These projects use Project Hawaii services and the Windows Phone platform. The students created these projects as part of their class curriculum and explored cloud-enabled mobile computing.

ReceiptManager provides you the ability to consolidate and view the digital receipts generated by your various mobile payment applications in one single location. With ReceiptManager, you can easily review your mobile expenditure history, as well as have the ability to track the geographic trail of your mobile monetary transactions via Bing Maps.

We are constantly bogged with mundane routines at certain locations. For e.g: 1) Sending SMS to someone when we reach home 2) Setting ringtone profile to silent in movie theaters/workplace/school 3) Launching certain apps at certain locations (for e.g. bus arrival app at bus stop). Since there is a correlation between the location we are in and the lists of actions we want our phone to do, we believe that building a Location aware action triggering like IntelligentMe will change the way people use their smart phone.

Data Silos are a threat to the openness of the web and hampers the potential benefits of the free flow of information (often referred to as Linked Data or the Semantic Web). The modern smartphone is an example of a Data Silo, but there are legitimate privacy concerns with allowing personal data from a smartphone device to be freely accessible. Existing solutions for making personal data on a smartphone more widely available do not currently meet the needs of a Linked Data architecture. In this paper we describe how to securely expose personal Linked Data from your smartphone device to authorized 3rd parties using the OAuth protocol. A proof of concept architecture OAuth based architecture tackles the 3 primary data silo challenges of Duplicated Data, Ad-hoc Integration, and Data Migration. The architecture includes a OAuth 2.0 server component that is connected to a mobile device via a cross-platform mobile application utilizing Phone Gap technology. We evaluate this architecture and prove it to be effective. We show that highly valuable personal information that is locked within a smartphone can be shared in a secure way on the Semantic Web.

We developed an information sharing service with respect to location. In this system, a user provides information to the system, also it provides metadata about the same information. This information will be shared with users having same preferences as metadata, location until some threshold time limit. We used terms tagging, location-tweets, and threshold time limit for metadata, shared data and TTL respectively.

A location based music sharing application built for the windows mobile platform with an element of a social application. Music Bomb is a LBS (location based service) Windows Phone 7 app built as part of Microsoft’s Project Hawaii. It is a music sharing application along with social networking capabilities. Users can share their favorite music with fellow users nearby. These users can make new friends with the people from the surroundings With the social network feature, user can also make new friends who are inclined to the same style of music, even meet in real life and talk more.

TRANSLATR is a utility for on-the-go translations. Visual, audio, and text inputs are used for various methods of translation. Project Hawaii’s optical character recognition and speech-to-text services are used for visual and audio inputs, whereas the Bing Translator API is used for textual translations.

In our solution to this problem, We are targeting vehicle drivers. We deliver notification about what will driver face soon next on roads (about potholes, bumps, congestion, road exits, accidents, U-turns, etc..). Those notifications are precious for drivers to take their precautions before ahead facing those situations.

Drivers always face situations in which they drive on roads that they are not familiar with. Driving on unfamiliar roads makes the driver a good candidate of accidents especially in night trips. Many accidents happen on specific and known spots on the map over and over again due to the same reasons as in some areas people are driving so fast, not paying much attention to the road signs or the road nature. If you know ahead about these road issues, you’d drive safer and smoother than ever.

In recent years the Restaurant Industry has begun catching on to the new wave of technology and social media outlets available everywhere. A few groups, such as OpenTable and GrubHub.com, are trying to capitalize on this new wave by providing a means to make reservations from your phone or by providing an interface to order online. However, the in-restaurant experience has been entirely static for years and years, even though there are some key weak points that could be improved with a little more technology. Our mobile and web application, GOUR, is a way to drastically improve the ins and outs of the restaurant experience. With GOUR, you can search for, make reservations for, and see all the reviews for the restaurant of your choice. Once you have made your choice, using GOUR, you can pre-order your meal, days in advance, so that it is ready once you and your party arrive. Then you can amend your order, call for service, and even pay, all using GOUR. Our platform makes it easy for the restaurant to schedule reservations, see which tables have which customers and which orders, and track which parties need assistance (for more water, or ranch dressing). With GOUR, going out to eat is a smooth and painless experience where all of the resources you need are in the palm of your hand!

