We focus on designing and implementing new mobile platforms that enable "better-together" mobile application paradigms, smoother mobile user experiences, and novel mobile applications and services.

The better-together mobile application paradigm addresses and promotes social aspects of mobile devices. Under the concept, we have prototyped the "lover's phone" and developed a novel joint-viewing video application. Work is also proceeding on key enabling technologies such as high-accuracy proximity detection, easy yet secure network setup, and device pairing, among other projects.

How to improve users' daily mobile experiences is always a priority in our research. We build new mobile computing applications such as using a mobile phone to connect, control, and coordinate all the physical surrounding and/or remote networked computing devices. We develop technologies that address, in a systematic way, the resource constraints of mobile devices by promoting the collaboration among mobile devices and by offloading the workload to the infrastructure. We also proactively promote the context-aware and social oriented mobile applications and services that exploit rich sensors on a mobile phone and the rich data services in the Cloud. Last but not the least, we research on novel ways to improve the robustness and security of modern mobile phones.

Our sensor network research mainly concentrates on the home scenarios which are undergoing rapid innovation and will be the key market focus for the coming years. Green, convenience and security are our major research targets. We adopt the deployment-driven research model and start with building a real demo home using existing technologies. From there, we identify real research problems, find and deploy solutions, and iterate the process.

• BeepBeep demo won a Best Demo Award at SenSys 2007!
• Jacky SHEN received the Engineering Excellence Regional Innovation Award of Microsoft, the highest award for engineering group employees in China, for his original contribution to the lover's phone concept.
• The article on Lover's Phone at MSRA's official blog at Sina generated more than 30,000 pageviews in three days.
• Jacky SHEN was invited to show the MobiUS demo on WinHEC 2007 and MEDC 2007. Here's one snapshot.
• MobiUS demo won the Best Demo Award at MobiSys 2007!
• MobiUS demo (a.k.a Lover's Phone) was selected to shown to public at Microsoft TechFest 2007 and received wide media coverage from major Chinese web portals including Sina, NetEase, Sohu, Xinhuanet, Science and Technology Daily, etc.

• Yunxin Liu
• Chunyi Peng
• Guobin (Jacky) Shen
• Yongqiang Xiong
• Yongguang Zhang

• Impression: Social mobile mashups

This project addresses new social application requirements on mobile phones with Internet connections. Details will be available soon.

• V-Phone: Virtual machine monitor (VMM) for mobile phones

This project leverages virtualization technology to improve the robustness and security of mobile phones.
Details and some other interesting phone related projects can be found Here.

• Throw2Share: Easy networking and sharing for phone

This project proposes simple and intuitive ways for people to pair up their mobile phones and share files while retain security. It's kind of a set of technologies designed from grandmother. Details will be available soon.

• Draw-in-the-Air: Physical environment interactions with phone

This project seeks to build applications that enable people to interact with networked devices in a surrounding physical environment. Key technologies include indoor localization and tracking, and fusion of multiple modality sensors. Details will be available soon.

• MobiUS: WE, on the Go! (a.k.a Lover's Phone)

This project propose the "better-together" mobile application paradigm that exploits, addresses and promotes social aspects of mobile devices/phones. Under the concept, we have prototyped the "Lover's Phone'' and developed a novel joint-viewing video application in which a higher (doubled) resolution video is played back on two mobile devices placed side by side.

• BeepBeep: High accuracy ranging

This project addresses the high accuracy ranging requirement between mobile devices. Using only a minimum set of sensor and actuator (i.e., speaker and microphone), up to 1 cm accuracy is achieved. Real system is built on COTS mobile phones and software is available to download.

1. Guobin Shen, Yanlin Li, and Yongguang Zhang, "MobiUS: Enable Together-Viewing Video Experience across Two Mobile Devices", ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2007. [pdf]
2. Chunyi Peng, Guobin Shen, Yongguang Zhang, Yanlin Li and Kun Tan, "BeepBeep: A High Accuracy Acoustic Ranging System using COTS Mobile Devices", ACM SenSys, 2007. [pdf]

• MobiUS demo: The scenario movie is here. More clips can be found at the MobiUS page.
• BeepBeep software download: The code is here. The scenario movie is here. Resort to the BeepBeep page for usage and FAQ.

Wireless and Networking Group | Microsoft Research Asia