First meeting with Prof Mangharam :)

Skype Meeting with Prof. Rahul Mangharam 

12-Sept-2011 

6.30 PM IST (9.30 AM EST)

•  Prof. Magharam directed us to take our ELM project work at YIF as a challenge in the form of a start-up company. He thereby suggested not only to emphasize on the technical aspects of the project but also to get exposed to aspects such as Market Research, User Experience, Case Studies etc.
• We were asked to immediately set up a lab at YIF to start our project work. For this we were asked to make and share a part list required for starting this project at the earliest.
• It was mentioned that after the completion of this initial task we would be required to write a second summary of how this product could be made viable by making it cost effective, working on the slim look, integrating with other solutions etc. Prof. asked us to give importance to the usability aspects of the product also as there is no point making a technological product unless it fulfils the demand of the users.

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All excited for the first meeting with Prof. Rahul (Our mentor)

Few days back we got the news that Prof. Rahul Mangharam from UPenn will be mentoring us as part of our ELM@YIF. Since then we have been very excited to meet Prof. Mangharam . Prof. has come up with an initial idea to assuage our thirst for doing research in the areas of HCI, embedded systems and robotics while adding value to the society. The initial idea was as described in the blog: http://kinecthesia.blogspot.com/ . This was a 3.5 months project taken up by undergraduate students at UPenn early this year.

Since our ELM is of 8 months, the task given is to deliver a viable product taking 'Kinecthesia' as our premises. The idea statement has been stated as follows by the Prof. - "To develop a Haptic Belt with the XBOX360 Kinect for visually impaired persons" where the initial technical effort needs to be taken to develop some relatively low-cost technology pieces and integrating them into a socially useful application. Although this is just an initial idea, we hope to do effective brainstorming with the Prof. when we talk to him for the first time. We all are geared up to officially start the project from today. Yippeee :-)