Classelect is a mobile app that targets to facilitate course selection out of a university curriculum and is based on three principles: Requirements (of the curriculum), Reviews & Ratings (of classes, professors etc. by students), and Recommendations (for classes you could//should take). Let’s face it, those generic course descriptions on college websites are just not enough. You don’t get to know enough about the material, nature, usefulness, the professors or just about anything about the class. If you’re lucky, all you learn is about the topics covered. These descriptions become even more important when you have multiple classes, or potentially, multiple career paths to choose from. With Class Select we aim to empower students, of any sort of education institution, to learn more about these classes they are about to take from students who have “been there, done that.” Not only can students learn about what other students think about various classes & professors, but they can also share their experiences with their peers. The app comes with some handy features which are motivated by the principles of web 2.0 and collective intelligence. Granted, there exists a fragmented market of such tools on the web, but such an idea, or app, to our knowledge does not exist on mobile platform yet. And since the future is going to be “mobile,” there exists the need for such a tool for students, who are one of the most technologically active groups nowadays.

Eventeè is an event sharing mobile application. Close integration with Facebook has been implemented, for user authentication as well as events publishing. Bing maps and directions are used for the events. Users can invite other users to specific events and also receive event notifications and reminders. In the cloud the applications uses Windows Azure cloud services, specifically WCF data services, Open Data protocol and Binary Large Object (Blob) storage. Concerning future work, the implementation of an event suggestion algorithm is under consideration.

Verto is a mobile app that promotes non-monetary trading. Individuals can use the application to publish items that are willing to trade in the exchange of other items. In terms of implementation, speech to text integration is supported for most application features and an intuitive user interface has been designed for Windows mobile phones. The interaction with the Windows Azure cloud services is based on the client/server model and user authentication supports the use of Facebook accounts. On the cloud the WCF service is used to utilize the SQL Azure database.

Convo is a chat mobile app with a social networking essence. Its main features include: One-to-one and group chat transfer, which has been implemented using the Hawaii relay service, local caching of chats and preservation of an exclusive chat context for each conversation. Special attention was given to the user interface, while also the application functionality has been enhanced, with features such as the Locator, to offer a better alternative to existing chat applications on Windows Phone 7.

myscience

MYSCIENCE is a free mobile app that enables individuals with smart phones to contribute to a variety of science research projects by gathering useful information using the sensors on their phones. The data is then made available in aggregate, on the cloud, to scientists. Naran Bayanbat, Lu Li, Forrest Lin, Mike Ortiz, Vignan PattamattaStanford University Visit project website

BlindHelper

Blind Helper is developed to assist people who are blind or visually impaired to identify their locations and contact with other people using smart mobile phones. Mohamed Abd El Aziz, Karim HabakEgypt-Japan University of Science and Technology Visit project website

Classroom7

Classroom7 is a cloud-enabled mobile application for the purpose of enhancing the learning process by adding more interaction and collaboration between students. Classroom7 is implemented using Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform. Moustafa Alzantot, Mohamed HatabaEgypt-Japan University of Science and Technology Visit project website

PictureLock Security Manager

Traditional character passwords are difficult to remember and vulnerable to attacks from unauthorized users. We have created a method of password authentication using multiple representations of categorized pictures instead of a string. This method of authentication, named PictureLock, is incorporated into an application, named Security Organizer, that stores information for online accounts. PictureLock provides countermeasures to known access control threats. David Chuha, Sarah Honacki, David Kronk, Marc Mustric, Peter TefftOhio State University Project presentation

Project report

Information Leaking Feasibility

This project aims to explore the feasibility of information leaking on the Windows Phone 7 platform. The project stores a user-entered message on a Windows Phone 7 and collects the device ID and user’s geolocation, which is then emailed to a remote recipient. Students discovered that, thanks to Microsoft’s security architecture, information leaking is difficult to achieve on the platform without attracting user attention (and suspicion). Desteban Escobar, Greg Landrum, Darwin ThomasOhio State University Project presentation

