Ethical Guidelines

University of Illinois trained engineers are the best and most highly sought in the world. Our graduates are superbly trained, highly competent, and creative. This, however, is not enough. Our engineers must also be trusted to conduct themselves according to the highest ethical standards. All teams must address ethical considerations in their projects. This requirement has two parts.

First, there is a stringent Code of Ethics published by professional societies, such as IEEE and ACM. The power of these Codes of Ethics is to provide guidance to engineers in decision making and to lend the weight of the collective community of engineers to individuals taking a stand on ethical issues. Thus the Code of Ethics both limits the professional engineer and empowers the professional engineer to stand firm on fundamental ethical bedrock. All teams must read the IEEE code and ACM code and comment on any sections of the code that bear directly on the project.

Second, we expect our students to have personal standards of conduct consistent with the IEEE and ACM Codes of Ethics, but also beyond it. That is, there are areas of ethics not addressed by these Codes that the engineer may consider in taking on projects or jobs or making other professional decisions. These are personal standards and choices. In the context of the class, there are no right or wrong answers here. Our students simply need to demonstrate that they are thinking deeply about their own decisions and the consequences of those decisions. We encourage our students to consider the wider impact of their projects and address any concerns raised by potential uses of the project. Students should ask themselves, "Would I be comfortable having my name widely attached to this project? Do I want to live in a society where this product is available or widely used? Would I be proud of a career dominated by the decision making demonstrated here?" Remember that UIUC engineers have a long history of inventions that really has changed the world.

If the students feel that these Codes of Ethics does not directly bear on their project and that there are no other reasonable concerns, they should not invent issues where there are none. Students will still be expected to be familiar with the IEEE Code of Ethics and ACM Code of Ethics.

A crowd-sourcing urban air quality monitoring system with bikes

Kaiwen Hong, Zhengxin Jiang, Haofan Lu, Haoqiang Zhu

Featured Project

**Problem**

For public bike users, someone may concern about the air quality in which they are currently riding, as well as the places they are going to. However, currently there is no such an air quality monitoring system which provides air quality information in specific areas inside a city such as Haining.

**Solution Overview**

The idea is to apply air quality monitoring devices on the public bike system. The public bike system in Haining is a perfect carrier for IoT (Internet of Things) devices and urban sensing since it has a large and stable user group and all bikes are managed by official organization which means unified modification on all bikes can be done. A monitoring device integrated on the bike can provide the real-time information that users want to know and share data with other users through a cloud server. A real-time air quality map can be created for users with the contribution from all running bikes.

**Solution Components**

Subsystem 1 – on-bike air quality monitoring device. The subsystem is a stm32 microcontroller based design, integrated with air contaminant sensor, speed meter and data transmission modules. Once connected to a smartphone, the subsystem will keep transmitting real-time data to the smartphone.

Subsystem 2 – Software include a user interface and a server. The user interface can be either an app or a website on smartphone. The user interface receives sensor data from the hardware subsystem, displays the real-time statistics, uploads sensor data to server and receives the air quality map from server. The server processes data from all running bikes, creates a real-time air quality map and returns it back to users.

**Criterion for Success**

1. Success of data collection: stable real-time statistic display on user interface, stable data collection on server.

2. Air quality visualization: The air quality map correctly reflects the air quality in Haining city. For example, the concentration of air contamination should be higher in heavy traffic than in intl campus.

3. Speed control: The on-bike device or smartphone should give an alert when the monitored speed exceeds the upper limit or the user set range. This is not the core function of our design, but we add it as we think the function makes sense for safety purpose.