1 Benedictine University • April 2017

Robotics project puts studen in international spotlight

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Jakub Jancek didn’t like computers when he was in high school. Now he can hardly imagine doing anything else.

In March, the Benedictine junior presented his project, “Optimizing Kinect® Depth Sensing Using Dynamic Polarization,” at the 48th Association for Computing Machinery Technical Symposium of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) in Seattle, Wash.

The symposium is SIGCSE’s flagship conference and regularly attracts more than 1,200 computer science educators from around the world.

Jancek’s project traces its roots to Benedictine’s Natural Science Summer Research Program and an interest he had in doing something with Kinect®, a motion-sensing device developed by Microsoft for Xbox 360 and Xbox One video games. Kinect® enables users to control and interact with their console/computer using gestures and spoken commands without the need for a game controller.

But Kinect® had one drawback. It has trouble measuring distances of objects it sees in bright sunlight.

“When there is a lot of sunlight, the Kinect® cannot work properly because the sunlight blocks its vision and depth sensors,” said Jancek, who worked under the supervision of Grace Mirsky, Ph.D., assistant professor, Computer Science. “We decided to create a system that can act like sunglasses for the Kinect®.”

“Really fancy sunglasses,” Mirsky said.

Jancek designed a system that autonomously adjusts a pair of polarizing filters to facilitate the use of the Kinect®’s depth measurement capabilities in different lighting conditions without the need to manually adjust the position of the filter. The system can

perform these tasks periodically over time as light conditions change.

One filter is statically mounted onto the Kinect® to maintain a vertical polarization axis. The other filter is attached using a set of custom-designed, 3-D printed clips and spools that are rotated by an assembly

connected to a servomotor, which is controlled by an Arduino®.

Each time the current image is analyzed, the motor rotates the filter

by 90 degrees, and an image is acquired every 10 degrees during that rotation.

2 Benedictine University • April 2017

The images are then analyzed in Matlab®, a fourth-generation programming language, and the optimal image is selected by determining which image has the least number of pixels that are saturated and are therefore unusable for depth measurements. The optimal filter position is then communicated back to the Arduino®, which drives the servomotor to rotate the filter to the selected orientation.

“We put these filters inside the spools and they turn based on how much light is coming in,” Jancek said. “They will turn in a few angles, and find and choose the best one for the Kinect® to use. Then the Kinect® can actually see objects in sunlight.”

The final step was adapting the system for use with a fully autonomous robot so that it could navigate around objects whether it is indoors in fixed lighting conditions or outdoors where the lighting conditions are varied and unpredictable.

“It’s a complicated system, and Jakub wrote a lot of software to connect all of these things together to actually make it work,” said Mirsky, who teaches an Artificial Intelligence class with a robotics laboratory at Benedictine in which students program a Raspberry Pi robot to accomplish different tasks such as navigating through a maze.

“He is downplaying how awesome this is,” she added. “It’s all autonomous and dynamic, and no one has ever done this before using a Microsoft Kinect®.”

Jancek’s project was one of only 24 presented at the conference and one of just 20 presented by a college undergraduate.

“So few people can just take a problem that they have never worked with and just figure it out,” Mirsky said. “Sometimes they want to look at it in a book or find it online and they want to find someone to tell them how to do it. Jakub demonstrates the true characteristics of a researcher. He is able to just figure things out.

“I have found that students excel in research when they feel a strong sense of ownership,” Mirsky added. “In particular, by giving students the freedom to select a project that strongly interests them, they are highly motivated to see that project to completion. I view my role as one of providing guidance and direction as well as encouragement, while allowing students to learn from their mistakes in order to develop into highly driven researchers.”

The Natural Science Summer Research Program is just one of several programs offered at Benedictine that encourages and creates opportunities for hands-on learning and student discovery.

Jancek, who is majoring in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and Physics, plans to attend graduate school and study robotics.

“My goal is to be that person who makes a difference, who has done something that no one else has done,” he said. “To be able to say, ‘I actually did it,’ and now people have to reference me if they want to use my work, that’s just a really cool feeling.”

Benedictine faculty members John Snyder, an instructor in the Daniel L. Goodwin College of Business, and Ovid Wong, Ph.D., associate professor of Teacher Education Preparation, traveled to Binh Duong University in Vietnam (one of Benedictine’s partnership universities) last fall to share their expertise and insights into American business and teaching methods.

Snyder first taught at Binh Duong in 2014. In his most recent appointment, made possible through a Core Fulbright Scholarship, Snyder taught Master of Business Administration and undergraduate business courses in managerial finance and marketing as well as the Capsim business simulation, which teaches students business fundamentals.

Vietnam is steadily becoming a major economic powerhouse with one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. As such, the country is heavily investing in education as it seeks to provide more advanced training to its workforce.

“You can tell the Vietnamese education system is trying to improve delivery and results from higher education,” Snyder said. “The common refrain is too much ‘blue sky’ and not enough practical skills, which stems from past learning processes that stifle critical-thinking and actions. Businesses see prospective job applicants as too passive, not team-oriented, challenged to work independently and struggling to define and solve job-specific problems.”

However, he was able to note some parallels between students in America and Vietnam in terms of their commitment and willingness to absorb the academic workload.

To teach effectively in a foreign classroom, Snyder had to learn how to pace his lectures and limit overly complex words and sentences.

“I found that drawing lots of figures and sketches on the chalkboard helps,” Snyder said. “Visual learning is effective as it breaches the language barrier. Business concepts are universal. It’s the delivery and localization of the information that counts.”

Faculty members at Binh Duong took note of Snyder’s teaching style and asked if he could teach other professors how to transition from “teacher-centered” to more “student-centered” instruction. Realizing there was another professor at Benedictine who teaches this very subject, Snyder reached out to Wong to help lead training for 30 teachers including deans, department heads and administrators across academic disciplines.

“We Skyped back and forth a number of times and the faculty also read my book to understand my intellectual foundation and delivery strategies,” said Wong, author of “Pivotal Strategies for the Educational Leader: The Importance of Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War.’”

Wong also spent two weeks at Binh Duong leading trainings, which included an assessment of current teaching practices and interviews to determine future goals for improvement.

“This is done by running a seminar on teaching strategies and suggesting ways of doing things differently in the classroom,” Wong said. “At this time, the level of training is focused on awareness. Changing teaching skills takes a change of culture and this will take more than one round of faculty training to adjust teaching behaviors.”

As part of the training process, which may take up to three years, Wong has been asked to return to Binh Duong this summer with financial support from the U.S. Embassy, U.S. Consulate and Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vietnam.

“I am encouraging them to find an internal leader to sustain the change and institutionalize the process of teaching for excellence,” Wong said. “If they go that route and ask the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Consulate for support (through grant application), Binh Duong could become a regional training center for Vietnam.”

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Benedictine faculty teaching students, staff in Vietnam

Like many journalists of her generation, Linda Polach can pinpoint the moment when she saw working in the news business not just as a career, but as a calling.

It was the summer of 1973 and all anyone seemed to be talking about was President Richard Nixon and his ties to a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

“I had just graduated from Benedictine,” Polach recalled. “As I watched the hearings and news coming out of Washington, I felt I started to wake up to what was going on and it inspired me to go into journalism.”

Today, Polach is an award-winning journalist with more than 25 years of experience as a news producer, executive producer and director of special projects for WCVB-TV in Boston, and as an executive producer and executive editor for WGBH News, where she currently helps oversee all of the newsroom’s radio, television and digital programming. In November, she was honored with the prestigious National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Silver Circle Award, a milestone award given to professionals for their lifetime of dedication and contributions to the industry.

“To receive that award was big for me,” Polach said. “As a producer, you don’t always get the obvious kudos because you are working behind the scenes and not on TV, so it was especially nice to be acknowledged in that way.”

Polach enrolled at Benedictine as the first member of her family to go to college and during a time of change as a member of the University’s first class of female students.

“At that time, they were still trying to retrofit Ondrak Hall into an all-girls residence hall,” Polach said. “I was a resident assistant and made some great friends and was very involved. I loved it and had a great time there.”

Polach played on the basketball team and was active in student council and the theater program.

4 Benedictine University • April 2017

passion for seeking truth sparked alumna’s journalism career

linda polach, c73, english

5 Benedictine University • April 2017

“If I had to come up with one thing I learned that stays with me, it would be the values that were instilled in us as students,” Polach said.

“At that moment in life, to be thinking about the meaning of life and what I should do – to have that spiritual guidance and the undercurrent

that your job is to be a good person and good citizen – I think that has stayed with me throughout my many different machinations and evolutions.”

