6.S062 Final Project Proposal

Project proposals are due Thursday, March 15, by 5 pm ET. Please send them to 6s062@mit.edu.

PROJECT LOGISTICS

We have provided a list of suggested projects at this end of this document. Please feel free to come up with your own ideas, or modify our suggestions in any way you want. Our suggestions are not complete specifications of projects.

1. Teams: Unless there are special circumstances approved by the course staff, you should work in teams of two. Feel free to use the class Piazza forum to find project partners.

2. Schedule: One- to two-page proposals (details below) are due by Tuesday, March 13, 2018. We will read the proposals carefully over the following few days and get back to you by email if we have any questions. Please don’t wait for us to get back to you; get started as soon as possible! You have about two months to carry out the project, which is ample if your proposal is focused and you start early, but not otherwise.

3. Proposal: A write-up in no more than two pages (11 point font or greater) that should contain the following items:

   • Project title (a detailed title is better than a vague one; you can always change it later if you don’t like it!) and names of the team members with email addresses.

   • A clear statement of the problem: a one-sentence summary followed by a one-paragraph explanation. This should identify the goal, question, or hypothesis you’re addressing.

   • A clear statement of your methodology. I.e., how are you going to solve the problems you’ve raised and motivated in the previous paragraph?

   • A statement of plan and schedule, to convince us (and yourself!) that you can complete this by the end of the term.

   • A list of resources you need to accomplish your work, with special emphasis on important components you don’t yet have access to. Be as clear as you can in your requirements and we will work towards getting what you need as quickly as possible. If your request can’t be accommodated for any reason, we will try to get back to you about it as soon as we find out.

   • Any other questions you have or clarifications you need from us.

PROJECT IDEAS

On all these topics, feel free to consult the published literature. Building on prior work is not only allowed, but it is recommended when it makes sense.

Positioning and location

• Battery-efficient indoor-outdoor detector: On a smartphone, develop a battery-efficient way to detect if the phone is indoors or outdoors. Evaluate it systematically and fairly. (No scheme is going to be 100% perfect.) Use all tricks at your disposal, including the use of inertial sensors, screen state, history, even allowing user labeling for training if you wish. And evaluate its battery drain (to first order, how much GPS does your solution use?)

• Location-based messaging: build a system where users can use your app to leave messages around campus, let people discover them on their phone (possibly use anthills to determine the location), and then use their phone to retrieve messages posted at that location.

• Campus tour: build a system that uses BLE-peripherals deployed around campus to provide a tour of art, hacks, or other interesting features inside of buildings at MIT. We can provide a small number of sensors to build a prototype system in one building (e.g., the Stata center.)

• Marauder’s Map: Can you build a map for navigating MIT’s underground tunnels similar to Marauder’s Map into an iOS app? These tunnels have WiFi access points. In its simplest form, this project involves four steps: (1) an offline phase that involves creating a database of the MAC addresses and the locations (and potentially signal strength) of the different access points in the underground tunnels of the MIT campus. (2) at testing time, find the MAC address of the WiFi access points within range (and the signal strength), and pull them out from the database. (3) write a localization algorithm that gives you a rough location estimate based on the WiFi access points detected. (4) write a GUI that would display your location on the floor map. This would be similar to the RADAR paper we discussed in class.

• Accurate BLE ranging: what is the best you can do? Conduct a rigorous set of experiments to evaluate your algorithm. How much better is it than iOS’s?

• Given a set of nodes (Arduinos and/or phones), arranged in some shape or geometry, using BLE ranging (for example), develop a distributed method to have the nodes self-configure into a consistent coordinate system.

• Implement the Cricket location system on laptops or smartphones using acoustic hardware available on these devices. (If it’s easier, do it on laptops.) Sound hardware on these devices seems to support the lower end of the ultrasonic frequency range. (One challenge in this project is it is not 100% clear whether it can be made to work, but if it can, it would be super-cool!)

Activity Sensing

• Crowd or traffic estimation: using Wi-fi and/or BLE sniffers, could you estimate how many people walk by Stata (or other parts of campus) every day, and at different times of day? How would you measure the accuracy of your system?

• Build a 2018 version of the Pothole Patrol on iOS.

• Conduct a careful empirical evaluation of iOS’s M7 activity monitor. Define performance metrics, justify them, and measure how well M7 does.

• Build a system that keeps track of common sequences of locations a user travels on a weekly basis, using iOS significant change, region monitoring APIs, and geo-coding APIs. The challenge here is filtering out locations that are infrequent from frequent origin/destinations, and determining when several nearby addresses are actually the same.

• “Air gestures”: build a system that uses the gyroscope and accelerometer to perform a range of “air gestures” e.g., to control lights in a building or send messages to friends. The challenge here is identifying which of several gestures a user performed.

• “Finding misplaced items using RFIDs”: In class we talked about localization using WiFi devices and RF reflections. This project involves localization using RFIDs -- battery-free wireless stickers. Imagine putting these stickers on different objects, and finding where the objects are by using the RFID’s signals. In this project, you need to learn how to program RFID readers and process the data coming from them.

• Existing smartphone apps are good at tracking some fitness activities like running and cycling, but don’t do a good job with many other sports. Build an exercise tracking app for a fitness activity of your choice. For example, can you use an iPhone or BLE device strapped to your arm to measure different types of weightlifting activities, or their intensity (by looking at acceleration and gyroscope signals)? Or can a similar configuration be used to reconstruct the sequence of plays in an outdoor game like basketball or soccer? Rowing? Skiing? Tennis?

• Fall detection: Detecting people falling is a classic problem that people have worked on (and continue to work on). Develop fall detection software with either: (1) wearable sensors (accel, gyro) prototyped on iOS or Arduino, or (2) cameras. (There are two distinct projects here.)

• Breath Monitoring: In class, you will learn about monitoring human breathing and heart rates using wireless signals that track small movements. Develop a breath monitoring software with either: (1) wearable sensors (accel, gyro) prototyped on iOS or Arduino, or (2) cameras. (There are two distinct projects here.)