Global Microscope takes center stage at NASA Week in Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico NASA Space Act Consortium and the National Science Foundation's Model Institutions of Excellence program at the Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan sponsored a week of educational activities throughout rural and urban Puerto Rico based the Global Microscope (GM). High school, undergraduate, and graduate students used the GM to study current environmental events and trends. Dr. Joyce Winterton, NASA's Assistant Administrator for Education gave the keynote speech, and twelve students were admitted as interns contributing to the development of tools for the analysis of remote sensing earth science data.

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Wireless cellular sensor interface unveiled at NIEHS WETP Conference

BanDeMar Networks unveiled a micro-miniature circuit that communicates measurements from any mobile environmental sensor to any computer anywhere in the world through any Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. The circuit board tags each measurement with precise geolocation obtained from the board's built-in third generation GPS, and builds upon the SMS protocol to achieve coast-to-coast roaming while avoiding expensive wireless subscription fees (unlike WiFi and other wireless local area network technologies that require relatively close proximity between the mobile unit and a base station). The sensor interface, which builds upon the technology used in the mobile just-in-time training system developed for NIEHS, was demonstrated live at the in Bethesda conference, from New Jersey, and from Nurnberg, Germany, using a Biosystems hand-held multi-gas sensor and Google Maps.

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NIEHS awards BanDeMar Networks an SBIR Phase II to deploy JITTEIS

The Worker Education and Training Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences awarded BanDeMar Networks a two-year Advanced Learning Technologies SBIR Phase II grant to deploy its Just-In-Time Training for Emergency Incidents System (JITTEIS) for HAZMAT responders and skilled support personnel.

Among the first adopters of this technology is MONOC, New Jersey's largest paramedic group responding to over 160,000 emergencies per year. As part of the Phase II, JITTEIS will be integrated with MONOC's Command and Control Center and will serve incident-specific multimedia to the operators of MONOC's one hundred vehicles distributed over its 1,800 square mile footprint. Another early adopter is Structure Tone, the largest construction firm in New Jersey. Structure Tone will be using JITTEIS to disseminate safety video courses to the cell phones of both on-site employees (who used company-issued devices) and contractors (whose cell phone configuration is arbitrary), and to record compliance with Federal and local safety protocols.

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BanDeMar interns present Global Microscope at NASA HQ

High school and college inters participating in BanDeMar Network's Global Microscope program presented their work to NASA's Office of Education Leadership at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. The Earth Science projects included interactive spherical displays of wind vector data and chaos theory by NJIT student Mike Tuccillo called the Butterfly Effect,, terrain following, and cellular metabolism. The Butterfly Effect project illustrates how the path taken by an airborne particle varies significantly with only a small displacement in the location from which it is released (e.g., NJIT campus left versus NYC Central Park right below).

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Global Microscope interfaced to USGS seismograph sensor grid

As part of BanDeMar's effort to promote Earth Science education, NJIT interns Anil Bridgpal, Ramon Gonzalez, and Mark Rechler implemented a real-time interface between the Global Microscope and the earthquake data RSS feed from the US Geological Survey. The interface monitors and parses USGS RSS data, and renders it with full metadata on the spherical display.

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