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While Wi-Fi can only accurately determine your position indoors to within about five to 10 meters, Ryan and Ganick say, ByteLight’s technology cuts this down to less than a meter—close enough for you to easily figure out which shirt the deal is referring to.

ByteLight is working on a functioning prototype, and hopes to have the first products available within a year. Ryan and Ganick say a number of developers are working on smart-phone apps that would include the technology, which, they feel, could also work as an additional (or smarter) location-finding feature within existing apps.

The company is talking to retailers about installing its equipment in stores, too. Ryan and Ganick think businesses will warm to ByteLight because installation mainly requires buying and screwing in their lightbulbs. Once a business installs the lights, they’ll need to use a ByteLight mobile app to determine which light corresponds to which spot in their building, Ganick says. An app developer could then use that data to tag deals to different lights.

And while LED bulbs are more costly than standard lightbulbs, they’ve been falling in price. ByteLight says its bulbs will be only “marginally” more expensive than existing LEDs.

Jeffrey Grau, an analyst with digital marketing company eMarketer, believes ByteLight may be on to something. If the customers are already inside a store, showing them an exclusive offer makes it more likely they’ll buy something.

But will shoppers find ByteLight’s targeting creepy? Ryan and Ganick don’t think so. They say an app on your smart phone would be “listening” for nearby ByteLights, not the other way around. So users can control their own experience. And the LED bulbs’ positioning capabilities could help people inside a large building solve the common problem of figuring out where they are. “We want people to think about lightbulbs in an entirely new way,” Ganick says.

Written by Rachel Metz

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39685/?p1=A2

From an office building in Kendall Square, two Boston University alumni have developed technology that can connect people with the businesses and environments around them through LED lighting.

Aaron Ganick and Dan Ryan , 2010 graduates of College of Engineering, will soon launch a company called ByteLight. Their startup focuses on transmitting information from LED light bulbs. While the technology remains in development, they plan to implement it into retail space and make it connect with mobile devices.

“We believe that mobile is the future of retail,” Ryan said.

Bytelight’s technology can determine the most effective display placements in stores, products and floor plans, Ryan said.

ByteLight’s LED lighting also has the potential to provide global positioning in large, indoor places such as airports, shopping malls and supermarkets, according to the January 2012 newsletter from the Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization.

Ganick and Ryan researched lighting as undergraduates in the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at BU, where they worked for several summers.

They said after taking a class entitled “The Business of Technology Innovation,” taught by School of Management professor Paul Levine, Ganick and Ryan started to consider pursuing entrepreneurial careers. They decided to take that route with the LED technology in 2010.

“We saw a big opportunity,” Ganick said. “Costs of LEDs were dropping and locational services were growing.”

Thomas Little, associate director of the Smart Lighting ERC, said locational lighting technology could be used for asset tracking in large indoor complexes such as hospitals and laboratories.

“It’s potentially as big an industry as outdoor location services,” he said.

ByteLight first operated out of a BU incubator and then moved to Dogpatch Labs, a venture designed to provide entrepreneurs with connections and launch startups, Ryan said.

While they hinted they may have found a lighting partner for the venture, neither one would name the potential partner, elaborate on their marketing plan or give a timeframe for an official launch.

“We’re in stealth mode,” Ganick said.

Though the specifics of ByteLight’s technology do not relate to or receive funding from BU, the venture has gotten support from BU faculty.

Babak Kia, an adjunct professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, called Ganick an engineer who “builds a better future” by fusing his technical vision and leadership skills.

“He and his team are driven by an unyielding passion to invent the future, and his startup – one of Boston’s hottest – will revolutionize indoor location in much [of] the same way as Google Maps has done for outdoor location,” Kia said in an email interview.

Little said the engineering degree at BU is designed to help students become analytical thinkers and problem solvers, which Ryan and Ganick demonstrate.

“To be successful once leaving BU requires the ability to adapt,” Little said.  “[This is] especially true in the entrepreneurial world where the problems are much more diverse.”

Little said ByteLight exemplifies how Smart Lighting ERC helps students learn how to apply their analytical skills.

