The CUHK team came to Seattle, marking the official start of our exchange project. We held numerous project planning meeting to discuss the goals and plan for our project. We also had the wonderful opportunity to visit active research labs on the UW campus. Many thanks to Prof. Sahr of the Radar Remote Sensing Lab, Prof. Hannaford of the Biorobotics Lab, Andy Crick of the Automated Brockman Memorial Tree Tour project, and the Embedded Systems Lab for the tours! Off campus, we visited Intel Research and Microsoft who were very generous in offering support and software. Of course, we still had some time to do sightseeing as well, it was a great visit!

We have established an online collaboration website for sharing information (especially files and URLs) and keeping up communication.

After two online meetings and two weeks of research, we have decided as a group to implement our demos on the PocketPC platform. We feel this the small form-factor of PDAs and the increasing computation power will offer an excellent platform to prototype our device. The UW team is beginning to work on creating a proposal for equipment funding to the Department of Electrical Engineering.

The UW team is proud to announce that our proposal was successful. We have been awarded nearly $2000 to purchase two Hewlett Packard iPac devices and a CompactFlash GPS. We also are thankful for the EE department's donation of Visual Studio .NET for our software development needs.

The UW team has begun software development using the GPS. Using libraries from PocketTerra, we can now connect to the GPS and gather information on current location, direction, and signal strength. We have found that using SALT in our development will not be feasible with our current resources and will be investigating other solutions. The CUHK team will be utilizing a speech engine on a web server from Prof. Meng's research group.

The CUHK team has released code for a map interface which the UW team has integrated into the GPS navigation system. The UW team has also localized the map interface to the UW campus.

The CUHK team has implemented speech recognition by connecting with a web server with speech services. The UW team now has a complete navigation system where a user can search for a location and use the map to navigate. The map includes the destination point and user's current point in real time. The UW team has also established a sourceforge.net project website for code development. In our latest online group meeting on Nov 8, both teams have begun making plans to integrate the speech user interface of the CUHK team with navigation system of the UW team.

The UW team has finished the software development for our first verson and publicly released the code on our sourceforge.net project website. The filming for the UW CampusNav demonstration video has also been completed and editing is now underway. Both teams are currently preparing for our public presentation in HK on Nov 28.

The UW team returned from our nine-day trip to Hong Kong on Nov 30. We had a wonderful stay at the CUHK campus, savored many delicious meals, and had a great time visiting exciting sites of the city. Many thanks to the BSEP committee members as well as Prof. Fung Kwok Pui, Head of United College, and Prof. Alaster H. Y. Lau, Dean of Students. And of course, Mrs. Jackie Chow deserves a great thanks for organizing our stay including the tours at Victoria Peak, Po Lin Monastery, Hong Kong Science Park, Cyberport, and more. Our joint presentation at CUHK was a great success and we look forward to having videos and pictures on the website shortly. The UW team will also be giving a short presentation Dec 5 at the UW campus to discuss our trip and results.

The UW-CUHK collaboration has concluded but work continues as Eric Work improves the WiFi location awareness services. This includes seemless integration of GPS and WiFi with semi-intelligent automatic switching. Also a better AP collection algorithm has been used, details can be found here. This work will be used in the 2004 Microsoft Imagine Cup.

The 2004 Microsoft Imagine Cup has come to an end with the UWCU team placing first in Hong Kong and making it to the second round of the final competition in Brazil. The team developed a personal shopping companion (PSC) complete with WiFi location services, voice-to-voice language translation, voice authetication, and integration of SMS with web services.