Cellular Crimefighter

A cell phone application set to debut this fall could help keep criminals off the campus while taking digital social lives well beyond the limits of the average Facebook account.

MyeVyu, which was developed by computer science professor Ashok Agrawala and his team of graduate students, can pinpoint a user's position on the campus within about 10 feet by using data from the 3,300 Wi-Fi stations scattered across the campus. With the push of a button, users can send that information - by way of live video, audio and text - to University Police in seconds.

In an interview, Christian Almazan, one of a team of graduate students working on the project, demonstrated a working version of MyeVyu. When he pushed a button on his phone, his face appeared on a laptop screen along with the date, time and his exact location - room 4149 in the A.V. Williams Building.

"Imagine 10 of these on a police dispatcher's desk," said Almazan, whose doctoral dissertation was the basis for the project.

Developers, who were inspired by a speech university President Dan Mote gave on reducing crime, said campus safety is MyeVyu's primary purpose. But they also hope that after the technology becomes entrenched in university society, it will one day become what Agrawala called "the next generation of social networking."

One attraction is that users can send information about their exact location to friends quickly and easily. They can also receive up-to-the-minute information from the university about everything from the real-time location of shuttle buses to the location of vending machines in their immediate area to where they parked their cars, Agrawala explained.

The system can track users' positions and schedules then calculate the best meeting place and time for them, Almazan said. The system can also create "virtual scavenger hunts," in which users mark positions on the campus that others attempt to find.

"There's any number of social networking applications we can do; we just haven't really fleshed them out yet," Almazan said.

Right now, MyeVyu only works with the Nokia N810, but developers expect to have working versions for many other phones - starting with the iPhone - by this fall.

It's too early to tell if students will be able to get the application for free, Agrawala said, but he hopes they do.

Police have greeted the prototype with high hopes. Police Chief Kenneth Krouse called MyeVu "an amazing piece of equipment."

"If a lot of people carried that equipment, then the knowledge that people had that might deter crime," Krouse said. He added that such technology could also help identify and convict criminals.

"Not too many criminals would like to be on the top actors list of YouTube," Agrawala said.

Agrawala and his team will be demonstrating MyeVyu on Maryland Day, April 26. They expect to make the application available to all students this fall. The team consulted the Office of Information Technology and police throughout the development process.

With more wireless access points, Krouse said MyeVyu could eventually be usable all over College Park or in other areas.

"This kind of technology is limited only by one's imagination," Agrawala said.

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