“Both Aaron and Dan have demonstrated the ability to adapt quickly to changing technology,” he said.

Written by Thea Di Giammerino

http://dailyfreepress.com/2012/02/05/eng-alumni-develop-indoor-gps-through-led-lighting/

Congratulations to Lucy Hutyra on her NSF Career Award: Assessing Urban Influences on Ecosystem Processes.  This is a 5 year, $543,000 award.  Lucy is Assistant Professor, Dept of Geography and Environment.
View more information and an abstract of Lucy’s award.

Congratulations to Yanfeng Geng, an SE PhD student, who  won 2^nd place in the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition. Geng won the prize together with a student team he put together for to the “Smart Parking” work he has been pursuing with his adviser, Professor Christos Cassandras.

The IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge prizes are given based on the relevance to a project to an actual real world problem, the clarity and significance of the engineering, computing, and other principles and concepts featured in the project, the degree to which the project allows for alternate methods of solution, and the degree to which the project can be replicated at other institutions. Each year 9 teams win the prizes (3 in Boston, 3 in the United Kingdom, and 3 in the Republic of Ireland).

CEESI featured in Dayaway.

Helping exceptional university students prepare for and find alternative energy jobs.

By Scott Kirsner
November 20, 2011

We’ve all had the experience of trying to find a particular product in a big box store apparently devoid of employees, or roaming the aisles of a vast convention center searching for a booth. While GPS displays in our cars or mapping apps on our phones can guide us to the parking lot, once you step inside, you’re in terra incognita.

The next big nut to crack in the navigation business is “indoor positioning,’’ which can solve problems as crucial as helping a fire chief understand where firefighters are within a burning building or as mundane as leading you to an ATM in an unfamiliar airport.

A Cambridge start-up called ByteLight is working on a solution that could be as simple as screwing in a light bulb. The company was spawned by Boston University’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

ByteLight hasn’t yet filed patents, so the founders won’t be specific about its technology, but the company is planning to use LED bulbs as a kind of indoor GPS satellite system. At the heart of an LED bulb is a cluster of light-emitting microchips, which can be programmed to flicker in a certain pattern invisible to the naked eye. But that pattern, viewed by the cameras built into most cellphones, would serve as a kind of address.

If the camera could see two or three of the bulbs above, it could get a very accurate fix on where you’re standing.

“LED lights are getting less expensive every day,’’ says cofounder Dan Ryan, “and location-based services are getting more important. Those are the two trends we’re trying to leverage.’’ Ryan says the company thinks its technology could be useful in places like museums, where you might use your mobile phone to find a particular piece of art.

But the company could also build its own devices that would continually collect positioning information from LED bulbs and relay it to a central station, perhaps to keep tabs on an expensive piece of equipment in a hospital, or a robot roaming through a factory. ByteLight thinks it will be able to determine a user’s – or a robot’s – position within 1 or 2 meters.

The three-person company hasn’t yet started to seek funding. “Right now, we’re just building’’ the necessary hardware and software, says Ryan.

Point Inside, a Seattle start-up, is a bit further along. The company has 29 employees, and has raised just over $2 million. But it is taking a different approach, trying to figure out where you are by reading the radio signals from Wi-Fi networks in a store, combined with information about your movements that are generated by the built-in accelerometer sensor in most smartphones.

Point Inside marketing executive Todd Sherman says the system is accurate to about 9 meters. (That’s a long stretch of shelving, if you’re looking for a particular product.)

Meijer, a Midwestern retailer, has been using the technology in its stores, enabling shoppers to create a shopping list on their phones before they arrive, and get a customized map that will guide them to the items on it. There’s also, of course, a marketing angle.

“If you put together a shopping list,’’ says Sherman, “we can tell when you’re getting close to the store and pop up a message that says, ‘If you come in today, we have a 20 percent discount for you.’ ’’ The system can also present offers for particular products located near where you’re standing.

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have been thinking about the challenges of indoor positioning since a warehouse fire in Worcester killed six firefighters in 1999. Getting lost in a building is one of the biggest dangers of the occupation, says WPI professor R. James Duckworth, but firefighters may not have maps – or current maps – of every structure they encounter.

