Just over a year ago, on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon, a second year engineering student walked up to me after my sensor data analytics lecture. The student hesitantly asked me whether I would like to see a video of my lecture that he had recorded using his iPad. A little nervous about how I would look in my professorial avatar, I reluctantly agreed to watch the video expecting my face to be all over it. Alas, my nervousness was misplaced. I was noticeably missing all throughout the video! In fact, the iPad had been strategically placed to record the screen on which I was projecting my code. According to the student, the video helped him and his friends to work their way through the assignments for the class while ensuring that they actually programmed the code themselves. Right there, in that video, was my Aha moment, staring me blatantly in the face.

Immediately after the conversation, I came back to my research lab and emphatically brainstormed with my grad students, the possibility of our research group creating and posting videos online. The result was www.matlabarduino.org; a website dedicated to providing technically rigorous, free of cost, real-time sensor data analytics education. The website and the companion YouTube channel feature high-definition videos that demonstrate the use of MATLAB and Arduino platforms to interface with wired/wireless embedded systems for compelling sensor based real-time applications. The unifying theme for these videos is task of procuring, analyzing, and visualizing real-world data to generate real-time insights that facilitate data-driven decision making.  

The videos have covered technologies that range from inertial sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers to ultrasonic and infrared distance sensors. Environmental sensors such as temperature and Force Sensitive Resistance (FSR) have been covered in great detail. Wireless technologies such as ZigBee (Xbee) and GSM (mobile phones) have been explicated. Other videos dive into the details of Geo-tagged (GPS) sensor data applications. Intuitive and coherent 2D and 3D visualizations of static and real-time data are presented to elucidate sensor measurement and computational concepts. Most recently, we have started producing videos that demonstrate enabling technologies such as the Raspberry Pi and Node.js for the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. 

The viewership has grown at an increasing rate since the beginning of the channel. The website has witnessed approximately 107,500+ views from over 160 countries to date. The United States accounts for almost 25% of the total viewership. Other top countries feature a healthy mix of countries from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. African nations form the lowest viewership for the YouTube channel; this is a cause of concern for us. The Chinese audience remains untapped since YouTube is not available in China at this moment. 

From a viewer engagement perspective, a key challenge faced by online education is the average view duration for a video being shorter than the total length of the video. We face the same challenge with our videos and continue to find innovative solutions to address it. 

The viewer feedback has been generally positive with most users thanking us on the YouTube channel for posting the videos. A significant number of messages request code for the videos. While all the code is displayed in the videos, as a matter of policy, these videos are meant to encourage the audience to create and further curate their own code repository. In the same vein, we encourage the viewers to write their own code. Should the viewers run into technical issues, we provide support to the extent possible. To date, the YouTube channel has witnessed 1600+ subscribers, an indication of growing viewer loyalty. 

A year later, we continue to remain true to our mission of providing our current and future generations of engineers and scientists the support structure and knowledge required to create systems that allow for effective and data-driven decision-making. Happy 1st birthday MatlabArduino.org!

A lot has been written and said about the power of technology in revolutionizing higher education. The web is playing an increasingly important role in democratizing higher education -- providing education to anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere. 

As the barriers to entry for effective education continue to fall, I am pleased to share our new endeavor, www.matlabarduino.org. I launched this website along with my graduate students Chris and Vaishali with a mission and vision to provide high definition YouTube videos that demonstrate the use of two powerful technologies -- Matlab and Arduino -- to perform fundamental engineering tasks across several fields. The unifying theme for these tasks is the idea of procuring, analyzing, and visualizing real-world data to generate real-time insights that facilitate data-driven decision making. 

The idea of creating this website and YouTube channel spawned during one of the several useful conversations that I have had with my second-year engineering students in my 800+ student class on engineering data analytics. For those who are not aware of these two technologies, here's a brief introduction:

Matlab is a software application built by the MathWorks. This technical software features one of the most comprehensive collection of software tools that can be and have been used to solve critical engineering and scientific problems. A large number of students around the world have access to Matlab through their universities and other sources.

Arduino is an open source hardware platform readily available in the market. This platform features a microcomputer chip that can be used to connect to sensors, actuators, and other devices, and create systems that can perform several automated tasks reliably and continually. Being open source, all the board designs and list of materials used to create the boards are freely available. Best of all, the entry level Arduino platforms start from $10. The one that we have selected is the Arduino UNO board. This board costs around $30.

So why combine the two? To an engineer such as myself, this is a match made in heaven. The Arduino board provides a simple and inexpensive method of electronically connecting with a plethora of devices and capture real-world data as and when it is generated. On the other hand, Matlab's raw computational prowess and plethora of sophisticated scientific software libraries allow one to analyze this real world data and convert it into information; information that is rich with actionable insights and qualitative acumen; information that can be used to answer difficult engineering and scientific questions.

The response to this website and the YouTube channel has been very encouraging. In just under 3 months since the launch, we have registered about 1500 video views from 70+ countries. These numbers are only expected to grow with time and more cutting-edge content. The average view duration is very close to the average length of our shorter videos.

As an educator, I strongly believe that as humanity becomes increasingly technological, we must provide our current and future generations of engineers and scientists the support structure and knowledge required to create systems that allow for effective and data-driven decision-making. Matlabarduino.org is a step in this direction. So the next time you have an idea, don't wait; simply 1) Plug an Arduino board to your computer 2) Start Matlab, and 3) Join the fun!