Device-free localization (DFL) systems locate a person in an environment by measuring the changes in received signal on links in a wireless network. A fingerprint-based DFL method collects a training database of measurement fingerprints and uses a machine learning classifier to determine a person's location from a new fingerprint. However, as the environment changes over time due to furniture or other objects being moved, the fingerprints diverge from those in the database. This paper addresses, for DFL methods that use received signal strength as measurements, the degradation caused as a result of environmental changes. We perform experiments to quantify how changes in an environment affect accuracy, through a repetitive process of randomly moving an item in a residential home and then conducting a localization experiment, and then repeating. We quantify the degradation as well as consider ways to be more robust to environmental change. We find that the localization error rate doubles, on average, for every six random changes in the environment. We find that the random forests classifier has the lowest error rate among four tested. We present a correlation method for selecting channels which decreases the localization error rate from 4.8% to 1.6%.

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The FPGA compilation process (synthesis, map, place, and route) is a time consuming task that severely limits designer productivity. Compilation time can be reduced by saving implementation data in the form of hard macros. Hard macros consist of previously synthesized, placed and routed circuits that enable rapid design assembly because of the native FPGA circuitry (primitives and nets) which they encapsulate.This work presents results from creating a new FPGA design flow based on hard macros called HMFlow. HMFlow has shown speedups of 10-50X over the fastest configuration of the Xilinx tools. Designed for rapid prototyping, HMFlow achieves these speedups by only utilizing up to 50 percent of the resources on an FPGA and produces implementations that run 2-4X slower than those produced by Xilinx. These speedups are obtained on a wide range of benchmark designs with some exceeding 18,000 slices on a Virtex 4 LX200.

Air quality is important, varies across time and space, and is largely invisible. Pioneering past work deploying air quality monitors in residential environments found that study participants improved their awareness of and engagement with air quality. However, these systems fielded a single monitor and did not support user-specified annotations, inhibiting their utility. We developed MAAV-a system to Measure Air quality, Annotate data streams, and Visualize real-time PM 2.5 levelsto explore how participants engage with an air quality system addressing these challenges. MAAV supports collecting data from multiple air quality monitors, annotating that data through multiple modalities, and sending text message prompts when it detects a PM 2.5 spike. MAAV also features an interactive tablet interface for displaying measurement data and annotations. Through six long-term field deployments (20-47 weeks, mean 37.7 weeks), participants found these system features important for understanding the air quality in and around their homes. Participants gained new insights from between-monitor comparisons, reflected on past PM 2.5 spikes with the help of their annotations, and adapted their system usage as they familiarized themselves with their air quality data and MAAV. These results yield important insights for designing residential sensing systems that integrate into users' everyday lives.