The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is excited to welcome Professor Phil Lundrigan to the program. Hired in November, Professor Lundrigan will be teaching classes and conducting research surrounding Internet of Things, or IoT, which is basically any device or object that connects to the internet. His new course, Introduction to Wireless Networking, will teach graduate students about wireless networking.
“Intro to wireless networking will be the first class I teach. It will introduce students to wireless networking topics,” Professor Lundrigan explained. “In this department there isn’t much focus on networking; there’s signal processing that Electrical Engineers do, but this new class will be about packets, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and things like that.”
Before Professor Lundrigan accepted his position at BYU, he worked on research at the University of Utah. His work, which he continues to participate in, mainly deals with air quality sensors.
“My big thing is that we deployed air quality sensors, since the air quality is so bad here in Utah. We currently have 10 homes with 3 air quality sensors—one in the living room, one in the bedroom, because that’s where you spend the most time, and one outside to compare the outside air quality with indoor air quality.”
Lundrigan explained that the sensor is designed to reduce indoor pollution. Many times, Utah residents think about the pollution outside, but rarely do they think about the effects of the pollution in their home. Ideally, this sensor would lessen the effects of pollution in their living rooms and bedrooms.
“We’re working with clinicians up at the University of Utah hospitals to see how it affects people, mostly children with asthma. So we’re testing to see how air quality in their home and outside their home affects things like going to the doctors, how many times they have to use their inhaler, etc.”
Since the research is still being conducted, Lundrigan looks forward to seeing the results. An app that tracks asthma scores has already shown some promising results.
An interesting component of this research project is its availability for future research.
Lundrigan explained, “We wanted to design this so any researcher could use this. We’re open-sourcing it, so it will all be on GitHub. It will be really easy for people to design their own experiments. We’re building an infrastructure for how to get the data reliably up into the internet and to look at the data in a meaningful way.”
In addition to the sensors in homes, Lundrigan and his team have also placed sensors in the Hill Air Force Base to see if the hangars follow protocol surrounding pollution and noise infiltration regulations.
Lundrigan is excited about this work. He feels like this project will help better the world.
“This air quality research really got me excited about what we can do to help benefit society. I feel like a lot of computer stuff can be just about how to make computers better—how can we make something faster, but with IoT and with the research I’m interested in, it’s about how we can help other people,” he said. “IoT can touch a lot of different fields—health, transportation, and more. I feel like being here at BYU, I can actually make a difference in the world.”
He hopes to make a difference at BYU, too. Since he is the first professor to teach about networking, he wants to expand the topic for undergrads.
“I would love to get more networking education here, so building a whole networking lab. Everything is connected to the network, in some way. Being able to understand the networking basics has been important,” he said. “I hope eventually in a couple years, I can get this down to an undergrad-level class and make this part of the core curriculum of networking. I feel like that’s something our undergraduates need to be successful, and give them some networking experience.”
Some of the experiences might include a project he is working on currently. It deals with Wi-Fi hardware.
“We’re trying to extend the range of Wi-Fi using just Wi-Fi hardware. We’re having this issue with these sensors where we put them in people’s homes and they are constantly disconnecting from Wi-Fi because they’re on the edge of the range.”
Lundrigan and his team are working on ways to communicate with the Wi-Fi hardware through codes to understand those disconnections. A Wi-Fi sensor would transmit codes and the user would be able to decode the data, explaining why there is a malfunction.
Through working with Wi-Fi hardware, air quality sensors, and years of studying, Lundrigan realized that his ultimate goal is to figure out how to make IoT a reality.
He explained, “There’s always talk of IoT—let’s connect everything to the internet. That’s great, but how do we make that a real thing, because Wi-Fi will not work if everything is connected to it? What kind of changes to wireless protocols do we need? What kind of changes to security do we need? What kind of changes to privacy? My overall goal is to figure out how you make the Internet of Things dream real.”
This goal will be the basis of his research while he is at BYU.
Professor Lundrigan was hired in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in November 2018. He completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering through Brigham Young University and has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah.