Romanian Collaboration

Responsibilities

Something unique about CERN Project at FAMU-FSU College of Engineering was the collaboration of students from the college with students form Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania. Thus the whole team was composed of Team USA and Team Romania. Team Romania was made up of the following team members:

· Cosmin Mogos

· Ion Alexandru Morega

· Adrian Mihai

· Andronache Ionut

All of the members are fifth year students in Electrical Engineering. Accordingly to major concentration the project responsibilities were divided in the following manner:

Team USA:	Develop and demonstrate balance detection method
Team Romania:	Software Design and assistance with electric equipment

Communication

Since in person collaboration was not possible, other means of communication were necessary. Also another obstacle that had to be overcome was the 7 hours time difference between US Eastern Standard Time and Romania Time. Email, Instant Messenger and Voice over Internet proved to be the most successful ways of communication.

· Email was done through www.gmail.com that both parties opened an account with, and it was the most common and frequent method of contact between the teams. The advantage of email was that a message with files could be sent and the other party did not had to be online to receive. Email communication was the only method that did not depend on the seven hours time difference. GMAIL also offers many user friendly features like storing and sharing Documents and Pictures, 2 GB of Storage and Chatting, which were used quite numerously throughout project evolution.

· Instant Messenger (IM) feature was used through Yahoo! and GMAIL Chat. The IM communication was not used as often as the email feature. The reason for that was again the seven hour time difference, which lead to confrontations schedules. The nice feature about IM though was that the exchange in information occurred much faster and more efficient than email. Towards the end of the project, the IM communication was used more frequently because one of the Romanian teammates was able to receive IM messages on his mobile device.

· Voice over Internet was the fanciest way the communication between parties could be done, by having the luxury of a phone quality conversation overseas. However, it was still depended on the time differences between the two countries, thus making it very difficult to organize. Also the file transfer could not be possible, unless using the email at the same time. Because of the difficulty to organize was big, Voice over Internet was only used just a couple of times.