From home automation to optical translators, 10 university students awarded cash prizes

LONDON, United Kingdom - 21 October 2008 - Symbian Limited, developer and licensor of Symbian OS™, the market-leading open operating system for mobile phones, today announced the results of its first Student Essay Contest, and on the wave of its success called for entrants to its 2009 contest.

David Wood, EVP Research, Symbian said "During summer and early autumn, students across the world submitted papers to Symbian’s first student essay contest. The theme for the contest was ‘the next wave of smartphone innovation’. Numerous thought provoking and intelligent entries were received which made the judging process difficult. We are pleased to announce the ten winners and reward them each with a well deserved £1000 prize."

The prize winners are as follows (listed in alphabetical order of surname):

    * Benoît Delville, Ecole Centrale de Lille, France: The hardware tech of smartphones. Benoît’s essay examines four factors which threaten to prevent the fuller adoption of smartphones.
    * Alexander Erifiu, University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria: New interaction concepts in mobile games. Alexander’s essay describes a project the author carried out with some colleagues to increase the suitability of smartphones for certain types of games.
    * Andreas Jakl, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria: Optical translator: word spotting and tracking on smartphones. Andreas’s essay considers some developments that will enable advanced new applications that take advantage of the high quality camera technology that is currently widely available on smartphones.
    * Florian Lettner, University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria: Smartphones in home automation. Florian’s essay investigates the possible use of smartphones in a number of practical situations, including several in the home.
    * Pankaj Nathani, Bhavnagar University, Gujarat, India: Improved development and delivery methodologies. Pankaj’s essay focuses on the fact that developers can face many challenges in developing and delivering novel or evolved services on smartphones.
    * Milen Nikolov, The College at Brockport, State University of New York, Brockport, USA: Exploiting social and mobile ad hoc networking to achieve ubiquitous connectivity. Milen’s essay examines a particular example of what is known as a ‘Mobile Ad hoc Network’ (MANET) involving smartphones.
    * Aleksandra Reiss, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia: The next waves of smartphone innovation. Aleksandra’s essay is targeted at discovering what new functionality can be added to smartphones in the near future.
    * Sudeep Sundaram, University of Bristol, UK: Situation aware maintenance mate. Sudeep’s essay reviews possible uses of a smartphone in coordination with a head mounted display, where for example, a user could see the positioning of electrical wires in a wall and carry out diagnostics.
    * Iftekhar Ul Karim, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh: Opportunities with smartphone technologies for the base of the pyramid. Iftekhar’s essay challenges readers to consider novel uses of smartphones for users in the so-called ‘base of the pyramid’ – the four billion poorest people on the planet.
    * Alejandro Vicente-Grabovetsky, University of Cambridge, UK: The smartphone of the future: A powerhouse or a mere terminal? Alejandro’s essay explores the potential for the smartphone to act as a ‘social computer’ as opposed to merely copying features from the ‘personal computer’.

David Wood continued, "Symbian’s goals for this contest were threefold: to encourage university students to carry out research on topics of interest to Symbian, its wider community and the mobile industry; to find out where the most interesting research was being carried out; and to stimulate interest in Symbian’s emerging University Research Relations programme. Following the success of the contest we’ve decided to run it again and are now calling for papers to be submitted."

The deadline for submission for the next Symbian Student Essay Contest is 31st January 2009. The overall theme for this contest is "Architectures to enable breakthroughs for mobile converged devices."

Students are encouraged to address one or more of the following topics in their essays:

   1. Software development that takes best advantage of multiple processor cores
   2. Allocation of responsibilities between managed code and native code
   3. Delivering maximum power from the hardware and the networks to applications
   4. Security and privacy concerns in mobile device architectures
   5. Taming the complexity of mobile system architecture: the role of open source
   6. Enabling devices, applications and services that appeal to huge new groups of users
   7. The role of system architecture in significantly improving consumer experience.

Winners of the 2009 contest will receive £1,000 with runners up earning special commendations.

The rules of the 2009 contest, as well as summaries and extracts from 2008’s prize-winning essays, are available at www.symbian.com/universities.