MyMetro App

“Innovations in Autonomy: Miami Students Creating Smart Applications for Smart Phones and More” was the theme of this year’s Miami University Interdisciplinary Technology Development Challenge (MUITDC). The 2011 winning team rose to that challenge with their “my Metro” app—and received the $5,000 award for their efforts.

School of Engineering and Applied Science computer science majors Paul Sunderhaus’11, Adam Koeninger’11 and Ryan Kelly, along with electrical engineering major David Alson’11, brought their expertise to the senior capstone project. A marketing major, math major, graphic design major and a sociology/psychology major completed the interdisciplinary team.

Sunderhaus, who served as team leader for the group, explains that the my Metro app is designed to use GPS signals onboard Miami buses to track their location and estimated arrival at stops in real time. He notes that students, faculty, and staff could greatly benefit from having this information available on their phones. Due to weather and the rush of class changes, he continues, the buses often cannot remain on schedule—leaving waiting passengers unsure of when they might reach their destination.

The team based their app on the One Bus Away open-source platform developed and implemented in the Seattle Puget Sound area. Their challenge was to scale the application to fit Miami’s needs.

“We got some ‘real world’ experience doing this,” says Kelly, who worked on the technical aspects of both the software and server. “It was very much like a business situation where you go to a company and have to work with code that you haven’t written yourself.”

Sunderhaus adds that my Metro was developed for a desktop application and mobile-web application, as well as for an IOS platform. The team consulted with numerous groups during the project, including a team at Indiana University that developed a bus-tracking app. They also gained information from Oxford’s bus service, First Transit, along with Miami’s parking and transportation department.

Computer science and software engineering associate professor Gerald Gannod served as the team’s co-advisor along with electrical and computer engineering professor Yu Tong (Jade) Morton.

“These students have really been the true leaders of this project,” says Gannod, noting that the initial impetus for the project originated from a student who approached faculty members with the idea. “Throughout the project,” Gannod adds, “They took the initiative to make sure all the work was being done, including all of the coordination across all of the different groups.”

Now looking forward to its fifth year as a successful interdisciplinary program at Miami University, MUITDC has thrown down the gauntlet for the 2010-2011 challenge: “Realizing Tomorrow’s Technologies: Focus on Ohio’s Third Frontier.” The team submission deadline is September 16, 2010 by 5:00 p.m.

Watch the video to learn more about my Metro—and see the app in action:

The mission of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering is to contribute to society through excellence in education, scholarship, and service. We provide for our students a rigorous education in computer science and software engineering and endeavor to instill in them the attitudes, values, and vision that will prepare them for a lifetime of continued learning and leadership in their chosen careers. We engage in scholarship of discovery, application, and integration.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) offers an ABET accredited major in computer science, the first undergraduate software engineering major in the State of Ohio, and thesis-based master’s degrees in computer science and computational science and engineering.  The department currently has strengths in the areas of software engineering, bioinformatics, augmented and virtual reality, information security, mobile computing, and semantic web.  Three faculty members are NSF CAREER Award winners and faculty have received grants from NSF, ARO, ONR, NIH, OSD, and NASA as well as other external support including grants from Procter & Gamble, and the PhRMA Foundation.  CSE has 16 full-time faculty, in the neighborhood of 275 undergraduate majors, and 20 graduate students.   The department’s laboratories and classrooms are part of the new engineering and computing complex, with many courses limited to an enrollment of 28 students.  Housed within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), CSE is directly involved in two major SEAS initiatives: the Leadership Institute and the Miami University Mobile Learning Center.  Faculty enjoy strong collaborative relationships with PhD granting programs at Miami, including Psychology, Biology, and English, as well as affiliation with the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies (AIMS).  Research facilities within the university include the Redhawk Cluster, a High Performance Computing center, the Huge Immersive Virtual reality Environment (HIVE) – the largest virtual reality environment in the world, and the visualization resources of the AIMS Smale Visualization Center.  Miami University also supports the Center for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching and University Assessment, an organization supporting training in, and research into, higher education.