Researchers are developing a cyber-infrastructure product that uses a Smartphone application in conjunction with a cloud-based counterpart to provide real-time information about people and places surrounding a user during the course of the day. This technology uses real-time semantic analysis and fuzzy logic to present the user with only the attributes of people and places that are of potential interest or benefit to the user. During the course of this project researchers plan to develop a framework capable of handling large volumes of short messages that can be processed in a short time and create a cloud-based infrastructure to perform real-time semantic profile matching to handle the workload created by all users registered with the network. Researchers also plan to design network architecture and protocols to facilitate the communication of potentially large amounts of data from multiple users with minimal interference in a relatively small spatial location.
People often find themselves in large groups in both professional and social settings, for example, at conferences, shopping malls, airports, and sporting events. Several people in these groups might share similar professional, social, and/or extracurricular interests and such knowledge could be beneficial to all. For instance, a researcher could find a potential collaborator, a businessperson a potential client, a student a room-mate and so on. This technology has the potential to enable people from all walks of life to establish new, meaningful relationships with others in their vicinity, thereby potentially impacting the human networking paradigm in both the social and professional context.
The I-corps grant was used to conduct extensive customer inetrview for our software product - Proximity. The funds were used to travel to two workshops held in Washington D.C during January and March 2013. The workshops comprised of intense training on customer segment identification through customer interviews. The customer discovery process has been the key piece in taking our commercialization effort forward. It has tremendously helped in shaping our product as well. Intellectual Merit: The three months of intense coaching from NSF's I-Corp program taught us how to discover our customers. For our team Proximity, it was a tremedous learning experience as we had initially gone into I-Coprs thinking that the world was our market. Having spoken to a wide range of individuals in the several market segments that we thought we could potentially launch our software App in (dating sites, conferences, trade shows, career services), we were finally able to get a somewhat clear picture as to the segment that had a clenching need for our App AND was willing to pay for it. Our biggest take away from the 3-month I-corp program was: (1) validating the need of our software by potential clients (we realized that there is indeed a market for it) (2) identifying a viable launching pad for our software Broader Impact: We narrowed down on a client segment, namely the University career services. Extensive interviews with students, career service employees and recruiters led us to believe that there was a burning need to bring to the recruiters the right recruitees at a career fair. Career service offices at Universities today are facing an existential question due to the dominance of web-based services like LinkedIn. Students are losing interest in doing their homework on the myriad companies that throng a career fair and recruiters are faced with recruitees who visit their booth absolutely uninformed. This is leading the Career Servive office to see a less turnout at the career fairs both of recruiters and recruitees. With our software App "Proximity" we intend to show the students just the right recruiters for them at any given career fair. This saves time for the students, holds their interest and takes away the overhead of having to do their "homework" on all the recruiters present at the career fair. The recruiters on the other hand benefit by having a targeted, interested and the "right" match of recruitees visiting their booth. This saves them time as well by automatically filtering out candidates who are not a good fits to that recruiter. Overall, the career service will see a boost in attendance both from the recruiters and the recruitees at a fair, thereby justifying their existence on campus.
