In a medium-sized office, located on the fourth floor of the BU Photonics Building or the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, there is a worn-out, crowded shelf, holding a pile of old Cingular Wireless and Nokia cell phones, incompatible palm pilots, and miniature, outdated Toshiba computers with screens too small to even have a Skype call or watch a YouTube video in 720 HD. At first glance some people may think the shelf acts as a storage unit. However, the property owner Jeffrey Carruthers refers to it as his “museum.”
(From left: Professor Jeffrey Carruthers, Computer and Electrical Engineering)
As a BU Computer Engineering Associate Professor for 17 years, Mr. Carruthers has seen dramatic changes in technology, specifically software and hardware engineering. Seated at his office desk, fashioning sleek, silver spectacles, the wide-eyed administrator reflects on the development of trends, which is mobile phones and apps. “That is the hot thing right now,” he said. As technology advances, students’ learning desires deepen. The engineering curriculum is set at a controlled pace, but does not run so parallel with the latest technological trends.
“We try not to chase after them [technological trends],” Carruthers affirmed. “Because if you look at what’s sort of popular in the development community, things will sort of be bright lights, flash for a while, and then they will become less popular.”
As a result, the educational advisor and his fellow colleagues teach their students the skills they will need to know in this generation, but “what is really more important is teaching them how to think like an engineer so that they can learn whatever technologies come up.”
But there is an opportunity open for students, who want to look beyond the set curriculum and study their own explorative interests.
BU Senior and Computer Engineering B.S. Candidate, Kanav Dhir presented his advisor Professor Carruthers with an entrepreneurial project idea, which involved an in-depth focus on software engineering. With an ambitious approach, Dhir introduced an untouched software program to the Department and a course plan that he designed, otherwise called a Directed Study. Since the acceptance of his proposal as a four-credit course, Dhir and two other fellow classmates—Alex Wong (ENG’15) and Deven Dayal (ENG’15)—have developed a web application, known as Bzzy, which has been launched and has gained attention around and about the University.
Directed Studies are growing amongst the student body at BU and offer not only extra credit, but also an eye-opening experience for young entrepreneurs.
The three creators, Kanav, Alex, and Deven, developed the idea of Bzzy amongst themselves and friends, assessing over the notion of not knowing how “busy” places are, such as the gym and dining halls, at given times. The group wanted to build a program that would be useful and app-worthy for students at BU.
(From left: Kanav Dhir (ENG’15) and Alex Wong (ENG’15))
The application involves an interactive aspect and is available via phone. Being the team’s design mentor and primary advisor, Professor Carruthers noted that “an app is a small enough software project that you can have a team of two or three people, actually doing something significant and useful.”
The source of data relies on the users. As of right now, “users can vote on what places they’re at and they can vote whether it’s busy, moderate, or quiet,” Alex Wong explained. Active places include the BU Fitness and Recreation Center (FitRec), George Sherman Union (GSU), three main dining halls, and popular libraries and lounges. The means to build a product with the aforementioned features starts with the program.
(A list of campus hotspots displayed on the web app, showing individual “busyness” levels.)
The three seniors conceived the thought for Bzzy in Spring 2014 of their junior year. In the course of the Directed Study, the group discovered and learned the basics of the two-year-old software program Ruby on Rails, which allowed them and still allows them to code and build the application and perfect any problems. The group really put their ideas to the test and initiated the actual developing process at the first annual Make BU Hackathon in April.
(Kanav Dhir, Alex Wong, and Deven Dayal (ENG’15) at Make BU Hackathon.)
“We pretty much developed the first prototype in 24 hours,” Kanav Dhir interjected, who takes the role as lead speaker amongst the group. “It [BU Hackathon] kind of lined up perfectly, where we could use the new programming framework for web apps to build this design.”
Upon winning the award for Best Mobile/Web App, the creators launched their product a few weeks ago to see how students outside of the Hackathon community would respond to Bzzy. Popularity was not a primary concern for the group. “It was more about getting a small subset of students using it [the product] to give us feedback to make the app much better,” Dhir said. As young entrepreneurs and educated engineers, the three seniors analyzed the “soft-launch” as a way to know what was working right and what needed altering.
“Talking to friends and random people, they loved the idea of getting information of how busy a place is,” Dhir said. “The consumption factor was really attractive. But, the whole other side of it, students providing the data, wasn’t what people were excited about.”
As ambitious and hardworking students, who want to provide quality products to BU people, the team has plans to redesign the app in order to make “busyness” notifications accessible at hand and take the responsibility off students of having to update the app.
“We’ll just be gathering in how many people are in a place and make the assumptions on our end,” Dhir admitted as being a teaser.
Boston University offers mobile service applications, including the BU Mobile App, which includes a University directory, an Emergency and BU Today icon, and the BU Bus map. The University has the ability to provide such services as Bzzy, but being a large organization has its limits.
“It is something the University could have done, but big organizations tend to be slow,” Professor Carruthers said. “It’s hard for an organization like BU to really understand what is it that their students want to know on a day-to-day basis to help them be productive and have fun while they’re here.”
As regards to support for student innovators, the Bzzy creators believe BU is recognizing the trend. “There’s just this whole community of young entrepreneurs and growing community,” BU Senior Dhir said. “And BU’s starting to catch on.”
A few months ago, the BU College of Engineering celebrated its 50th anniversary. Creative innovations continue to roll out of incubators such as the BU Food App and more are still yet to come. Professor Carruthers, who has been involved with the Bzzy project from the seed, is glad to see a long-term concept bloom into a real, functioning product.
The three BU seniors aim to create a brighter future for themselves, their BU peers, and the Greater Boston Community by expanding the product to local restaurants, bars, and someday worldwide.
“The fairytale goal is doing something on your own,” Dhir said for the whole group. “That’s kind of the passion we have behind any project that we work on.”