After graduation, Polach taught English for three years at her alma mater, the former Maria High School on the South Side of Chicago, and then moved to Boston to pursue a graduate degree in journalism with an emphasis on broadcast news at Boston University.

“I had no idea what Boston was like, but I applied to this one graduate program and was accepted and it seemed like destiny,” Polach said.

While in graduate school, she interned with WCVB (ABC’s affiliate station) and was later offered a position as an associate producer.

Throughout her career, Polach produced live coverage of such events as the Boston Marathon, the Tall Ships® races and various political debates. She has also worked on some of the biggest news stories of the present day, providing coverage of the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster (for which she received one of several Emmys), the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing.

Polach’s many career highlights include a series on education that led her to Japan and other stories that took her to the White House.

“Being a journalist is being a chronicler of the world,” Polach said. “It is really a great privilege. When you think about it, the average person doesn’t get to sit in a car with the speaker of the House or talk to the president in the Oval Office.”

Recently, Polach has taken on a more experimental endeavor as project manager of the WGBH Studio – the first TV, radio and digital studio in the world to be located entirely within a public library.

Since opening in September at the Boston Public Library, the WGBH Studio has provided a means to engage the public on a more grassroots level. One segment in particular, called “Hear at the Library,” invites visitors to the library to talk with news anchors for an average person’s perspective on various topics and issues.

“The purpose is really to listen to people,” Polach said. “I think media does a lot of talking to people, but this is an opportunity for people to come in and really talk with us.”

While the journalism industry has weathered declining readership and viewership in recent years, accurate news that holds people in power accountable is still very much in-demand, and will require young and talented reporters to innovate and overcome new obstacles to sort fact from fiction in the flood of the information age, Polach said.

“I would say now more than ever before, we need people who can dig, find the facts and report them so citizens know what they need to know about their government and what’s happening in their communities,” Polach said.

“Young people especially should be thinking about getting into this profession,” she added.

“Sure, you can work on Wall Street, but I can’t imagine anything more fulfilling if you are curious, are interested in what’s going on in your community and if you like to find out more about people. If you are sincere about finding out what the truth is, there is nothing better.”

Do you know an alumnus whose life and/or career would make a good feature in an upcoming issue of Voices? Email lhale@ben.edu.

Benedictine has chosen James E. Payne, Ph.D., as its next chief academic officer.

Payne, dean of the J. Whitney Bunting College of Business at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Ga., will succeed outgoing Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs María J. de la Cámara, Ph.D., who last year announced her retirement.

Payne brings more than 28 years of experience in higher education at a variety of institutions, and a wealth of experience in academic program development and assessment, strategic planning and budgeting, and accreditation.

At Georgia College, Payne helped lead re-accreditation efforts for the school’s business college by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and initial accreditation of the college’s computer science program by ABET, a nonprofit that accredits applied science, computing, engineering and engineering technology programs. He also helped expand the college’s fundraising efforts.

In addition to his extensive administrative experience, Payne has continued to be an active scholar, serving on several editorial boards and as a journal editor. He was a 2000 Fulbright research scholar and 2007 Fulbright senior specialist to the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, Croatia. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at Berea College, and a Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Economics at Florida State University.

He will assume the role as Benedictine’s provost and vice president for Academic Affairs in May, and University leaders believe his experience and vision will make for a seamless transition.

“Dean Payne has the leadership experience and visionary aptitude to help not only maintain our University’s high academic standards, but also to provide guidance for setting a balanced academic infrastructure that will make Benedictine a first-choice university,” said University President Michael S. Brophy, Ph.D., M.F.A.

Selected as New ProvostJames Payne

6 Benedictine University • April 2017

Benedictine University • 5700 College Rd. • Lisle, IL 60532

Benedictine University is located in Lisle, Illinois, just 25 miles west of Chicago, and has branch campuses in Springfield, Illinois, and Mesa, Arizona. Founded as a Catholic university in 1887, Benedictine enrolls nearly 9,000 students in 56 undergraduate and 20 graduate programs. Forbes magazine named Benedictine among "America's Top Colleges" for the sixth consecutive year in 2016. A 2016 PayScale Inc. report ranked BenU one of the top 10 colleges in Illinois for return on investment and in the top 20 percent nationally. Accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (hlcommission.org). For more information, contact (630) 829-6300, admissions@ben.edu or visit ben.edu.

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