For the Academic Year 2012-13: I was on sabbatical. Here is the Sabbatical Report and acknowledgement of the same from Dr. Alperin, Associate Provost.

For the Academic Year 2013-14:

• A list of DIS/MS Thesis topics was distributed to our students.  See this attachment.  Five students have enrolled with me in Fall 2013. Their topics and work is listed here. Other students are welcome to contact me. There is more work to be done!
• Our Smart Phone Development App course set has four professors teaching four different and concurrent courses on anthropology (12 students), digital arts (8 students), anthropology (4 students), and engineering (33 students). They together will form 11 teams and develop Apps for urban and environmental planning. A group of professionals from all the above disciplines will judge the team presentations on December 12, 2013. Please contact me for details. You are most welcome! Here are two sites that will provide updated info: android.fau.edu and eTeams site.
• Our Semantic Web Programming has 25 graduate students, one of the largest graduate classes this semester. These students will apply semantic web principles to enhance productivity in a targeted area of academics or health care. The goal is to build long-lasting Apps that are not brittle and can adapt to rapidly changing environments.  This is achieved by ensuring that the ontologies that they build will be compatible with the overall structure developed for SUMO. Our FAU site will provide more details: semanticweb.fau.edu
• Our Senior Seminar course (25 students, the largest of the three sections) is focused on Web 2.0 Architectures. Students will work in groups of 3 and present a 50 minute long presentation on one of the following: case studies (on rise or fall of a company), patterns (there are 11 such patterns. See Web 2.0 Architectures by Governor et al.,), or domains (such as education, health, democracy, law, identity, media, advertising, and library). Students will use this as the outline: social etc problems that led to this technology solution, technology implementations, and social etc consequences of these technology adaptations. Their presentations and links to their videos  will be posted at our center’s site.
• All these three courses have a group formed at LinkedIn. These groups will allow the students to interact and learn from each other. We are mining queries in the Android App course to help students find the right resources (both with regard to the domain of urban planning and in developing Android Apps – by accessing our tagged collection of 50 Apps). Another researcher will study them for team dynamics. Our spring semester group will have multiple tools available to help them. So, this study will compare teams this semester with those from the spring semester, to determine whether there is a marked improvement in team performance when they are supported with these tools. For the senior seminar course, it meets with the class requirement that students ask questions of the teams that make presentations. All the Q&As will be documented at the group site – and will be available for grading and ABET review later on. Eventually, our goal is to invite professionals and business people to join these groups so they and the students can become aware of each other and work towards meeting entrepreneurial/employment opportunities.
• We are making progress on building low cost robots for use in K-12 Math education. Our focus so far has been on mapping robots to common core tasks (that relate curriculum objectives to assessment metrics, as per Dr. Wiggins’  UbD – Understanding by Design – philosophy). Professors from Math and Psychology have joined the team to explore new ways to approach this problem using mental models. More is found here: robotics.fau.edu
• Curriculum Planning: I have received several TI boards. My goal is to modernize our microcontroller lab, in collaboration with 3 other professors, and use TI’s ARM board; build a biomedical DSP Lab; improve our software-hardware codesign class by including projects on hardware/embedded aspects of Android; formalize the robotic building process, so high school teachers can build and/or repair their low cost systems, and use them for math and game oriented Apps without being overburdened with technical details. All these initiatives have students working with me (on DIS/MS thesis topics, as listed above). More on this will be documented here: smartsystems.eng.fau.edu
• For the Android Apps course, we will also upload our portfolio of Apps (50 of them) and the new ones developed every semester now on. We will tag them appropriately so it will be easy for others and our students to navigate and find the right information quickly. Another graduate student is helping with this effort.