Ask ICT university students to come up with something relevant for today’s lifestyle and they might produce an internet-based car pooling system and location-based advertising for mobile devices.
These two ideas won the 2010 edition of the Malta Internet Foundation Prize, which recognises the best research conducted by ICT students at the University of Malta, which also hosts the foundation.
Matthew Sammut came up with a project called “Location Based Mobile Advertising” that exploits the global positioning system (GPS) function found in today’s mobile devices to deliver targeted advertising through SMS.
“This area is relatively new around the world especially in Malta. Few applications have been built using location base services since the field is still being researched and experimented. Having said that, more and more smart phones are being equipped with GPSs and so I took the opportunity to develop something using these new technologies,” Mr Sammut told i-Tech.
The system works something like this: a person walking next to a shop in Valletta receives an SMS alert on his/her mobile phone stating that if they show the message just received to the shop assistant on the day they will benefit from a discount on particular purchases.
“With this system businesses are not wasting money by sending mass alerts to people that might be far away, abroad or in bed! All the SMSs delivered are to people actually close to the business and more prone to generate a sale. The benefits to the client are the same, basically they are not bombarded with useless SMSs but with location based alerts that can be attractive and useful to them,” explained Mr Sammut.
As with all advertising, and especially on such a personal device as a mobile phone, there are privacy issues that have to be kept in mind.
“This was a primary concern from day one of my research,” reassured Mr Sammut. “In order to tackle this issue I made sure to design the application in a way to let the user decide what to receive, let the user decide the quantity of ads to receive on a daily basis and also offer the user the chance to opt out at any time from the system.”
Matthew Montebello, the student’s tutor, explained why this project is a winner.
“This project had the right balance of academic challenge and application development that brought together the cutting-edge technologies present in smartphones with the commercial need of such applications. The ability of this student to unite the real needs of the industry with the technologies available and the theoretical knowledge acquired during his studies at the Faculty of ICT made the project stand out and address a specific niche that is commercially lucrative and technologically captivating. Apart from winning a Malta Internet Foundation award, this work was also accepted for publication at the 2010 WWW/Internet International conference held in Timisoara, Romania.”
A demo of this project is accessible at www.malta-locate.me
The other winning project focused on a solution that facilitated car pooling.
Simon Theuma, Andrew Said, and Julian Zammit worked on “PoolMe = the Green Sustainable Carpooling System”. Though the idea is not original, such a system has not yet been successfully implemented in Malta on a national scale.
The students recognised that the high number of cars jamming our dense road network is unsustainable and wanted to reduce the number of cars on the road.
“We based our project on the presumption that if we can ‘fit’ at least one more person who drives in a car, then on paper we have half the cars on the road,” explained Simon Theuma.
The system has three entry points – a website, a mobile interface and a tablet PC interface. In the prototype built in the project, the mobile client is primarily used by drivers, whereas the tablet PC is stationed at a strategic location and can be accessed by passengers. The mobile interface can track the whereabouts of the driver and broadcast the location and direction to the system. A passenger on a tablet client can select a destination to anywhere on the island.
The students developed matchmaking algorithms which pair up the two, ensuring that as much as possible the driver will not go out of his/her way to offer a lift to a passenger. Drivers and passengers alike can use the website to plan trips ahead of time instead of going for ad-hoc ridesharing. In the driver’s case, these trips are posted as reminders on the application.
While the system works, its success depends on the take-up by drivers and passengers.
“There are a number of challenges that must be overcome, mainly social ones,” explained Mr Theuma. “There’s the issue of trust, although we’ve put in certain mechanisms that give as much information as possible to the other party without infringing on privacy rights and is strictly on a need-to-know basis. There’s also the issue of mobile internet availability, since users would have to pay for such access. “Having said that, a lot of people have expressed interest in our project, and this is a very good sign. Were this project to be sponsored and implemented, we firmly believe that it would evolve to be a significant contribution in cutting down on car use. It’s just a matter of getting everyone aboard the same boat.”
John Abela, the tutor for this project, is confident the idea as developed by the students has potential.
“The idea of a web-enabled car-pooling system was novel and exciting. It combined the use of the latest web technologies with environmental awareness and responsibility. The students put their hearts and souls in the project and the end result shows this. They produced a very polished artefact that has enormous potential.”