September 08, 2011
Three St. John’s University students from the College of
Professional Studies, Division of Computer Science, Math and
Science participated in the Humanitarian Free and Open Source
Software (HFOSS) project this past summer.
This project was funded by a $14,000 grant from the
HFOSS initiative, a consortium of computer science
departments at several colleges and universities dedicated to
involving students and faculty in developing software projects for
humanitarian organizations.
St. John’s students Geri Stoykova, Jesse Aboh and
Vincent Gaviria, spent eight weeks developing a
Smartphone application called First Responder. The
application tracks firefighters responding to an emergency call,
and will be available for free to volunteer firefighter companies
who typically do not have the budget for commercial tracking
software. The students were mentored by John
Reilly of Google Crisis Response, and Bonnie
MacKellar, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Computer Science,
Mathematics and Science.
Last June, the students participated in the Random Hacks of
Kindness (RHoK) event at Trinity
College in Hartford, one of 15 global sites where
volunteer software developers gathered to help prototype technology
solutions to humanitarian problems. RHoK is a unique collaboration
between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, and is
dedicated to using technology to make the world a better place by
building a volunteer community of innovation.
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The trio of students spent the weekend prototyping applications for
first responders, including a Smartphone application that detects
if a firefighter has been motionless for a set amount of time
issuing an alert email to the commander. Another application allows
a tablet device mounted on a fire truck to automatically detect
when a firefighter has entered the truck. The second app, which was
developed by Vincent Gaviria and Jesse Aboh along with Bo Xiong
from Connecticut College, was a joint first prize winner at RHoK
Hartford.
St. John’s students made two trips to Google in Manhattan to
discuss their work. At the end of the project, students travelled
to Wesleyan University where they presented their work in front of
an audience consisting of student teams from the HFOSS chapter
universities and colleges, as well as faculty members from these
schools and representatives from various non-profit
organizations.
For further information on HFOSS, please visit: http://hfoss.org/
For further information on Random Hacks of
Kindness, please visit: http://www.rhok.org/
For further information on the Division of
Computer Science please contact Associate Professor Bonnie K.
MacKellar at: mackellb@stjohns.edu or call
(718) 990-7425 or visit:
www.stjohns.edu/academics/undergraduate/professionalstudies/departments/csms