Stephen P. Tarzia
Ford Engineering Design Center, room 2-221
2133 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Ford Engineering Design Center, room 2-221
2133 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Northwestern University, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Evanston, IL
Enrolled in PhD program, Sep. 2006 to present. Advised by Prof. Peter Dinda.
MS in Computer Engineering and Systems division: GPA 4.0, Oct. 2008. Advised by Prof. Robert P. Dick
Columbia University, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. New York, NY
BS in Computer Engineering, Magna Cum Laude: cumulative GPA 3.80, Feb. 2005
S. P. Tarzia. Acoustic sensing of location and user presence on mobile computers. Doctoral Dissertation and Technical Report NWU-EECS-11-09, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University. August 2011.
S. P. Tarzia, P. A. Dinda, R. P. Dick, G. Memik. Indoor Localization Without Infrastructure Using the Acoustic Background Spectrum. In Proc. 9th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’11). June 2011. pages 155-168.
S. P. Tarzia, P. A. Dinda, R. P. Dick, G. Memik. Demo: Indoor Localization Without Infrastructure Using the Acoustic Background Spectrum. In Proc. 9th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’11). June 2011. pages 385-386. [demo]
S. P. Tarzia, P. A. Dinda, R. P. Dick, G. Memik. Display Power Management Policies in Practice. In Proc. 7th Intl. Conf. on Autonomic Computing and Communications (ICAC’10). June 2010. pages 51-60. [slides]
S. P. Tarzia, R. P. Dick, P. A. Dinda, G. Memik. Sonar-based Measurement of User Presence and Attention. In Proc. 11th Intl. Conf. on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp’09). September 2009. pages 89-92. [slides]
S. P. Tarzia, R. P. Dick, P. A. Dinda, G. Memik. A Demonstation of Sonar-based Presence Detection. In Suppl. Proc. 11th Intl. Conf. on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp’09). September 2009. pages 158-159.
S. P. Tarzia, R. P. Dick, P. A. Dinda, G. Memik. Sonar-Based Measurement of User Attention. Poster presentation at USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX’09). June 2009. [poster]
S. P. Tarzia, R. P. Dick, P. A. Dinda, G. Memik. Prospects for Sonar-based Measurement of User Attentiveness. Technical Report NWU-EECS-09-06, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University. April 2009.
S. P. Tarzia, H. Zhou, R. P. Dick. Fast Voltage Assignment by Convex-cost Flow. Technical Report NWU-EECS-09-07, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University. April 2009.
paper acceptance rates:
| MobiSys 2011: | 18% | ICAC 2010: | 26% | UbiComp 2009: | 12% |
Dr. John N. Nicholson Fellowship (full tuition and stipend); Northwestern University, Fall 2007- Spring 2011.
Walter P. Murphy Fellowship (full tuition and stipend); Northwestern University, Fall 2006 - Winter 2007.
Magna Cum Laude (top 15% of graduating class); Columbia University, 2005.
Indoor Localization of Smartphones using Acoustics
For my thesis work I am developed a set of techniques for determining the location of smartphones while indoors (where GPS is unavailable). Specifically, I extract a sound "fingerprint" for the location using the smartphone's microphone. [report] [software]
Sonar-based power management system for laptop computers
We detect presence of computer users using sound rather than relying on mouse and keyboard input. [report] [software]
Supervised by Professors Peter Dinda, Robert Dick and Gokhan Memik
Flow-based voltage assignment for High-level Synthesis
We developed an efficient algorithm to assign discrete voltages to functional units during High-Level Synthesis. [report]
Supervised by Professors Robert Dick and Hai Zhou
Formal Methods for Unrealiable Systems
Modeled a simple consensus protocol using the TLA+ language and TLC model-checker [report]. Wrote a probabilistic model checking module for TLC [report].
Supervised by Professors Robert Dick and Hai Zhou
Software Development, Overhead camera 2D object tracking
Enhanced an open-source real-time video processing and vision server (Mezzanine) for use with robotic soccer. Integrated the vision server with existing agent-control software. [report] [software]
Supervised by Professor Elizabeth Sklar
Software Engineering Consultant
Built and tested a complete VoIP service-provider platform using Asterisk, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
Solutions Engineer
Evaluated and reported on various IP telephony (VoIP) products. Provided installation and maintenance support for 3Com and Cisco VoIP products. General Linux system administration.
Teaching assistant for EECS311: Data Structures (Spring 2007). Supervised by Professor Chris Riesbeck
Teaching assistant for EECS101: An Introduction to Computer Science for Everyone (Spring 2010). Supervised by Professor Peter Dinda
Guest science teacher.
Taught Earth Science labs through Northwestern’s Meaningful Science Consortium. Supervised by Leslie Lepeska
Lab a dab a do intern
Developed prototype educational software applications in Macromedia Director and MS Visual Studio. Supervised by Stephen H. Lewis
Robotics teacher
Taught high school students computer programming using Lego Mindstorms robotics. Provided classroom assistance for teachers using robotics in Elementary and Middle school classrooms. Assisted in training NYC teachers in the effective classroom use of robotics in a summer workshop. Supervised by Professor Elizabeth Sklar
Technical Paper Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 2010-2011
Technical Paper Reviewer, IEEE Computer Magazine, 2010
Volunteer, Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop 2010
Session Summarizer, USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2009, (published in login; magazine, Oct. 2009)
Technical Paper Reviewer, Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) 2008
Technical Paper Reviewer, Embedded Systems Week Conference (ESWeek) 2007
32-bit Radix-4 Kogge-Stone adder in 0.25 micron technology
Schematic capture and layout were done with Mentor Graphics Falcon Framework CAD tools.
This work was done in collaboration with two other students and was supervised by Ryan Cortez and Professor Yehia Ismail.
Vehicle Data Acquisition and Telemetry System
Worked with a team of electrical engineering students to design and prototype an onboard data acquisition system for a formula-style racecar. The sampled data were wirelessly transmitted to a pit computer for display. [report]
Supervised by Professor Stephen A. Edwards