Dr. Vishal Saxena, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer engineering at Boise State University, received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for developing hybrid mixed-signal photonic circuits. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research.
Figure 1: An internet-of-things node for Smart Environments outreach activity using Intel Galileo Kits.
The educational component of this project features a Smart Environments for Sustainability summer camp for high school students, with hardware kits donated by the Intel® Software Academic Program. The project will link circuit design to wider issues of sustainability, engaging participants while also creating a pipeline of future undergraduate and graduates students in Boise State engineering programs. In this project, Prof. Saxena will leverage existing Embedded Summer Camp program hosted by the ECE department and its collaboration with the Boise School district, to create a five-day module titled “Smart Environments for Sustainability” as an advanced camp for 11-12th grade students. The idea is to get students to think differently about Electrical Engineering and its aims is part of preparing the future workforce; getting them at early ages and through college to consider environmental impacts is critical today given the environmental issues we are currently confronting globally.
The camp will use the Galileo Internet-of-Things (IoT) wireless nodes with Grove environmental sensor kit donated by Intel Corporation. The Intel kits will be used to teach and demonstrate the concepts of circuits, signals, machine learning and data analysis. Participants will use a code library to program an IoT network to sense their ambient environment, and interpret the collected data on smartphones. Open discussion will be followed on how the sensed environmental data can be used to make smart adaptations, such as turning down a smart thermostat on a cool summer day and send a message to open the windows instead. For 2016, in addition to repeating the prior activities, a small group of high-school students led by undergraduates, will also be invited to devise efficient strategies for energy conservation in households by utilizing the IoT nodes. For each year afterward, the experiments will be expanded into the greater Boise metropolitan area including homes from socio-economically diverse population, such as the resettled Nepalese refugee and Hispanic community. Prof. Saxena will work closely with the sustainability undergraduate minor program at Boise State, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) to recruit and engage students to accomplish this. A portion of the NSF budget is allocated to cover additional equipment costs of the program.