Wireless networking and mobile computing students demonstrate mobile apps

A third UMass Lowell Computer Science course this spring engaged students in developing mobile applications.

On May 10, more than 20 students gathered in Olsen 311 for the project demos from the course “91.650: Topics in Wireless Networking and Mobile Computing.” The course, offered by Prof. Guanling Chen, covered a variety of topics on both principles and practices of the state-of-art academic research and industry development on emerging mobile platforms and wireless technologies.

All 14 students showed their project demos. Examples included:

• Anthony Biasella presented an Android-based adventure game called "The Legend of Adlez"

• Beibei Yang demonstrated sentimental analysis of movies currently playing in nearby theaters, using data mashed from Twitter and Google services

• Chris Dietsch showed his iPhone app for guitar tablature search based on the song currently playing by the iPod

• Jesse Lucas showed his Android app for bar-hopping and pub crawl

• Mehrdad Nourai demonstrated an iOS app for QRCode-based inventory control

• Roger Dejean presented an Android-based app for car theft detection using motion detection

• Zach Kissel showed an Bluetooth proximity monitor for office and home automation

At the end of session, the audience unanimously voted Beibei Yang's movie app as their favorite demo. This web app is implemented using HTML5 so it works across multiple mobile platforms. By first locating the user's position, this app uses Google movie service to find the titles of the movies being played at the nearby theaters. The app then pulls Twitter conversations about these movies and applies sentimental analysis algorithms to show how the movie is liked or disliked by Twitter users.

The project reports and some video demos can be found at the project website.