Tuesday 2 June 2009

iFAST

Ever since I studied the elective course 'Distributed computing' and heard about 'Multi-Agent systems' during my college days at FAST I thought it would be fascinating to have a mobile application that would allows students to add and drop courses, see the real-time whereabouts of the on-campus activities, review their grades and course history and perform a variety of other administrative tasks that are normally accessible only over secure campus networks.

It's very intriguing to know that Standford university and others of the like have already implemented such an appication called iStandford for their students carrying iphones. How cool is that!
You can read about it here, here and here.

Also I thought, if each student or cell phone could have an RFID attached on campus, each student can track down his/her friends, class mates, T-A, Pofessor and so forth via an application on the cell phone that would show some what like a university campus map pointing to where people on our peer list can be located and reached to in the campus at a given time. Ofcourse there would be pros and cons and privacy issues to deal with. Maybe in a couple of years, such a feature will be in the making if not already. In case no one else has thought of it, which I doubt, I should patent my idea =).

4 comments:

Farhan Hafeez said...

Nice work by the Stanford folks. This app becomes too much attractive when its on iPhone :)

About the other RFID tags idea, its an old one :P

Zeeshan Sohail and Salahuddin had almost the same idea for their final year project. The only difference was that they were looking forward to do it in offices :)

Also, the main thing about their idea was that they were looking forward to do it with RFID Tags placed in office cards which will be scanned using RFID scanners placed at several places in the office.

Your idea is with Mobiles, so, I expect you are thinking about using GSM technology, right? This would be possible with it, but of course will require a separate software on cell phones too.

But, do patent it, cuz its still open :D and Zeeshan and Salahuddin did *ALMOST NOTHING* in their project :D ...

Good Luck :)

Syra said...

Thanks for sharing Farhan. I thought of these around 4 years ago..now the ideas seem oldy ofcourse..I have seen the rfid tag at offices here in islamabad..though it seems more like micro managing the employees and keeping track of who is wasting time rather than be of any help to the card bearer like in it's mobile application in university.

You are right abt the GSM technology. GSM devices are already attached to cars to monitor movement.

Working on iphone applications seems so intriguing.

Farhan Hafeez said...

Check this out ...

A credit card in your cellphone

Syra said...

Thanks for the link. Interesting to know.

in blackberry with gprs+gps combined the idea i was giving is already implemented...pretty cool!