WPI researchers have been developing and testing what they call the Precision Personnel Locator. It uses a small wireless device, about the size of walkie-talkie, that attaches to a firefighter’s breathing apparatus. That device communicates with two or more receivers on the firetrucks. The receivers send information about each firefighter’s location to a ruggedized laptop that would be used by the incident commander.

“On the screen, you can see a kind of breadcrumb trail of pixels,’’ says WPI professor David Cyganski. “If someone gets lost, they can be talked back.’’ The WPI research has been funded by grants from government agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

High-priced, custom-built systems for fire departments or the military could come first, given the obvious benefits. But like every technology that hasn’t yet been perfected, some still have questions about how useful indoor positioning will be for the average citizen, and what business models might support it.

“There’s really no burning imperative to provide these services,’’ says Greg Stirling, a senior analyst for Opus Research in San Francisco, “though it would be nice to have them if they existed.’’ (Sort of like Wi-Fi in hotel rooms, once a luxury and now a necessity?)

Stirling also questions whether marketers will feel there’s enough value in sending consumers messages on their mobile phones to try to persuade them to buy one brand of baked beans over another. “Getting the chief marketing officer of a consumer goods company interested in the person standing in Aisle 4 is really hard,’’ he says. “Often, their goal is something that has breadth and reach and scale.’’

But indoor positioning feels inevitable to me, especially when I find myself roaming the aisles of a big box store, or trying to catch a train at an unfamiliar station. As Duckworth, the WPI professor, puts it, “GPS has really set an expectation for people: I know where I am outside, so why can’t I get the same information inside?’’

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2011/11/20/moving-mapping-technology-indoors/zptUmZ3uY6FRN82K46nPoL/story.html

Nathan Phillips is a meter-reader for the 21st century.

The College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of geography and environment recently piled into a Nissan Murano with collaborators Bob Ackley and Eric Crosson and rambled through the streets of greater Boston to hunt for natural gas leaks. With the help of a strange-looking vacuum device attached to the car just below the rear bumper, the three have found geysers of gas gushing invisibly from underground pipes corroded by age. The leaks, Phillips says, contribute to global warming, could create explosions in some extreme cases, have killed or damaged up to 10,000 trees in Massachusetts (a disputed matter under litigation), and shaft rate-paying gas customers who must pick up the tab for wasted gas.

The vacuum sniffs up molecules into a suitcase-sized machine in the hatch called a cavity ringdown analyzer, where a laser beam ricochets off mirrors and through the collected particles. The more natural gas collected, the more the laser diminishes. When the machine detects a leak, numerical values on a display screen indicate how much gas is spurting; if there are multiple leaks, the display “looks like a stock market index during a busy day,” says Phillips. The machine instantly spits out the leaks’ locations and shows them on Google Earth maps as shafts of green, punching skyward like a light show.

The Google Earth image above shows shafts of bright green indicating natural gas leaking around BU’s Charles River Campus. If there are multiple leaks, the display “looks like a stock market index during a busy day,” says Nathan Phillips. Photo courtesy of Nathan Phillips and Picarro, Inc.

There are a lot of leaks. One utility, National Grid, counts 14,000 in its system, which serves half of the Bay State, while Ackley, president of Gas Safety USA, a Massachusetts leak-detection company, puts the figure for all leaks at up to 30,000. Utilities reported 13.5 million cubic feet of gas lost from leaks throughout Massachusetts in 2009, an amount that is surely an undercount, according to the federal government, which collects the data.

In May, Phillips and company found a leak in Newton, Mass., that was spewing 400 cubic feet of gas per day. “The average household uses about 200 cubic feet per day,” says Crosson, whose California company, Picarro, makes the analyzer. “So that leak was equivalent to two households opening up their gas stoves and heater without igniting them.”

