Cal Poly CPE newsletter 2020

HELLO WORLD Computer Engineering | Cal Poly College of Engineering | Summer 2020

CPE ALUMNUS Neil Girling works in tech to support photography

Computer Engineering COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

HELLO WORLD

“Using technolog y to help people.”

CPE STUDENTS EXCEL IN PROJECT AT THE PIER Cover photograph

HELLO WORLD Computer Engineering | Cal Poly College of Engineering | Summer 2020

CPE ALUMNUS Neil Girling works in tech to support photography

Computer engineering Capstone students worked with the Cal Poly Biology Department to simplify controls and develop unified methods to capture and record data and data inputs at the research station out at the Cal Poly Pier in Avila Beach. Pictured at the facility’s tidal simulator are Capstone team members (left to right back row standing) Colin VanDervoort and Kent Zhang; (left to right front row kneeling) Daniel De Leon, client Dr. Rob Brewster and David Lutze.

Inside this issue P. 3 Note from the director P. 4 Cover story: CPE grad Neil Girling is taking their shot

P. 6 Job at Amazon delivers travel experience for CPE grad Computer Engineering COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

CPE grad Neil Girling’s photograph of acacia trees, dead now for 800 years, deep in the Namib Dune Sea, in Naukluft, Namibia.

P. 7 Autonomous vehicle safety team excels in competition

P. 8 John Seng’s robot “Herbie” roams the halls of Bldg. 14

P. 10 CPE faculty notes

NOTE from the director GREETINGS CPE COMMUNITY. I WRITE TO YOU TODAY IN THE context of change as I end my first year as the Director of the Computer Engineering Program. This follows numerous years of the program being guided and nourished by Dr. John Oliver. I want to express my appreciation for his leadership and the positive impact he had, and continues to have, on students.

Adjusting to shelter-at-home orders along with the rest of the world, the Cal Poly campus shut down near the end of the winter quarter and transitioned to virtual instruction for spring quarter. Our priority during this time has been the health and wellness of the entire community.

Lynne Slivovsky For that reason, much of the university’s communications were put on hold as we focused on disseminating important information about the virus and how that would impact our campus community and our work.

The content for our latest newsletter was created before the shelterat-home order and the campus shutdown. I am excited to finally be able to share significant news with our alumni, corporate partners and donors: After a nearly year-long process of discussions with stakeholders, myself, Dean Amy S. Fleischer, Chris Lupo, and Dennis Derickson (chairs of the computer science & software engineering and electrical engineering departments, respectively), we have unanimously decided to elevate the CPE program to department status!

Creating a department at a university is a rare opportunity and we are excited about what will be possible as we transition from a program to a department. We are in the middle of that transition and plan to have the department operational for the 2021-22 academic year.

I am proud of the CPE faculty and collaborators who are taking a critical look at our approach to computer engineering education as they define a new vision around culture, community, collaboration, and support. We are designing a dynamic, adaptive, holistic Learn by Doing curriculum from which our students will be able to negotiate sociotechnical complexity and ambiguity, and have the capacity, agency, and inclination for change.

I’ll keep you informed as we proceed through our transition. In the meantime, this issue of “Hello World” highlights faculty, student and alumni achievements and reminds us of the amazing individuals who make up the CPE community.

It also stresses how industry support has contributed to our success, and that support continues to be crucial. With support from Daimler Trucks North America, Carmaker and the Department of Transportation, a team of computer engineering and mechanical engineering students finished second place in the 2019 Enhanced Safety of Vehicles competition in the Netherlands. Vehicle safety technology represents impactful, real world experience that has the potential to save thousands of lives.

Industry support is also helping faculty member Maria Pantoja expand the use of parallel computing. A recipient of the Lockheed Martin Endowed Professorship Award, Pantoja will use the $25,000 to study earthquakes, Hawaiian bird calls and wine production.

Our great partnerships with industry not only sponsor innovative, impactful projects, but they also allow students to forge important connections for their careers, as you’ll read in the story about Gabrielle Santamorena, who now works at Amazon after interning there.

Check out alum Neil Girling to learn about their wonderful career in tech and stunning photography. (Also, Neil was in my CPE169 lab my first year of teaching at Cal Poly!) We wanted to show how well-rounded our students and alum are by highlighting some of Neil’s beautiful work.

We’d like to thank Neil, whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair and The Smithsonian, for letting us feature their work here.

