Current MS Students/Tristan Peters

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My CS 590 page.

Tracking Locations of Friends With Cell Phone GPS

Contents

[edit] What I am planning to accomplish

[edit] Brief Project specification

I plan to build a mobile application that will keep track of the locations of friends through GPS information obtained from their cell phones. At any time, a user may open up the application to see a map/satellite image of their area with markers denoting the locations of friends who have opted to share their locations. When people download the mobile application, they will also create an account on a web site. This site will be an online social community, much like My Space et al. The user will be able to meet friends and romantic interests in much the same way they can on existing sites. People will be connected based on age, interests, music, etc, and they will maintain a list of friends. Users will also have their own personal pages where they can post messages, pictures, and links. The mobile application will seek to add an entirely new element to the online social scene: that of being able to actually meet the people you know from the online community through alerts as to their locations. Aside from the obvious feature of being alerted to the locations of those in your friends list, users could choose to also be alerted to the proximity of other yet unknown peole, based on interests, friends in common, or other information from their profiles. If a woman (a yoga instructor) is at a coffee shop for instance, she could be alerted to the proximity of men in her age group who were also interested in yoga. When such a man arrived in the coffee shop, the woman could receive an alert along with a picture of the man in question. The woman could then identify the man and either go talk to him on her own (if she liked what she saw) or she could choose instead to have an alert sent to the man letting him know that she was there, so he could initiate contact. In this way, some of the anonymity of the online dating community could be preserved while still adding the aspect of being able to meet face to face prospective romantic interests.

[edit] High level architecture

These are the important pieces of my application and their functions:

  1. the code on the phone that communicates with the server on a regular schedule about the phone's location;
  2. the server code that interacts with the cell phone code in (1);
  3. the interactive code on the phone
  4. the server code that interacts with the code in (3);
  5. the server database behind it all.

[edit] Why this is academically interesting

[edit] Intended audience

The intended audience of this project is the legions of junkies to existing social networking sites. While this group consists of people from all ages, it primarily consists of 14-35 year-olds.

[edit] Why this is MS-level work

This is MS-level work because the technology upon which it is built is very new, and developers are only beginning to harness its potential. There is only one existing application that even approaches the functionality of what I am proposing, and it is not an open source project.

[edit] Previous work

[edit] Platforms to be used and what I will add to each

I will use J2ME, Servlets, JSP, the API released by Sprint/ Nextel and Motorola for accessing location data, and probably other platforms that utilize NMEA (GPS) data once it has been retrieved. I will integrate these technologies into an application that will be unique, innovative, and ground-breaking.

[edit] Available platforms I am not using and why

I am not aware of any relevant available platforms that I am not going to use.


[edit] Anticipated challenge(s)

[edit] Challenges

I have never completed a major software application, and so I don't have experience designing such a project from start to finish. I know that if code is not structured well and proper tests not in place, large projects can become programmatic nightmares. I have never used J2ME or worked with GPS data before either, so learning the library and other intricacies of the platform will also be challenging.

Making a site comparable to one of the existing large social networking sites will be too much work for one person doing a Master's project. Though the principle will essentially be the same as myspace, my site will be simpler and offer fewer advanced features.

[edit] Anticipated approach to each challenge

I have been reading about basic code organization techniques and trying to implement them in some smaller applications. I plan to do a lot of diagramming and other work on pen and paper before I start coding. I have been reading a book on J2ME and experimenting with some small mobile applications. I will continue to do this work as I prepare for the actual coding of my application.

[edit] What I bring to this work

[edit] My relevant background and experience (CS 590)

I have a creative spirit and a strong work ethic. I have a 3.8 GPA in computer science classes and I recently started a web programming job.

[edit] What I find interesting about this work

I think this project will be truly groundbreaking. I think the impact of merging the worlds of online and real world dating could be truly staggering. I feel very passionate about this project because I see it as having incredible potential to change the way people use cell phones and social networking sites.

[edit] How this work goes beyond my experience and course work

This entire project goes beyond my experience and coursework.

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