The perils and price of leaking gas are the subject of a paper that Phillips, Crosson, and Ackley presented at a spring conference sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Their research suggests that 7 percent to 15 percent of manmade methane (the main component of natural gas) in the atmosphere comes from these urban emissions. And that’s a problem: methane is a greenhouse gas that according to the United Nations is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Then there’s the money. The eight billion cubic feet of gas vented in Massachusetts in 2005 (that’s leaks plus gas unaccounted for because of other factors) was worth $41 million, and that annual leak of gas and dollars continues. Gas customers pay a monthly maintenance charge already, in addition to being charged for the gas that leaks away, says Ackley, who for years worked to detect leaks for National Grid and other utilities. He estimates that leaks could add $40 a year to the average Bay State residential gas bill.

Leaking gas also kills or damages millions of dollars worth of urban trees—between $15 million and $25 million just in the commonwealth alone, says Ackley, who with Jan Schlichtmann (the lawyer hero of the book and film A Civil Action) runs the Massachusetts Public Shade Tree Trust, which seeks damages from utilities for affected municipalities.

Nathan Phillips (left) and Eric Crosson check a display screen indicating the extent of a natural gas leak. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Brookline is suing National Grid, which serves 1.2 million customers there and throughout Massachusetts, for damages to town trees allegedly caused by gas. Company spokesman David Graves says he can’t comment on pending litigation, but he does say that there is no scientific evidence supporting claims that underground gas leaks cause widespread damage to trees. “We work with communities on individual cases where they believe gas may have damaged a tree,” he says. “If we can prove gas is responsible, we replace the tree at our cost.”

Graves says his company takes the leaks issue very seriously and responds to every reported odor of gas. “We are in complete compliance with state and federal standards in leak management,” 
he says.

Phillips says utilities triage their repairs to remedy catastrophic leaks, such as the one that occurred near San Francisco last year, when a gas transmitting line exploded, killing four and torching dozens of homes. He found one leak in West Newton with methane levels that would rate as potentially explosive.

By contrast, Phillips says, slower street-level leaks are bottom-tier concerns for repair, even though pedestrians occasionally can smell the gas.

Ackley tracked gas leaks for years before teaming with Phillips, whom he met by chance. Walking with his toddler son in their Newton neighborhood, Phillips spied Ackley in a yard wielding a strange handheld device. Curious, he asked Ackley what he was doing.

Picarro’s machine has revolutionized the labor of leak detection since Phillips and Ackley began using it last winter. “I can find the leaks with the old-school equipment we’ve been using in the gas industry for years,” says Ackley, “but this equipment is much more sensitive, and it has the ability to map out on GPS, right on a computer screen,” a leak’s location, “and also quantify the gas a little bit better.” The machine can sense leaks at any car speed, Crosson adds. “I’ve done it doing 65 miles an hour.”

So far, Crosson, Phillips, and Ackley have surveyed only a small percentage of Boston streets, and they plan to publish more comprehensive leak data from the city.

ByteLight one of seven innovative cleantech companies selected for technical development, entrepreneurial advisory and incubation services

BOSTON, MA – October 5th, 2011: ByteLight has been selected for funded services through U-Launch, a US Department of Energy-funded grant-based award program that provides funded services to promising clean energy start-ups. These grant awards were offered as part of the Cleantech Open Northeast business competition. The grants will be used to assist seven Boston-area companies, including ByteLight in validating, developing and deploying innovative cleantech solutions.

ByteLight is a young BU spinoff that is developing indoor navigation, location based advertising, and interactive shopping experiences for retail spaces. GPS has played a huge role in the recent mobile device revolution, spawning many companies including FourSquare, ShopKick, SCVNGR, and Gowalla. There are a variety of competing technologies that are trying to solve the indoor positioning problem including Wi-Fi triangulation, dead reckoning, and ultrasound, however these solutions have struggled to reliably achieve sub-meter accuracies. In response, ByteLight is developing a system to turn overhead LED lights into positioning beacons used for locating smartphones indoors.

“Earlier this year, U-Launch committed to providing a minimum of $20,000 in funded services to Cleantech Open Northeast Region semifinalists,” said Eric Graham, Director of Fraunhofer CSE’s TechBridge program and administrator of U-Launch.  “But given the strong field of competitors participating in this year’s competition, we felt compelled to exceed our commitment and have awarded $89,000 in total services to seven highly qualified companies.”

