Travel Grant Recipients

Congratulations to BC Kwon and Pat Brunese!!! They are the recipients of the first Travel Grants provided by the IE GSO.

Bum Chul (BC) Kwon
ReadingMate: An Infrared-Camera-Based Content Stabilization Technique to Help Joggers Read While Running on a Treadmill
Computer Human Interaction 2009 on April 4 – 9, 2009 in Boston, MA

Abstract of Presentation: Though reading could be a useful activity while a jogger runs on a treadmill, reading while running can be quite tiresome. In order to alleviate this difficulty, we developed a content stabilization technique, called “ReadingMate,” using head-tracking to track the location of the jogger’s head/eyes and relocate the position of the contents on the screen, so that the contents appear to be stabilized. We conducted a small experiment with ten participants, and eight out of ten reported positive experiences in using ReadingMate. Thus, ReadingMate could be a potential solution for joggers who would like to read while running, and possible future works are also discussed.

Pat Brunese
An Investigation of the Effect of Non-Identical Replacements on Optimal Maintenance Policies IIE Annual Conference – Industrial Engineering Research Conference on May 30 –June 3, 2009 in Miami, FL

Abstract of Presentation: We consider a system subject to failure, whereupon the system can either be repaired or replaced. A repair action will bring the state of the system to somewhere between good-as-new and bad-as-old, termed general or imperfect repair. The age of the system after repair is modeled according to the so-called virtual age, first proposed by Kijima (1989). The replacement action is assumed to reset system age to zero. In addition, the replacement systems are assumed to have different reliability functions. We formulate and present results for a semi-Markov decision process with state space comprised of the virtual age and number of failures.