Eric Becker may be a local guy, but he has a worldly outlook.

Eric graduated from Lamar High School in Arlington and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering here at UT Arlington in 1995. After graduating, he began working for the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, which operated a group of hospitals in Texas, including St. Paul’s in Dallas.

“I maintained a system of terminals throughout St. Paul’s,” Eric said. “It was pretty primitive compared to what’s common today, but it kept me busy. Too busy, in fact, because I was on call 24 hours a day.” One night, Eric received a request to replenish the paper in a printer in Austin. He decided it was time to return to school and get a master’s degree.

It was a good decision, because he became involved in a variety of activities that greatly enhanced his engineering and computing abilities. One was the Software Engineering Center for Telecommunications, under the direction of Drs. Pei Xia and David Kung. They were developing three software tools – Objection Relation, Block Diagram and Object State Diagram – that could be used to reverse engineer C++ and Java code into various types of diagrams so that debugging algorithms and change searches could be tested. The Block Diagram tool mainly analyzed computer code and generated flow charts that would allow the user to see the decisions made through the path of execution.

Eric recalled an interesting exchange he had relating to the tools. “In the spring of 2000, I was able to attend a convention in Chicago with Dr. Xia. A gentleman came over to our display and asked about our products. He’d been told we were doing networks instead of debugging tools. We started our usual description of how each tool generated the diagram. Halfway through our description of the Block Diagram tool, he stepped back, obviously upset.”

“He then said that had he had the tool available earlier, he could have prevented a multi-million dollar disaster. He was a NASA engineer who had worked on the Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed into Mars along with its three additional probes because programmers mixed metric and imperial measurements. He said he could have used the flow chart to work back and find the control statement that misaligned the measurements before the spacecraft was launched.”

Eric earned his master’s degree in 2000. He remained here to work with Dr. Roger Walker in the Transportation Instrumentation Laboratory, creating systems measuring everything from the consistency of concrete and asphalt during paving to the relative smoothness of a roadway. “You would be surprised at the amount of impact an 18-wheeler has on even the slightest change in road surface elevation,” said Eric.

During the 2006-2007 academic year, Eric was a lecturer conducting an introductory course on programming for electrical engineering, industrial engineering and science majors.

Since 2007, Eric started on his doctorate and has worked in the Heracleia Human Centered Computing Laboratory, trying to achieve the most productive ways computers can interact with humans. “We’re developing assistive living environments for the elderly and mentally infirm,” he said. “We’ve set up a pseudo apartment in our lab that’s outfitted with an assortment of sensors.”

“Say, for instance, that we want to be sure that someone is following a medical prescription regimen. Electronic tags on pill bottles would tell the system that it weighs ‘x’ grams less than the last time it was moved. Other sensors placed in chairs or sofas or beds would identify a person’s location. Of course, for privacy considerations, we can’t use cameras for this.”

“Our goal is to create a system that ‘knows’ a person’s ordinary daily activities, detect deviations from them and take some action to correct the situation. This will allow more people to remain in their homes instead of a nursing home or similar institution.”

Eric plans to receive his Ph.D. in the spring of 2010. After that? “I’ve received several suggestions from various sources, everything from teaching to a postdoc or going overseas. I’ll just have to keep my eyes and ears open for the best opportunity.”