Project report

Anywhere, Anytime, Configurable Real-time Monitoring of 802.11 Networks

Network administrators need a simple, low-cost solution that allows them to monitor their wireless networks in real-time at any time, from anywhere. Furthermore, network administrators have varying needs as to what metrics to gather from their network, and when to use each metric. In this work, we develop a proof-of-concept system that addresses these points. Our system consists of a Windows Phone 7 application which displays real-time information via polling a wireless network sniffer application for results on arbitrary metrics. We show that, upon further optimization, our solution is viable for use by network administrators in practice. Daniel Vucci, Jesper PedersenUniversity of California Santa Barbara Download paper

QUEST7: A Real Life Search Agent

Human eyes have a limited range during each eye fixation. As a result, searching specific text in a document or an image is time consuming. In this paper, we design QUEST7, a real life search agent combining the advantage of mobile devices and cloud computing. Utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service provided by MSR Project Hawaii, we extract texts from images captured on a mobile device. Keywords are then highlighted for human use. Experiments show that QUEST7 is significantly faster and more accurate than human eyes for dense texts. Extensive measurements are carried out to identify sources of delays in the process. With 3G access, network transfer latency tends to dominate. In contrast, OCR on the cloud side contributes to most of the delay with Wi-Fi access. Presented at Mobisense 2011, June 12, 2011, San Francisco, CA, USA. Eshwar Rohit Pedamallu, Hien Nguyen, Sushil Joshi, Rong ZhengUniversity of Houston Download paper

Alpha Marauders

This app is functionally a multiplayer game which is much like Worms, a turn based game where you need to wipe out another team by shooting projectiles at them. The basis of this game is two people are placed in an “arena” where they have to destroy the other team (consisting of two characters which are controlled by a single person). They then take turns moving their characters around and at the end of their turn they fire a projectile. They take turns at this process until the one’s team is completely destroyed. At this point, the game starts up with a main menu and you are prompted to join a game. After joining the game, the player needs to type in a game name which needs to match the player with whom you want to play against. The players are then put into a match against each other. As long as one has Wi-Fi activated and connected, one can play the game; otherwise one is not able to play the game. The reasoning behind developing this app is that small gimmick games are very popular, such as Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, and Fruit Ninja. This game is meant to entertain a person while they have a few minutes to waste. Shaobo Gu, Joshua WisniewskiUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Visit project website

Mapster

Our project this semester is in collaboration with researchers at the Nation Center for Supercomputing Applications. It is essentially a system to enable personalized localized situational awareness by integrating heterogeneous sensor information. One might view it as Foursquare except that it is for emergencies. The basic premise is as follows: If you see an emergency before you or if you know of one happening nearby, you can quickly tweet about it and through the built in twitter plug in and it gets registered as an official tweet in your account. That information is then taken and overlayed onto Bing Maps; which any user with our app can view and see the exact location(via pushpins) that the incident occurred at and the detailed tweet associated with it. The user also has the option of viewing different layers on the map, in the event that they are looking for a specific type of event. Another important functionality is a slider that allows the user to view the change of the spatiotemporal animation on a map interface for heterogeneous sensor streams including OGC Web Mapping Services and citizen sensing twitter feeds. Each position of the slider corresponds to a time range (e.g. last 30 minutes, last 24 hours) and this allows the user to see all tweets that were posted within that time range as well as the weather radar information. We believe that with this as a basic premise, we have a prototype that could potentially be a very successful app, that people would use in the event of an emergency and would therefore get help warn others about the exact location and nature of the emergency. Sahil Handa, Adarsh Hasija, and Pratch PiyawongwisalUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Visit project website

Traveltant

One of the biggest problems people face when travelling is a personalized planner. This Windows phone application combines data from Facebook, Bing, and Yelp to provide personalized planning and recommendation to users while travelling. Features of the application can be found on its weburl including, History aware plans and Budget Aware plans. Sultan AlfarhoodUniversity of Arkansas Visit project website

Parking Manager

Park Manager helps drivers to find nearest parking spots for their vehicles at nearest available parking areas. Also Park manager manages parking areas that are participating in the system. Sameh Abo SamraEgypt-Japan University of Science and Technology Visit project website

Home Automation using Project Hawaii and HomeOS

CSE 481M worked on a set of home automation projects using the Project Hawaii Platform and the Microsoft Research HomeOS. Home Networking Capstone, University of Washington, CSE 481M Course website

SMS Encryption

This project encrypts SMS messages sent from one person to another using a four-digit symmetric key (PIN). The sender enters the message and the PIN; the message is XORed with the PIN. Any eavesdropper only sees meaningless gibberish. Patrick Mulac, Jason Carrier, Jacqueline Telljohann, David Reing, Daniel SpagnuoloOhio State University Project presentation

Project report

Class projects at University of Massachusetts Lowell (91.564, Data Communications II)

UML Parking Finder by Peng Xia and Shan Lu, for finding parking spaces at UMass Lowell.