Finally, during this time of change for all of us, I wish you well. If it’s been a while since you’ve been in touch with someone in CPE, I invite you to reconnect and get involved. There are many ways to do so, from having your company sponsor a Capstone project to mentoring a transfer student or simply reaching out to your favorite professor and letting them know what you’re up to, we would love to get back in touch with you.

Lynne Slivovsky Computer Engineering Program Director

THIS ROBOT MEASURES UP Computer engineering students developed an autonomous robot that can quickly and accurately determine the measurements of a room in a Capstone project advised by Rich Murray.

CAL POLY COMPUTER ENGINEERING | 3

HELLO WORLD

Cover

SHooting for success Neil Girling pursued an engineering degree so they could work as an artist.

“I’ve always been an artist: I would paint and draw as a kid, and I found my calling as a photographer later,” said Girling (CPE, ’07), a non-binary, transgender designer and artist living in Oakland. “In order to make a living doing those things, though, it requires one to constantly hustle and to work gigs and produce material for corporate purposes, all of which I knew would suck the joy out of it for me.”

So the award-winning photographer, whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Smithsonian and the Oakland Museum of California, makes a living as the head of hardware engineering at Orion Labs — a San Francisco-based voice platform for teams in business, enterprise and government organizations — and creates visually intriguing photos on the side. Girling’s unique LinkedIn achievements includes photography from the past 15 Burning Man festivals and tech work with Apple and Google.

We asked Girling about art and engineering.

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Neil Girling at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco after setting up for the Edwardian Ball in 2018.

(Photo: Trevor Tarin).

NEIL GIRLING ACHIEVES AS A TECH PROFESSIONAL AND A PHOTOGRAPHER

You tore apart computers as a kid. What made you do that?

I rarely do anything “just because;” I just can’t bring myself to do so, unless I have a goal in mind. When I was a mid-teenager, I ran what was one of the largest Hotline servers on the internet — this is pre-Napster or BitTorrent, etc. — and it was a community of people from all over the world. While striving for maximal uptime and accommodating growth and additional storage needs, and operating with virtually no budget, I got pretty good at kludging together systems that were ultimately extremely reliable and lean, even if it resembles Frankenstein’s monster and was held together with duct tape and a prayer.

What about your CPE experience at Cal Poly has helped you most in your career?

There were a number of things at Cal Poly that have been directly helpful to my career: The hands-on laboratory experience meant that I already knew my way around the lab at my first internship, at Apple, which I got through connections I made at SWE’s Evening with Industry. Lastly, having professors — rather than grad students — who themselves have spent time in industry is invaluable, for they gave context to what we were learning and why.

“There were a number of things at Cal Poly that have been directly helpful to my career: The handson laboratory experience meant that I already knew my way around the lab at my first internship.”

— Neil Girling, CPE ‘07

Computer Engineering graduate Neil Girling’s photo of “This Too Shall Pass” by artist Lekha Washington at Burning Man in 2019.

You worked on the Mac mini. Why did they trust an intern with such a big project when they presumably have so many professionals?

So this was pretty funny: I interned at Apple in 2004, on the original Mac mini, and then again in 2005 for a 6-month co-op, where we designed the Intel Mac mini from scratch. In 2004, there wasn’t much of an intern program at all, and especially not for hardware engineering — I think there were two of us in hardware, total. So when the system integration teams were talking about where I might end up, while I was originally supposed to be assigned to the iMac team, they thought the Mac mini in its nascent stage would be a unique and fantastically entertaining project to work on, and they were right.

When I walked into a meeting room on my first day on the job, one of the designers literally threw himself onto the table to hide the Mac mini prototype from me, not realizing I was the newest member on the team.

What made you take a leap with a startup like Orion? Didn’t that seem risky?

Above, Neil Girling’s photograph of dusty gas masks in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Below, Girling’s photo of two participants fighting in DeathGuild’s Thunderdome at Burning Man, 2019.

I am what you could call “entropy tolerant.” I had some small savings from previous jobs and very minimal expenses, but more importantly I really don’t mind the lack of structure or form in a very, very early stage startup. (It was just me joining the two founders.) I’m more of a generalist than a specialist, anyway, so I took the opportunity to see how a company is built from the ground up, help grow the team, and wore a dozen hats as we got off the ground.

What do you like most about shooting carnivals, Burning Man, etc.?