“As a partner in U-Launch the MassCEC is extremely pleased with the level of competition in this year’s Cleantech Open Northeast competition,” added Patrick Cloney, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. “It’s exciting for us to support innovative cleantech companies with U-Launch funded service awards.”

“The partnership between U-Launch and the Cleantech Open is a perfect example of the kind of collaborations necessary to further innovation in clean energy,” said Peter Rothstein, President of the New England Clean Energy Council. “New England’s cleantech cluster is rich and diverse, and connecting divergent programs and resources is a top priority.”

The U-Launch program provides grants that are comprised of funded services tailored to enhance the future market and funding potential of the individual awardee, and can include:

• Technical services provided by Fraunhofer TechBridge, including prototype development assistance, technology validation and technology feasibility studies,
• Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) services provided by the New England Clean Energy Council, including business plan development, go-to-market strategy creation, capital requirements planning, and fund-support.
• Incubation services supplied through the ACTIONetwork, including subsidized space and access to incubator business support services.

These awards were made possible in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy as part of its Innovation Ecosystem Development Initiative, administered by the Commercialization and Deployment Team. The purpose of the Innovation Ecosystems is to accelerate the commercialization of clean energy technologies from US university laboratories into the marketplace.

About the Cleantech Open

The Cleantech Open runs the world’s largest cleantech accelerator. Its mission is to find, fund and foster entrepreneurs with big ideas that address today’s most urgent energy, environmental and economic challenges. A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, the Cleantech Open provides the infrastructure, expertise and strategic relationships that turn clever ideas into successful global cleantech companies. Since 2006, through its one-of-a-kind annual business competition and mentorship program, the Cleantech Open has enabled hundreds of clean-technology startups to bring their breakthrough ideas to fruition, helped alumni contestants raise over $300M, and created an estimated 2,500 green-collar jobs. Fueled by a global network of more than 1,000 volunteers and sponsors, the Cleantech Open unites the public and private sectors in a shared vision for making America’s cleantech sector a thriving economic engine. For more information, visit www.cleantechopen.org, or follow Cleantech Open on Twitter and Facebook.

About U-Launch

U-Launch was founded in 2010 with the aim of supporting clean energy technologies in their transition from the laboratory to the market, and is partially funded by a three-year, $1.1M award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovation Ecosystem Development Initiative. The program is administered by four leading New England cleantech organizations: the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE), the New England Clean Energy Foundation (NECEF), the Association of CleanTech Incubators of New England (ACTION) and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC). Each member of the U-Launch team provides critical early-stage resources for start-ups and spinouts. U-Launch grants are awarded to high-potential technologies, many of which are spun out of New England-based research universities. Grants are comprised of funded services tailored to enhance the future market and funding potential of the individual awardee, and can include business model review or development, market analysis, technical feasibility studies, prototype development assistance, technology validation, executive-in-residence guidance, and incubation space.

For more information on the U-Launch partners, visit:

MassCEC – www.masscec.com | Twitter

NECEF – www.cleanenergycouncil.org/foundation | Twitter

Fraunhofer CSE – www.cse.fraunhofer.org | Twitter

ACTION – www.innovativeaction.org

There is nothing enjoyable about driving around a parking lot looking for an empty space.

“Did you know that 30% of vehicles on the road in any major city downtown are cruising for a parking spot?” asked Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE). “And that it takes the average driver 7.8 minutes to find a parking spot?”

What if you knew exactly which spot was open before you even entered a lot?

Cassandras and systems engineering graduate student, Yanfeng Geng, are developing a smart parking application that will allow drivers to reserve and pay for spaces using their smart phones – and their research was recently featured on New England Cable News (NECN).

Watch the NECN video.

The new application can reduce the amount of gas wasted, lessen air pollution and traffic congestion, and save drivers some of their sanity.

“Not only are these people frustrated, but they actually obstruct everybody else,” recently told NECN.

If the application works as well on the streets as in this garage, Cassandras believes that parking may not be such a problem in the future for Boston drivers.

Read more about Smart Parking research in BU Today.

-Samantha Gordon (COM ’12)