Mobility and Location Awareness

Location-aware mobile devices are everywhere. Cellphones have GPS built in, laptops find their location from nearby wireless access points, buses publish their location, and tracking devices are cheaply available for just about everything. How can we manage this information efficiently and securely on a large scale, provide useful services and notifications, and still protect privacy? This what Locomatix was founded to explore.

Locomatix was founded in Ann Arbor in 2007 by Jignesh Patel and Karthik Ramasamy, and is staffed by a number of UM graduates. We work on server software to manage location information on a large scale, and on mobile clients to send this information and receive alerts and other services.

We will talk about the challenges of developing a large-scale location management infrastructure and mobile clients for a variety of architectures, including iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, and a Web browser. We will talk about our solutions for privacy management, and our vision for the future of mobile location awareness. We will demonstrate our system with an iPhone client, and take questions.
Aaron Elkiss develops the Locomatix iPhone client. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan.

Scott Gifford develops the Locomatix server. He is a University of Michigan graduate, and worked at the University running the Whereabouts location awareness project.