THE INDEPENDENT DAILY AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
The Chronicle Global health injects new life into NC Former UN ambassor to speak today by
Matthew Chas THE CHRONICLE
If Washington Duke —one of tobacco giants during the late a large benefactor of then-n; College—were alive today, som Duke’s progress might make smoke break. According to a recent Uni the once-heralded North Caro industry may be replaced by could not be any more differ industry that produces cigarette
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Ciaran O’Connor THE CHRONICLE
John Bolton, former United States ambassador to the United Nations, will speak today at the Duke School of Law on President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The Duke chapter of The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a national organization of conservatives and libertarians seeking to reform the JohnBolton current American legal system, invited Bolton to speak at the University. Q&A His visit is cosponsored inside by the Duke University Program in American Grand Strategy and the International Law Society. Bolton’s visit comes at “an exciting and relevant time,” said Erica Stalnecker, a second-year law student and president of the Federalist Society chapter at Duke. Bolton, currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, will speak on “Obama’s
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SEE BOLTON ON PAGE 4
Phone application offers precise location tracking by
Tullia Rushton
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the chronicle
In case you don’tknow where you are, your phone may soon be able to tell you. SurroundSense, an application developed by three members of the Duke community, can pinpoint the location of a phone more precisely than current GPS devices. Romit Choudhury, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, lonut Constandache, a computer science graduate student, and senior Martin Azizyan, have recendy published their work on the new mobile application. “We wanted to use the phone to create a fingerprint of the locadon it was in,” Constandache said. SurroundSense uses a new approach to determine the specific location ofits user that employs the technol- | ogy already built into the phone, including the camera, mouthpiece and accelerator, Azizyan said. The phone first uses the information gained from cell towers to generate a list of places within a certain radius of the user. SurroundSense then uses information generated by the phone such as sound, color, lighting and acceleration to determine the user’s exact location. In a Target store, for example, the phone will sense the large amounts ofred in the store and that the user is walking around.
“The problems with GPS is that it doesn’t work inside, and the accuracy is not very high,” Azizyan said. He added that even a small error by a couple feet could place a user in the wrong store.
when you could just look around?” Azizyan said. Constandache noted that the program is designed like a building block so that new applications can be added. Although the technology can detect a user’s exact location, Azizyan said that privacy was not a concern when creating SurroundSense. “Privacy is an issue out of our scope” he said. “Because this is enabling technology, privacy issues must be addressed for every application that makes use of this
technology.” Official production of the SurroundSense application began in summer 2008 and was completed this March, with an experimental test of SurroundSense
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Azizyan said the program is not necessarily meant to be used on its own, adding thatthe program’s development is valuable, but becomes more useful when paired with other mobile applications. “Why would you need a phone to say where you are
ontheRECORD "This actually tastes like cheap meat." —A fellow dinerat Taqueria Rubio on the restaurant's chorizo. See review RECESS 4.
in 51 business locations in Durham. As a result, SurroundSense had an 87 percent accuracy rate, meaning that SourroundSense was able to accurately name the location of the phone 87 percent of the time, Constandache and Azizyan said. All the SurroundSense data was recently published when Constandache, Azizyan, and Choudhury traveled to Beijing, China to attend MobiCom, the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computingand Networking. The future of SurroundSense is unclear, Azizyan said, adding that further development of the application depends who takes an interest in the program.
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