ZurianSwap by Steve Bilozur, Swapnil Gewande and Ian White for sign translation using smartphones.

iBridge: Augmenting Reality with Barcode by Ke Huang and Liuying Peng, to scan product barcodes with smartphone and obtain relevant information (e.g., stores nearby, compare price, nutrition analysis, etc).

UML Shuttle Tracker by Jason Chan, I-Hsuan Lin and Xiawei Liu, a user friendly smartphone application to look up the shuttle bus location in real time.

SleepSafe by Bhanu Kaushik, a smartphone based approach for sleepwalking detection.

Language Translator by Darshan Darbari and Rachit Mathur, language translator on smartphones for storing translated text.

UML App by Kavya Kona, Prathiba Dyavegowda and Sunil Kumar Balaganchi Thammaiah, All-you-want to know information about UMass Lowell (shuttle services, dining services, on-campus residence, athletic centers, libraries, emergence notifications, etc)

UML 4-Ride by Malav Parikh, Purva Patil, Puneet Agrawal and Pragya Singhal, providing UML students with ride service at ease with smart phones.

RSS Reader by Naiem Sleiman and Naji Dagher, RSS Reader for keeping up with news and information on smartphones.

Read university blog

Adaptive Accuracy-aware Localization for Smart Phones

Location-based smart phone applications like social networks, traffic information, health services, food services, entertainment, etc., are becoming increasingly popular, especially that GPS functionality is becoming a standard in new phones. However, GPS is a power hungry service, and using it as the only location service will quickly drain the phone’s battery especially if users need continuous updates from location-based applications. Moreover, GPS accuracy degrades in urban areas where tall buildings are present, and where the user needs accuracy the most. We propose and implement an energy-aware and accuracy-aware system that utilizes other common functionalities available in a smart phone, specifically: Bluetooth, WiFi, and accelerometer, to provide location information service that could be used by location-based applications. In Bluetooth, a smart phone device requiring to update its location information can scan nearby devices, and obtain the locations of those devices. Due to the relatively short range of Bluetooth, the device can safely copy the acquired location to be its own, and assign a 10m uncertainty on it. When using WiFi, by creating a network with nearby anchor nodes, the position of the device can be determined on triangulation basis. The accelerometer can predict how and where the device is moving, and using this data, the next position of the device could be estimated. Bluetooth, WiFi, and accelerometers require less power than GPS, but they provide varying accuracy depending on a user’s location. For example, WiFi would be more accurate than GPS in urban areas due to the high density of access points, and other people owning mobile devices. An investigation of the power consumption and accuracy of each of the four mentioned technologies will be made. An algorithm will be implemented to dynamically select the proper technology for the location service based on the input of the required accuracy, the detection of the current battery level, and the user’s setting for the battery quota provided for location-based applications. A Bayesian estimation framework will be used to model the investigated accuracy, and the available power, which can then be contrasted with the input requirement. Salim Mohamed, Reza HajisheykhiMichigan State University View poster

Illinois Phone

We propose to overhaul the current authentication system used on UIUC’s campus and automate and integrate other tasks such as room scheduling with our system. Our architecture proposes an innovative multi-step authentication approach to this problem so as to get around single point of failure. Given the proliferation of GPS enabled smart phones, each user in our system can be identified by their personal smart phones. The GPS within cell phones can authenticate that the given user is indeed within the building. Authenticating whether the user is indeed by the resource or a room to which access is being demanded however is non-trivial. We use QR codes as the second layer of authentication in our architecture for this purpose. The user can use the camera on his mobile phone and take a picture of the QR code and thus authenticate his presence right by the resource. This QR code is decoded and the string is sent to the cloud which then authenticates the user and could then unlock the resource for the user. Amey Chaugule, Joe Fernandez, Abhishek PradhanUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Visit project website

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