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May 2005
The 2005 Lloyd Fosdick Award, intended to recognize exemplary
collaborative projects that include Computer Science undergraduates as
participants, was recently announced. This year's winning project was
Mirage - Location-Based Spatial Wiki.
Project team members were undergraduate Computer Science majors
Nels Anderson,
Gaurav Kulkarni,
Adam Bender,
Anuradha Kumar and
Isaac (Zack) Sanders.
The concept of a location-based spatial wiki was developed by Professor
Dirk Grunwald, the sponsor of the
project. While the wiki concept is fairly new to the Internet, the general
goal of a wiki is to bring the collaborative power of open source
development to website design. All content on a wiki-based website is
maintained by its users, who may or may not be subject to certain levels
of access control.
This project's goal was to extend the functionality of a wiki by
implementing a novel paradigm of web browsing based on
location-dependent, dynamically deployed content -- the content a user
sees is dependent on the location of the user interacting with the wiki.
For example, a user accessing the wiki from the UMC may see a listing
of events going on in the UMC at the current time. A user accessing the
wiki from the Engineering Center Office Tower may be provided with
floor plans showing the location of various faculty, department offices
and conference rooms. A critical aspect of Mirage is that the
users can not only view this information, but they can add to it as
well.
Not only was the project successful from a software development
standpoint, it was also very successful from a research standpoint. As
a testament to the quality of the research, the team along with their
sponsor submitted a paper to 2005 WEBIST (International Conference on
Web Information Systems and Technologies). The paper was accepted and
group members will present at the conference in Miami in May of this
year. The project also won a "Best in Group" award at the Spring 2005
Engineering Design Expo, in which more than 80 projects from throughout
the College were exhibited.
Mirage was one of eighteen projects completed in Computer Science
Senior Projects (CSCI 4308-CSCI 4318)
during the 2004-2005 academic year. The Senior Projects course was taught
by Bruce Sanders along with teaching
assistants Jerry Sun and
Gary Yee.
This annual award is named for former Department Chair
Lloyd Fosdick. Nominations for the award come
from Computer Science faculty directing group projects, with the
Undergraduate Committee
selecting the award-winning project from those nominated each year. Each
undergraduate student in the award-winning group will receive a $50 prize.
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