About: Ibrar Ayyub

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers in Germany has found that because developing nations have increasing energy needs, they are turning to coal because it is the cheapest option available. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jan Christoph Steckel, Ottmar Edenhofer and Michael Jakob describe their study of emerging countries and what they found regarding the reasons many of them have for using coal instead of oil or other energy producing options.

Introduction We were inspired to build an ultrasonic security system for our final project by our housing situation this summer. Security is an important part of home. Especially if we are going to share a house with prior strangers without a lock on our room door. Yes, that is the situation we are walking into […]

Introduction top For our final project, we have designed and built a ‘proof of concept’ prototype for Project Green Stations, an externally funded student group with the following mission statement: Project Green Stations is all about changing the way people see the environment. Imagine the go-green movement as a brand. Solar panels, Toyota Priuses, and […]

Introduction Our project is a two player touchscreen controlled speed chess game. One of our goals for this project is to build a reliable touchscreen device. Our initial plan was to use an LCD and attach LED and phototransistors on opposite sides. However, we determined that most commercial LCDs are small and placing 8 LEDs/8 […]

Introduction “A GPS tracking devices capable of telling the user his/her approximate distance to buildings and attractions on a map downloaded from a remote station” -Project Soundbyte For our final project in ECE4760, we designed an GPS tracking device that has a capability of downloading maps from a remote server, and then calculating distances from […]

A trio of researchers at the University of Southern California has uncovered a social-network illusion that might explain why some things become popular in cyberspace while others do not. Kristina Lerman, Xiaoran Yan and Xin-Zeng Wu have written a paper describing the illusion and how it works and have posted it on the preprint server arXiv.

High street shops are well-established online these days and provide new opportunities for interaction between shop and shopper. Consumers have become accustomed to shopping using a range of devices and the immense popularity of smartphones and mobile devices has led to the rise of mobile or m-retailing, with new communication and distribution channels created with these in mind

Abstract -A Roomba for boards For our ECE 4760 final project we created a board climbing robot capable of cleaning the board autonomously. The robot uses neodymium magnets to stick to the board and moves across it with two continuous servo motors. It has bumper sensors on all four sides and keeps track of its […]

Mark Johnson, associate professor of biology, has joined a consortium of seven other researchers in four European countries to develop the fullest understanding yet of how fertilization evolved in flowering plants. The research, employing techniques such as comparative genomics and molecular biology, could ultimately help agronomists improve crop yields for a hungry world.

Introduction The tags used to monitor wildlife can either be passive or active. Passive tags simply identify an individual, whereas active tags may send out a radio beacon or even collect data. These active tags, more commonly referred to as “bio-loggers”, are typically battery powered, and thus have limited life. This is especially true for […]