Developing tomorrow’s defense

Smart guy, Adam Hollock; smart enough to be allowed to skip calculus classes in his freshman year at Drexel University, smart enough to get into a Department of Homeland Security research program this summer, and smart enough to recognize things without looking at them …or touching them, or hearing them.

Well, the Crestwood High School grad doesn’t do the recognizing himself, exactly; he’s too smart for that.

He programs computers to do it. In a classic case of the bureaucratic penchant to create acronyms no matter how torturous, it’s called “HoLiSTiC,” for “Heterogeneous Lightweight Sensornets for Trusted Visual Computing.”

“My specific group is working on digital signal processing for form,” Hollock, 19, said in a phone interview from Texas A&M University, where he is spending his summer in a program sponsored by the Department of Defense. “It’s recognition of both video and audio, and encryption.”

A computer maven since as far back as he can remember, Hollock is modest about his success in getting into the program, placing credit on “a really nice instructor at Drexel” who recommended him to the research post. The reality is that he was one of 10 students selected from a pool of about 1,200 applicants nationwide. And he nabbed the opportunity after his college freshman year, when the program – officially called “Research Experience for Undergraduates” -- typically takes juniors.

Selection into the rarified company means 10 weeks in sunny Texas with room and board and a $4,000 stipend. Being a frugal guy, Hollock said he expects to come home with a surplus in his pocket. The experience, of course, is priceless.

“It’s very interesting work,” he said, “The other day I built an equalizer, for playing music. I’ll proceed to hide signals in the music.”

“I put in my own kind of messages and hide them at such a low frequency that if I amplify it right I hear them,” he said.

It would be a particularly surreptitious way for, say, terrorists to communicate over the airways, and this kind of work would detect it.

“That’s part of what I’m working on. Another part is recognition algorithms, which is basically a camera looking around, making sure it can recognize what it is looking at based on an algorithm.”

So, for example, the camera focuses on a bus, looking at different light wavelengths that, somehow, prove it is, indeed, a bus.

It’s not what Hollock had in mind when he first decided to study computers and electrical engineering.

“When I came down here I wasn’t very interested in the idea of signals,” he said, “But now that I’m actually working with it, it’s very interesting. I went in (to work) on a weekend. I don’t have to, but I wanted to go in just to play with the equalizers, and to build more stuff.”

The son of Charles and Kathleen Hollock of Mountain Top, Adam said two things about Texas came as a bit of a surprise: weather and politics.

“I came from Northeast Pennsylvania when it was still pretty cold. It’s really warm down here,” he said. “I’m getting used to the heat, though. When I come home I think I’m going to freeze.”

And while “I felt like I was a conservative” back home, “down here I feel like I’m the most liberal person around.”

Getting into the research program, of course, means he gave up his summer vacation, but Hollock expects that to be the norm. “The way Drexel works, I won’t have any summer vacation,” he said, spending the time instead on internships. And he’s planning to just stay in school until he gets his doctorate.

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