Carnivals, festivals, and Burning Man all provide a very colorful, varied, and dynamic array of possibilities to shoot. The degree of spectacle gives me a lot of potential material to work with. Despite the often challenging shooting conditions, I don’t have to work overly hard to make the images look interesting, at least. And as for portraiture, people often look their best and are happy to have photos captured of them. n CAL POLY COMPUTER ENGINEERING | 5

Journey to Amazon FROM EE TO CPE, SENIOR DISCOVERS A BRIGHT PATH AT CAL POLY With the luxury of getting a job offer with Amazon several months before graduation, Gabrielle Santamorena quickly rewarded herself with a plane ticket to Europe.

And since her first day of work wasn’t until September 2019, she decided to have an extended summer vacation.

“None of my family was able to take three months of travel with me, so I decided to travel for a large part of my trip alone,” she said. “It was an amazing experience, and I enjoyed having the freedom to make my own decisions on what to see and do while abroad.”

While she enjoyed her first trip to Europe, her journey to Amazon began in high school in Marin County. As a senior, she attended the Society of Women Engineers Welcome at Cal Poly. There she learned about the university’s Learn by Doing ethos and made key connections.

er and joined Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, which she led as president for two years.

“The experiences through which I was able to develop as a leader and work with others helped me most,” she said of her Cal Poly experience.

“I learned things such as effective team-building skills, how to hold effective meetings, and how to organize events. For my senior project, I had the opportunity to lead a team of six CPE students, which helped me learn more about technical project management.”

After interning with Amazon, she was offered a job in September of 2018, which she formally accepted in December. In her role as a software development engineer, she is currently working on Bluetooth middleware for Amazon’s consumer electronics.

Her time at Cal Poly prepared her well for previous Amazon work, she said.

“I also met some girls that weekend who ended up being my roommates for all of college,” said Santamorena, who grew up in Atlanta before her family moved to California.

“My coursework has helped me with the whole code design process, as well as with both hardware and software debugging,” she said.

Initially an electrical engineering student, she gravitated to computer engineering after taking CPE courses and interning at Raytheon, where she performed work related to missiles. “I really enjoy both circuits and programming and, therefore, CPE was a good fit for me.”

Having the job offer, plus a signing bonus, made her feel at ease about planning a big trip. And she took advantage of it, visiting 15 countries and 23 major cities. While she met some of her old friends in Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy, she also made new connections.

A Dean’s List regular throughout college, she also became a WOW lead-

“I made a ton of friends from all over the world during my travels!” n

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the future of transportation CAL POLY TEAM FINISHES SECOND IN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE SAFETY COMPETITION IN THE NETHERLANDS For nine months, things were going well for a team of Cal Poly students working on an autonomous vehicle project. But right after the students arrived in the Netherlands for the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) competition, that abruptly changed.

“The lighting was different, which threw off our vision subsystems, our object detection algorithm quit working and we even blew a fuse and accidentally shut off power to our corner of the conference center for a little bit,” said Nick Lampe, one of four CPE students involved.

Yet, after two days of developing under intense pressure, things were running smoothly again — and the team finished second, just behind the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

“It was extremely rewarding to see industry experts so amazed with our work,” Lampe said. “They had such positive things to say, and it made the whole experience very worthwhile.”

Billions of dollars have been invested in autonomous vehicle technology, but so far the most it has produced for the general public is sophisticated cruise control and braking systems and some autonomous vehicles that operate under very constrained circumstances. Technology still needs to address safety issues, like poor weather and unforeseen obstacles in the road.

“Being able to identify pedestrians in the rain with oncoming traffic shining headlights into the camera is just one of many scenarios cars will need to be able to handle with near perfect precision before fully automated autonomous vehicles can be commercialized,” said Kiyoshi Moran, another CPE student on the team.

The Netherlands competition and conference, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, provided opportunities to share advances in autonomous vehicle safety. Cal Poly competed with five other universities from the U.S. and Asia, demonstrating their system and offering an oral presentation. Cal Poly’s team was the only one that didn’t feature doctoral students.

The team specifically explored how two autonomous vehicles could work together, driving close to one another, and how autonomous vehicles could respond to an object in the road.

The platooning was accomplished with a combination of image processing and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Meanwhile, a neural

Jacob Loh, left, and Nick Lampe test their autonomous vehicles at their booth in the Netherlands. Their team finished second at the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles competi-

network was used to identify obstacles, and stereoscopic cameras were used for distance estimation and path planning.

To help with this project, this year’s team included both CPE and mechanical engineering students for the first time.

“The mechanical students worked to create a mechanically stable and well-modeled platform,” said Bruce DeBruhl, a CPE assistant professor.

