET competition, setting the industry-standard. His recent work on lung tumor segmentation and detection in chest CT scans has resulted in a number of US patents. He has received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in computer science from University of Southern California, and the M.Phil. degree in human informatics and the B.Eng. degree in mechanical engineering both from Nagoya University in Japan. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at San Francisco State University and leads Biomedical Image & Data Analysis Lab (BIDAL). Prior to his academic appointment, he was a research scientist at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, SPIE and MICCAI.
Xiaorong Zhang San Francisco State University
Xiaorong Zhang received the B.S. degree in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2006, the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from University of Rhode Island, Kingston, in 2009 and 2013 respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at San Francisco State University. Her research interests include embedded systems, wearable technologies, neural-machine interface, and cyber-physical systems.
Abstract
Given the important role of community colleges in undergraduate education, in order to increase the recruitment of STEM students and improve undergraduate STEM education, it is crucial to develop strategies to inspire community college students’ interest in STEM. With support from the Department of Education Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program (MSEIP), a cooperative internship program between a community college and a public comprehensive university was developed to engage community college students in leading-edge engineering research. In summer 2016, five sophomore students from the community college participated in a ten-week computer engineering research internship project in a research lab at the four-year university. This internship project aimed to develop an intelligent electromyography (EMG)-based gesture control interface which deciphers EMG signals collected from forearm muscles to identify users’ intended hand and arm movements. The gesture control interface has great potential to provide natural human-machine interaction in a variety of applications, from assistive devices through rehabilitation therapy to virtual reality (VR). The developed interface provides easy connection with a commercial EMG-based armband Myo and a modular software engine for customizable gesture recognition as well as a special pipeline for converting recognition decisions into control commands for external applications. The students also conducted usability testing of the gesture control interface on human subjects by using it to control a first-person shooter (FPS) virtual reality game which was developed by another community college student intern. The project provided a great opportunity for the student interns to gain research experience and learn valuable knowledge in human-machine interfaces, EMG signal processing, and gesture recognition. It also helped them improve their skills in experimental design, data analysis, scientific writing and presentation, as well as teamwork and time management. The outcome of this project indicated that the internship program was an effective method for inspiring community college students’ interest in computer engineering research and strengthening their confidence and capability in pursuing an engineering profession.
Yan, J. T., & Dalton, J. L., & Chang, K., & Doronila, B. C. V., & Melara Alvarado, V. J., & Thomas, C., & Donovan, I. M., & Bholla, K., & Enriquez, A. G., & Pong, W., & Jiang, Z., & Chen, C., & Teh, K. S., & Mahmoodi, H., & Jiang, H., & Okada, K., & Zhang, X. (2017, April), Engaging Community College Students in Computer Engineering Research through Design and Implementation of a Versatile Gesture Control Interface Paper presented at 2017 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting, Tempe, Arizona. 10.18260/1-2--29214
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