Recent Projects

The rapid adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offers significant advantages in the defense sector, but also exposes vulnerabilities. Electronic warfare, particularly GPS jamming, poses a critical threat, rendering many commercial UAVs inoperable. While inertial navigation systems offer resistance to jamming, they are prone to drift over time. Optical navigation emerges as a promising solution, enabling reliable and jam-resistant navigation.

This article details an information leakage vulnerability in an activity-tracking app called Strava. Strava enables users to record and share their activity metrics, including location details, in a social media format with friends and the wider community of over 120 million users. Strava has faced scrutiny from privacy advocates, notably in 2018 when it inadvertently exposed the location of secret military bases and again in 2023 when its heatmap feature was found to potentially leak users’ home address locations.

I recently had the pleasure of being invited onto the CBC to join Stephen Quinn on the Early Edition. I was invited to speak about a recent project using city-level mapping data to find every location to hang a hammock in the city of Vancouver. The project was a bit of a laugh but the response it received was overwhelming and it was an interesting experience being featured on the CBC and online.

In our embedded systems class, my team and I developed a robotic car equipped with a camera to scan for people and navigate towards them. This project combined hardware design, embedded programming, and computer vision to create a vehicle that could drive autonomously. Our goal was to create a robotic car that could be placed on the ground, look around until it saw a human, navigate towards the person while correcting its path around obstacles, and finally stop at a set distance at their feet.