Microsoft’s Research Summit Features University of Arkansas Student Projects

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The Traveltant mobile application

At Microsoft’s 12th annual Research Faculty Summit on July 18-20, the company spotlighted student projects, including two from the University of Arkansas. These projects were created with support from Microsoft's Project Hawaii, which provides hardware and software that students can use to create their own cloud-enabled mobile applications. The applications created by Arkansas students are also featured on Microsoft Research’s website.

Traveltant, designed by Sultan Alfarhood, is an app that helps travelers stay organized. According to its description, “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.”

Another app featured by Microsoft is Order2Go, designed by Wiwat Leebhaisomboon and Jordon Yust. This app links users to nearby restaurants, allowing them to browse menus and place to-go orders directly from their phones. The phone will even notify the user when the order is ready.

The students created these applications as part of a seminar called "Hot Topics in Mobile and Pervasive Computing," taught by Nilanjan Banerjee, assistant professor of computer science and computer engineering.

In this seminar, students use resources provided by Project Hawaii to create cloud-based apps for smart phones. The cloud refers to services that run on an external server, rather than in the device itself, and Banerjee explained that this technology is vital for making complicated mobile applications.

“Mobile phones are resource constrained, both in terms of energy and computational capability,” he explained. “Hence, if you want to run a sophisticated application, like image processing or text to speech, it is impossible to run it locally on the phone. That’s where cloud services come in. The computation happens at the remote server and the phone acts as a client.”

Banerjee was pleased with the work of all the students in his class, who showed off their apps in a poster/demo session at the end of the spring semester. “The students in my class were just great,” said Banerjee. “They have converted interesting and sophisticated ideas into reality within a couple of months and demonstrated them in front of over a hundred people. Microsoft's support in terms of mobile phones and cloud services has been a great boon for my class – it has spiked interest of students in mobile and pervasive computing".