01 September 2011

Taking Mobile Applications Into the Cloud

Campus Technology (08/31/11) Mary Grush

Microsoft Research Mobile Computer Research Center director Victor Bahl, speaking at the recent Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2011, discussed Project Hawaii, a research initiative that provides students at more than 20 universities with tools to create cloud-enabled mobile applications. The goal of Project Hawaii is to pair mobile devices with cloud technology to take advantage of its ubiquity, according to Bahl. The project creates a framework that enables student developers to use the skills they are learning in computer science. As part of Project Hawaii, the universities create mobile application development courses and Microsoft Research builds the infrastructure, offers support and cloud services, and provides devices to the programs. Project Hawaii offers many cloud services that developers can choose from as they write new mobile applications, Bahl says. Since Project Hawaii's launch in the spring of 2010, Stanford University students have used it to develop a citizen science project application that collects sensory data from mobile phones in the field. The data is sent to a central location in the cloud and turned into a visualization of what is happening in real time.