uOttawa Engineering Students Finalists in “Innovate North America” Altera Design Contest
April 16, 2010
The Faculty of Engineering is proud to announce that a computer engineering prototype developed by a team of students from the University of Ottawa has ranked in the top 5 spots in the “Innovate North America” Altera Design Contest 2009. The competition had over 35 projects as finalists, and was open to universities across North America.
Their project was a brain-computer interface where a computer chip actuates electrical signals onto the tongue. The project was designed based upon a device called BrainPort which is used to help the blind to see, and to correct some vestibular disorders (http://wicab.com). Unlike the BrainPort technology which is expected to retail for as much as fifteen thousand dollars, the device from uOttawa can be manufactured for less than a hundred dollars. The fabricated prototype was designed to play the game “pong” with a human user who cannot see the game, and instead interprets signals sent to the brain as visual information.
This bidirectional human-computer interface chip was configured to display the game state so that an audience could view the game being played on a VGA screen. The uOttawa team was comprised of undergraduates Alexey Borisenko, Lukash Monczak, Ovidiu Draghici, and Ikvir Singh. Ph.D. student Daniel Shapiro, and Dr. Miodrag Bolic of the uOttawa Computer Architecture Research Group (http://carg.site.uottawa.ca/) and Dr. Voicu Groza of the uOttawa Signal Processing Oriented Technologies Research Group (http://www.site.uottawa.ca/research/spot/) served as advisers.
This selection demonstrates not only the hard work of the uOttawa team but also the strength of the Faculty of Engineering’s School of Information Technology and Engineering. Constructed in 2002, the School of Information Technology and Engineering has been an overwhelming success in training engineers who solve the problems of today with the technology of tomorrow.
Innovate North-America is a multi-discipline engineering design contest open to all graduate and undergraduate engineering students in the North-America region. The goal of the annual contest is to help students to cultivate their design interests of embedded processor, to improve their design technique, and to make their creativity and innovation into best practice. For more information about the Contest, please visit their website at http://innovate-na.terasic.com.
Following their selection, the uOttawa team will continue their research in this field. They have recently submitted a paper to Medical Measurements and Applications (MeMeA) which will soon appear in the IEEE Journal on Instrumentation and Measurement.
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