“And the CPE students worked to develop algorithms to make decisions about what the car should do.”

Both DeBruhl and mechanical engineering professor Charles Birdsong acted as faculty advisors.

Autonomous vehicles could offer more than convenience. Close to 40,000 people are killed in the U.S. every year due to vehicle accidents, with driver error being a major cause. While automated vehicles offer the prospect of removing driver error, the problems encountered by the Cal Poly team illustrates the challenges in achieving that technology.

“Even with a full (school) year to develop and test for a very limited demonstration, trying to make our project work for all the edge cases and unforeseen circumstances was the most difficult,” Moran said.

Lampe thinks the technology will eventually be there, but getting autonomous vehicles on the road will require a buy-in from policy makers, the auto industry and the general public.

“So I don’t think that will be for many years still,” he said. “In the meantime, I think the smaller aspects of autonomous vehicles will continue to be integrated into cars on the road, such as adaptive cruise control, driver eye-tracking and obstacle alerting and lane keeping.” n CAL POLY COMPUTER ENGINEERING | 7

HELLO WORLD

One of Herbie’s stops around campus included the office of College of Engineering Dean Amy S. Fleischer.

HERBIE’s ON THE GO JOHN SENG’S ROBOT PUTS ON A HAPPY FACE FOR PASSERSBY

Students returning to campus last fall were greeted by a new face — and it was all smiles. In fact, Herbie the robot never doesn’t smile. But that’s part of his charm.

“Herbie is meant to be a very kind, inviting and approachable figure,” said Daniel Jones, one of three students working with Herbie as a senior project.

Jones and the others, Angel Bonilla and Amanda Krysl, approached Professor John Seng last year about ideas for a senior project. “And when we came back in the fall, CPE/CSSE Professor John Seng (second from left) and seniors Daniel Jones, Amanda Krysl and Angel Bonilla are working on the social media for Herbie, an autonomous robot currently cruising around Building 14.

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FOLLOW HERBIE Instagram page — Hey_Herbie To see a video of Herbie, go to: https://vimeo.com/user92922447

“This summer, some ideas started coming together and I would work on it on weekends and early in the morning when no one was around so that the halls were empty.”

— John Seng on the creation of Herbie

Herbie has stopped by classes and met with Computer Science Chair Chris Lupo, below right, during his travels around Building 14.

Professor Seng had a robot built,” Jones said.

Seng’s affinity for human-like machines goes back to his childhood, when he would watch robot-building competitions on TV. “I was into Transformers,” he said. “That got me into robots, also.”

He built his first actual robot (Herbert) in college, and when he joined the faculty at Cal Poly 16 years ago, he considered making another one.

But it didn’t actually happen until this fall.

Seng, who had been secretly working on Herbie for a couple of years, stepped up his efforts after most students had left last June.

“Last summer, some ideas started coming together and I would work on it on weekends and early in the morning when no one was around so that the halls were empty,” he said.

He “debuted” Herbie in the fall.

With a fixed smile and googly eyes, Herbie slowly rolled down the path he was programmed to remember around Building 14, avoiding collisions with pedestrians. Occasionally, he let out a tweeting sound that’s a nod to the droids of “Star Wars.”

While Herbie’s regular strolls made him a familiar feature, the students have also built Herbie’s social media presence, often posting photos of Herbie visiting classrooms on his Instagram page — Hey_ Herbie. The posts draw attention to both Herbie and the classes he visits.

“We’re all very social engineers,” Jones said. “We’re more focused on the impact rather than the technical aspect, and that’s what we wanted to deliver with our senior project.”

With voice recognition, Herbie might add a practical component, for example, by assisting students looking for a classroom.

Seng is looking for corporate sponsors and hoping to upgrade Herbie with more autonomous vehicle hardware and software.

“It has reached a point where I can start incorporating other students into the project to build in other features,” he said. n CAL POLY COMPUTER ENGINEERING | 9

John Bellardo, right, received the Distinguished Scholarship Award for his work with CubeSats,

FACULTY NOTES

FOUR CAL POLY CPE FACULTY MEMBERS WERE HONORED FOR AWARDS THEY HAVE RECEIVED RELATED TO THEIR WORK n JOHN BELLARDO, whose work as director of the Cal Poly CubeSat Research Lab garnered much attention last summer, was one of three faculty members campus-wide to receive a Distinguished Scholarship Award.

