David Elies is currently an Electronics and Computer Engineering Technology program student at Maui Community College working towards his A.S. degree.

He enjoys hiking, cooking and computer programming. David loves to travel and has traveled to 49 of the 50 United States as well as Europe and the Philippines. David grew up in Lahaina and also lived in Las Vegas for 5 years. He is an active member of Lahaina Christian Fellowship where he teaches Sunday School.

Institute when accepted: Maui Community College

Improving Image Download Speed through Compression and Decompression Project Site: Akimeka, LLC. Mentor: Rob Reed

Project Abstract: The Medical Situational Awareness in the Theater (MSAT) project brings together and presents military medical information from multiple sources in a user-friendly and coherent web-enabled structure. MSAT combines operational data with relevant medical information in order to assist military medical units and commanders in making accurate and timely assessments. To aid in visualizing the location of facilities, events, and other pertinent data, MSAT includes satellite imagery of the Earth presented on a virtual 3D globe. This globe has rotation and zoom capabilities. As the map is zoomed in, higher-resolution images are downloaded to show greater detail. These high-resolution images can be relatively large, and thus slow to download. Since timeliness of data delivery is one of the primary goals of MSAT, it was advisable to find a way to limit the delivery time of these images. The image file format was analyzed and an image conversion tool was developed to compress the images before transmission, making them smaller and faster to transmit. This appears to have resulted in an improvement in the speed of transmission. More study is needed to determine if this solution is viable in the scope of the MSAT project.