To pick up extra cash, junior computer science major Mike Skwar works at two stores around Burlington, and there’s one thing he and his colleagues dread. We “are more than fed up with receiving phone calls ad nauseam about whether or not Heady Topper is in stock,” he groans. So Skwar is designing a mobile app that relies on crowd-sourcing to help people unite with those wildly popular black and silver cans of beer. He’s named it Heady Dropper.
Skwar explains the concept behind his app. “People who come to Vermont are almost always given a mission by someone they know to come back with some Heady Topper,” Skwar says. Yet, because of the intense demand for this intense brew, most leave empty handed.
Here’s how the app works. When a user logs into it, they’ll see a list of stores that carry Heady Topper. And they’ll see user remarks saying whether or not cans were there in the previous hour. Red arrows facing down mean no beer while green arrows facing up means the odds are good.
Heady Dropper is not for a client but a class. Skwar, along with his teammates, is building the app for Professor Christian Skalka’s Mobile and Embedded Devices class -- which aims to give students hands-on experience in designing apps for smartphones and embedded devices.
“A lot of UVM computer science classes are really great for applying for a master’s but not for applying for jobs,” Skwar says. “This course actually gives me real experience that I can put in a portfolio and send to employers.”
Besides helping students improve their odds in the job market, Skalka also familiarizes students with the intellectual property issues around developing apps. For instance, how is each team member’s contribution acknowledged? Can the app be commercialized, and if so, how should profits be divvied up? The class, says Skalka, “is definitely an opportunity for students to incubate their ideas.”
The stakeholders
I visit Skalka’s class on a balmy Thursday in October. It’s midterm time, and student groups are presenting their progress to the class. Up at the podium is a team of students working to revamp an app that will help volunteers identify the bugs, or macroinvertebrates, present in area streams. The presence or absence of such bugs provides clues about stream health.
Skalka, whose research focuses on the intersection between computer science theory and practice, launched the course three years ago after helping several students develop apps for independent study credits. There’s a need to move computer science courses away from pure academia, Skalka says.
The setup for the course is straightforward. Stakeholders, who include students like Skwar and representatives from the larger UVM community, present ideas to the class early in the semester. Some students come in with a clear idea of the product they want to create, while others are feeling out app development, and all the issues surrounding technology commercialization, for the first time. Once stakeholder presentations wrap up, students select a project and divide into teams. Each team then selects a leader.
Skalka doesn’t advertise the course, but he’s had no problem attracting outside stakeholders via word of mouth. One such stakeholder is Patrick Clemins, also a computer science professor at UVM and a cyber specialist with Vermont EPSCoR -- a program through the National Science Foundation that funds research projects in smaller states. Vermont EPSCoR’s current focus is on regional water quality, and Clemins knew of a group in dire need of a mobile app. The volunteers tasked with counting macroinvertebrates in streams, he says, were taking binders full of papers out onto the water to identify the bugs.
So two years ago, he presented to Skalka’s class to see if they could take the information on bugs currently available on Vermont EPSCoR’s wiki page and transfer it to a mobile app. This year, he presented to the class again and asked them to upgrade that original app. Among other challenges, he says, the app contains so many images that syncing can take five minutes or more -- a time-prohibitive constraint out in the field. Scrolling is cumbersome. And the app background is an appalling neon green.
During the presentation, the macroinvertebrate team talks about the changes they’re making to the app including its new sky blue background -- a marked improvement.
Thorny IP issues
One thing the macroinvertebrate group is still sorting out, though, is ensuring that the app can be released in its new form, whether commercially or open source. Trying to give credit to multiple creators and ensure their agreement on releasing the final product can be tough for a multi-year, multi-student product.
The hope, says Skalka, is that the class projects will familiarize students with these software development issues and the agreements that need to be put into place to ensure the end goal for the app can be achieved.
As part of that effort, Skalka has invited Corine Farewell, director of UVM’s Office of Technology Commercialization, to speak to the class, along with attorneys specialized in software development and intellectual property. With this introduction to intellectual property considerations, students will have a deeper understanding of the laws that govern their work -- important information as they hit the job market or even start their own companies.