In the 2018-19 school year alone, the professor and his team of 80 students, faculty and staff launched a trio of homegrown Cal Poly satellites and also assisted with the twin MarCO satellites, the first CubeSats to leave Earth’s orbit as a part of the InSight Mars landing mission. He has brought in more than $3 million in funding to Cal Poly, which has expanded Learn by Doing opportunities for hundreds of students from many majors across the campus, and has championed the university’s CubeSat program.

LightSail 2, a project that garnered international attention, was his highlight. In July, Bellardo was part of the mission control team for LightSail 2, the Planetary Society’s successful mission to prove that mini satellites could be propelled in space with solar sails. Bellardo has been involved with the Planetary Society since the early design phase of LightSail 1, which performed a test flight in 2015.

With LightSail 2, Bellardo was responsible for most of the flight software, primary flight commanding, ground station infrastructure and general spacecraft operation support.

When the CubeSat, prepared with student assistance at Cal Poly, de10 | CPE.CALPOLY.EDU

ployed its solar sails, it marked new territory for space exploration.

For the past nine years, Bellardo has “focused on advancing the technologies, services and scientific results of CubeSats,” said his nomination letter for the Distinguished Scholarship Award.

“His work has brought international recognition to Cal Poly as a leader in advanced CubeSat designs. Designs and ideas introduced by Dr. Bellardo five years ago are just now getting incorporated by other CubeSat vendors.”

n BRIDGET BENSON was presented with the Don and Paula Heye Oustanding Teaching Award. Several students nominated Benson, noting how they benefitted from her collaborative work environments and a teacher who was both approachable and passionate about the topics. A past winner of the Quality Online Learning and Teaching Award for the 23-campus CSU system, Benson has been working with EE faculty to redesign introductory electric circuits labs so students can make use of modern tools and project-based learning.

A certified Scuba diver, who has explored the waters of French Polynesia, Mexico and Belize, Benson’s focuses include selecting and developing technology to advance marine science research. Past projects have entailed designing and building a camera system along the Cal Poly pier and a project that uses computer vision to count and classify fish.

Bridget Benson received the Don and Paula Heye Outstanding Teacher Award for 2019.

projects that seek to increase production of wine grapes, identify damage caused by earthquakes and understand the population distribution of endangered Hawaiian birds.

She will also work with local wine producers and begin taking data in vineyards. That project will involve students helping to study different computer vision algorithms to improve wine grape production.

The use of computers in agriculture is not new, she said, but it is growing.

She has also advised masters and senior projects sponsored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Benson will also work on projects with the institute’s engineers and scientists and work to generate more student projects in collaboration with the institute.

n MARIA PANTOJA plans to use her $25,000 Lockheed Martin Endowed Professorship award to expand the use of parallel computing to study earthquakes, Hawaiian bird calls and wine production.

Parallel programming is the use of multiple resources — specially processors — to solve problems. Cal Poly’s parallel computing facilities help students learn how to create software that can be deployed in distributed systems and can run faster. But those facilities need to be upgraded — one of the things she plans to do.

“Every three to five years, components should be replaced,” she said, adding that those can be replaced in steps.

Pantoja also wants to involve other departments in artificial intelligence

“There are several companies already developing software for ag,” she said.

n Recognizing a need, TINA SMILKSTEIN formed the Cal Poly EE/CPE Diversity inclusion and Equity Project, which encourages both discussion and action to combat discrimination.

The group meets once a week, and topics of discussion include recent diversity and inclusion topics on campus, in the community and worldwide that might make students feel unwelcome. The group has written letters to faculty and staff on campus, asking for their support on diversity and inclusion and made a presentation to the Electrical Engineering Industrial Advisory group. The project also hosted a welcome party for transfer students.

“The Diversity and Inclusivity Project has Tina Smilkstein given me an environment to speak openly and comfortably with other underrepresented students in S.T.E.M.,” wrote one of the students who nominated her.

Smilkstein also volunteers as a faculty greeter at dormitories to welcome families to Cal Poly during the Week of Welcome. One of those students she greeted, a first-generation, low-income immigrant of color, said Smilkstein had a deep understanding of diversaity and inclusivity.

“Tina’s empathy and charismatic personality puts her way beyond the understanding of most people,” the student wrote.

Smilkstein can relate to being in an underrepresented group, having lived in Japan as a white American for 20 years.

Maria Pantoja received the Lockheed Martin Endowed Professorship award.

“I’ve always tried to support people that didn’t have support,” she said last year. n CAL POLY COMPUTER ENGINEERING | 11

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