Hi, my name is Abigail and I'm a Project Manager on C2S2...and Hi, I'm Chidera and I'm one of the team leads on C2S2. At the inception of this project team, we set out to create a custom silicon chip with an interdisciplinary focus in mind. We wanted to combine engineering and something else but we didn't know what that was going to be just yet. So we set out on this exploratory exercise across the Cornell Campus to figure out who we could team up with to embark on this epic adventure with us. We went from department to department seeking our partner; ranging from faculty in Veterinary medicine and human ecology to digital agriculture and beyond. From this campaign, we learned about super cool projects that individuals at Cornell were working on such as novel research of microwave heating of foods, employment of robots to aid in mitigating downy mildew disease, and utilization of AI to determine nitrogen quantity in crop fields. Although all the projects we heard about were fantastic and groundbreaking, we could not identify an insertion point for C2S2 in any of the work that was being done. This was mainly because of feasibility issues as many professors or research groups were hoping we could achieve an industry level IoT chip or had projects that wouldn't be able to utilize an IoT solution.

At the end of the fall semester, the Project Management subteam had a design review to reflect on the progress made so far during the campus partner search. Although we contacted nearly 50 professors and research groups, we were still receiving a low response yield. From our design review, we also discussed that the possible reasons for our low response were due to many professors having limited availability and perceiving a campus partnership to be an additional significant time commitment to their already busy schedules. We quickly worked to shift our approach while searching for a campus partner. First, we made adjustments to our template email to reflect that a partnership was what the partner themselves wanted to make of the experience. We made sure to include more information about the team, specifically how we are tailoring towards a low-power IoT chip to help reduce the number of infeasible projects. We also continued to broaden our search by reaching out to graduate students and PhD students that were part of research groups that were utilizing IoT devices or could possibly utilize IoT solutions.

At the start of the spring semester, we continued to implement changes by establishing milestones for the Campus Partner search such as deadlines for when we hoped to secure a possible partner and how many potential partners we wanted to contact and meet with each week. Shifting our approach yielded better results, as we not only were able to hear back from more possible partners, but we were also able to find more feasible projects for the team! We again were able to learn about some unique and interesting projects here on campus such as using virtual reality to reduce pollution from fast fashion and using IoT devices to help control water quality in fields. The digital agriculture team's research was really interesting and in the scope of C2S2 and currently working on using IoT devices to improve the denitrification process, however, we wanted to have a bigger challenge when creating our own design of a chip.

Figure 1
Scrub Jay

Returning back to Professor Adams' - one of our faculty advisors - idea of possibly partnering with researchers at the Lab of Ornithology, we continued to reach out to professors as well as PhD students currently working at the lab. From our search process, we finally met with Christopher Tarango, a current PhD candidate at the Lab of Ornithology researching the relationship between Scrub Jay behavior and vocalizations. His current research requires him to tag Scrub Jays to reduce human interaction, which may affect bird behavior, as he collects recordings of their vocalizations. These current tags only collect audio recordings as well as data on a bird's relative acceleration. They also have a poor battery life which only allows for about 24 hours of recording. As a result, birds frequently must be lured, which is a long process and adds more variance in data as the luring process may change a bird's behavior and cause them to interact with other wildlife that they may not typically interact with.

We finally reached the end of our quest for a campus partner as we realized that the challenges facing current tags utilized by Tarango and the Lab of Ornithology seemed like the perfect fit for C2S2 to design a chip for. The poor battery life of current tags aligns well with the team's hope to center our design toward a low-power IoT chip. Sensors on the current tag, as well as other tags used in research, such as the accelerometer and audio recorder already align with the “Sensor Shield” design created by the Systems Architecture team from the fall semester. Finally, creating a custom chip for a tag also poses additional design limitations that would provide more of a challenge for the team such as designing a chip that can obey the 5% rule, which requires a tag to be less than 5% of the bird's weight. So we set out on this exploratory exercise across the Cornell Campus to figure out who we could team up with to embark on this epic adventure with us...and we found the Lab of Ornithology. In the end, we decided to combine Engineering and the Scrub Jay!