NJIT Researchers Extend Digital ‘Everyware’ Using Equipment That’s, Well, Everywhere

Cesar Bandera Cesar Bandera, assistant professor of management, focuses his research on the emerging field of mobile- or m-health. Through his company Cell Podium, he has research support from the National Institutes of Health to develop applications for environmental public health outreach and training via cell phone. In 2010-2011, he was enlisted by the Center for Disease Control to help train clinicians in Haiti who were treating victims of a cholera epidemic.  He also has grant support from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to employ m-health technology to improve safety and construction sites.
Mengchu Zhou Mengchu Zhou, professor of electrical and computer engineering, is leading a study that will use cell phone data to analyze the amount of social disruption caused by a disaster and how long it takes for the area to return to normal. The NSF-funded project will draw on the expertise of a civil engineer, sociologist, and a computer scientist using math, computer science and travel behavior research. The team will compare normal, everyday cell phone use with use during and after a disaster and will chart the process and speed by which usage returns to normal. The goal is to improve understanding of the effects of a disaster and to demonstrate how indirect measures can be used to study these events.
Cristian Borcea Associate Professor Cristian Borcea and computer science doctoral students Susan Pan and Mohammad Khan (not pictured) recently collaborated with researchers from the University of Versailles, France, in a study of strategies for re-routing vehicles to avoid traffic congestion. They developed a system that collects real-time traffic data from vehicles and road-side sensors and computes proactive, individually-tailored re-routing guidance which is pushed to vehicles when signs of congestion are observed on their route. In a paper which appeared in the Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '12), they presented and compared three re-routing strategies and found that all three offered a significant decrease in travel time.
  Grace Guiling Wang, associate professor of computer science, focuses her on wireless sensor networks, vehicular networks, network security and mobile computing. She is leading an NSF-funded project to study network issues critical for building self-sustainable outdoors sensor networks.  The goal is to promote the adoption and application of sensor networks through enhancing their survivability in the outdoors environment, providing better solutions for disaster rescue missions, military surveillance, and intelligent transportation systems.
  Professor James Geller and his doctoral student, Xiang Ji, collaborated with Soon Ae Chun of CUNY-Staten Island to develop the Epidemics Outbreak and Spread Detection System, which gathers information in real time from Twitter as the basis for a user-friendly method for visualizing the outbreak and spread of an epidemic.