On behalf of the Mobile Future Forward team, Intel – the contest sponsors, and the esteem panel of Judges from the mobile industry, I would like to thank all the students who participated in our inaugural “Student Paper Contest.” Despite the summer recess and only one month of preparation time, we got an overwhelmingly positive response from students in 9 different countries across Asia, Europe, and North America.

We very much appreciate the time and energy the students put in producing some exceptional papers that are indicative of their potential in the mobile space in the coming days.

We went through a rigorous selection process and our elite jury panel helped us pick and rank the top 6 papers. The contest judges were:

1. Pankaj Kedia, Head of Mobile Ecosystems, Intel

2. Subba Rao, CEO, Tata DoCoMo

3. Len Barlik, VP, Sprint Nextel

4. Jeff Giard, Director, Clearwire

5. Paul Palmieri, CEO, Millennial Media

6. Matt Oommen, CTO, Sprint Nextel

7. Paul Struthers, Head of Regional Marketing, Amdocs

The final ranking of the papers was as follows:

1. UWB Based on Multi-Band MC-CDMA and Magnetic Near-Field – Lun Huang, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, US

2. Ubiquitous Peer Proximity Awareness in Mobile Environments – Smruti Parichha, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, US

3. Ubiquitous Augmented Reality – Anna Maria Ksiezopolska, Institute of System Level Integration – iSLI, University of Edinburgh, UK

4. Mobile Communications & Accessibility for Blind Users – M Kazi M. Yakoob, Chan Naseeb, and Hafiz Qasim, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

5. Mobile Future – Free CPU Everywhere – Ren C. Luo and CJ Chi, Intelligent Robot and Automation Lab, EE Dept, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

6. Serving the Poor Farmers by Mobile Agricultural Information: Quality of Service Assessment to Empower Rural Bangladesh – Mohammed Upal, Graduate School of Management, International University of Japan, Japan

Lun Huang and Smruti Parichha are being invited to meet with the senior executives in the mobile industry and attend the Mobile Future Forward conference. Rest of the authors in the top 6 will receive a book on mobile computing.

Abstracts of the winning papers are:

UWB Based on Multi-Band MC-CDMA and Magnetic Near-Field – Lun Huang, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, US

Since the FCC opened up the spectrum for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) operation in the 3.1 to 10.6 GHz range, several standards have been proposed to realize moderate and high rate short-range communication systems. Under the WiMedia and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) umbrella ^[1][2], industry incorporated UWB as the technology to achieve high data rates up to 480Mbps for certain applications, such as wireless USB v2.0 and Laptop to HDTV audio/video extenders. In this paper, a novel UWB based on Affine Orthogonal Transform MC-CDMA and Magnetic near-field is introduced. The proposed new scheme is capable of improving the spectrum and power efficiency while provide good wireless link quality.

Ubiquitous Peer Proximity Awareness in Mobile Environments – Smruti Parichha, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, US

This paper proposes the idea of enabling all WiFi capable consumer devices with the knowledge of the locations of peer devices in their network neighborhood. We will use the term “peer-proximity awareness” to describe the ability to discover locations of peers and update this knowledge with changes in the network neighborhood. GPS functionality enables a device to locate its own coordinates in outdoor environments. Peer-proximity awareness is meant to provide knowledge of the location of peer devices with respect to itself in indoor environments, where mobile wireless devices are extensively used, but GPS capability is of little help. The accuracy in peer-proximity awareness is intended to be a few meters, or even sub-meter level, depending on the application. We will focus on extremely interesting applications that can leverage peer proximity awareness and show that it has great potential in the future of the mobile market.

Congrats to the winners and everyone who contributed to the process.

Thanks to all the students and their academic institutions for participating. I am sure our paths will cross again.

Best wishes for their successful academic and professional careers.