The main design theme is Location-Aware Applications and Mobile Computing. Students will be asked to apply the basic principles learned in class to design societal-scale applications and build a proof-of-concept prototype. The project will require students to explore the following principles of mobile computing:

• Accessibility: The user interface should be simple and intuitive to allow for quick, on-the-spot information access.
• Location-awareness: Information should always be relevant to the user's current location.
• Mobility: The device should be efficient in both space and weight, freeing the users from physical burdens.
• Security: The device should be secure enough for users to store personal data and the system should respect user privacy.

You can submit your project electronically (more info later).

• 4/6-4/20: Form teams, brainstorm on ideas, and prepare proposals
  How you go about this depends on your situation. If you already have a clear idea of your project, you can start writing the proposal (follow guidlines below), post it, and recruit other students from the class to join your team. If you have a less clear idea, you may want to meet with other students and brainstorm on a project idea.

• 4/20-4/27: Discuss project ideas in lab. Make adjustments.
  

• 4/27: Project proposal due (10%)

• 4/27-5/18: Work on design and development/evaluation plan

• 5/18-6/6: Implement your ideas. Get from paper to demoable prototypes

• 5/25: Progress report due (10%)

• 6/7-6/8: Presentation/demo (10%)

• 6/10: Project report due (20%)
  Your report should be a technical description of your system, and should follow the guidelines below.

• Project title and names of team members with email addresses. Include one primary contact for the team.
• Overview of the project explaining what it is and what problem it seeks to address.
• Motivations and challenges: why is this problem important and difficult? Do existing systems or services do something similar, and if so, how is yours different/better? Your "survey of the competition" should include both relevant research projects (industry or academic) and relevant commercial services.
• Main technical ideas/challenges. How are you going to solve the problems you've raised and motivated in the previous paragraph? Here's where you can present your new idea/solution and explain why it's new or better/needed.
• Your plan of attack with milestones and dates, and
• Any resources you might need (so that we can take care of this early on in the quarter).

• Summarize the existing solutions, show understanding of the problem and technical challenges
• Discuss the strengths and the weaknesses of previous solutions
• Suggests/speculate viable future directions or better solutions

• Abstract:
  A short summary of your report. If the reader remembers only 2 things about your work, what should they be?

• Introduction/Motivation:
  State the problem and goal of your work. Provide a motivation, i.e., explain why this problem is important and why it has not been solved yet? Why and how would someone use your system? Give a specific scenario. State your assumptions, like "Our wireless chat system will be widely useful because we expect peer-to-peer applications will constitute 80% of the wireless traffic within X years."

• Related/Previous Work:
  Survey what are prior solutions have been proposed, why are they not sufficient? What are their relative strengths & weaknesses? How does your system improve on these attempts?

• Design and Implementation:
  Clearly state (or suggest) your approach to solve the problem, i.e., what are your contributions? any new solutions/designs you are proposing? How are they different from previous work? Expand on the scenario from the motivation section. Explain any interesting design tradeoffs.

• Evaluation methodology and research results::
  Clearly develop a plan to evaluate your proposed solution. How do you show that your solution is better? Discuss what you have found out through analysis/experiments. Present any measurement/simulation data your have collected. Describe any proof-of-concept prototype or implementations you have built. Can you show that your proposed solution work?

• Bibliography:
  List of references: .

• Appendix:
  If necessary, submit source codes or prototyped systems.