University of Florida students share their work in smart technology
The future of things is in the Internet of Things, showcased Wednesday at the University of Florida’s College of Engineering.
In celebrating the launch of the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World, dozens of students shared their research in smart technology to better the world.
William Eisenstadt, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, led students in developing a device that would monitor and record weather data in Haiti, where sustaining agriculture can be difficult in erratic weather zones.
The researchers’ weather station is easy for farmers to maintain, Eisenstadt said.
“This technology is pretty off the shelf, but it’s useful because it can be fixed with $20 or $30 here and there,” he said.
The data is kept on an online portal, where anyone in the world can review it.
“That way the farmer can get information,” Eisenstadt said, allowing them to plan their crop yields.
The institute is to be a connecting agent for engineers, developers and other researchers to work together on projects, said Cammy Abernathy, dean of the engineering college.
“We’re a very inventive college,” she said.
The students today are more focused on human problems than were those in her generation, she said, who focused on making tools.
“They want to solve people’s problems,” she said. “I think that’s one of the hallmarks of Wertheim engineering.”
David Greene, an engineering PhD student, created a real-time kinematic contraption that could monitor locations in centimeters. While GPS could show that a lost phone is in your house, his device enables more specificity.
“With something like this, it could tell you it’s underneath the couch cushion,” Greene said.
But smart devices can be hacked. Yier Jin, the first endowed term professor at the institute, researches how to keep devices secure from meddling hands. Two of his students, Dean Sullivan and Kelvin Ly, presented their research poster, “Attack and Defense in Internet of Things Security.”
Their goal was to demonstrate how a malicious attacker can target devices like smart locks or cars by hacking into systems.
“You can improve the security of a lot of devices,” Sullivan said.
They’re working to create an internet router that automatically generates strong passwords instead of easy-to-break codes like, say, PASSWORD.
“We want to offer an automatic way to secure them without any interaction with the user,” Sullivan said.
David Nelms, who with his wife endowed the institute in his father’s name, said in an age where smart devices abound, security becomes a more pressing issue. He hopes the college will foster more research on the topic.
“Security is even more important because you don’t want your car hacked into,” he said.
