As any student can tell you, university life can be stressful. Many freshmen find it difficult to adjust during their first months on campus. In addition, students who come from families with limited income may worry about living within their restricted budget. It’s no surprise, then, that many anxiety-ridden students develop poor eating and sleeping habits.
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (opens in new tab) (USTC) and Microsoft Research are using Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab) and some clever coding to make life less stressful for students. Recognizing that a university campus resembles a miniature city, the researchers connected with the Microsoft Research Smart City initiative to build a collection of applications, called Smart Campus, to help beleaguered students.
The Palm USTC platform aggregates 15 widely used apps.
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Now, incoming freshmen at USTC can download a suite of mobile apps that use location services and push notifications to familiarize themselves with the campus. These apps—which are useful to all students, not just freshmen—include an interactive map and location finder, campus bus schedules, and information on the availability of library resources and classrooms.
The smartphone apps work across several mobile operating systems, including Windows Phone, iOS, and Android. To make the apps more easily downloadable, the researchers have built a distribution platform called Palm USTC that includes the most popular apps.
Resource-constrained students, meanwhile, can take advantage of apps that monitor their shopping expenses and can automatically transfer available money to their campus smartcard, while all students benefit from apps that keep track of their coursework, grades, and borrowed library books.
Graduate student Wang Dan checks his lifestyle report on the Smart Campus website.
Some of the most valuable apps are those that help students stay healthy. These rely on the lifestyle analysis work of Microsoft senior researcher Xing Xie, and they include a website that allows easy access to the computing back end, complete with a crawler and behavior analyzer. Drawing data from the usage of campus smartcards, email, and social networks, the website can provide students with individualized health recommendations based on their habits. Graduate student Wang Dan, for example, uses the Smart Campus website to make sure that he eats regularly and doesn’t stay up too late.
Building a platform such as Smart Campus, which involves mobile services, a scalable website, and the technology to perform sophisticated data analytics, demands an enormous infrastructure and a massive investment of work hours—huge hurdles for universities, most of which have limited infrastructure and technology resources. But Microsoft Azure has made it possible to execute Smart Campus as an affordable, scalable, and easy-to-use suite of cloud services.
The developers, who include graduate students at USTC, deployed the data crawler and analysis programs by using A7 virtual machine instances, which are the core of Microsoft Azure’s IaaS (infrastructure as a service) model. The student developers benefited immensely from Azure’s industrial-grade development environment, which makes the creation of Azure Virtual Machine (opens in new tab) instances easy and permits everyone to work in the same environment.
Crawled data is saved on an independent Azure SQL Database (opens in new tab), an architecture that ensures low-latency data transfer. In addition, the Azure-hosted web interface supports mainstream web development language and frameworks, while making it easy for students to bind their accounts and retrieve lifestyle reports.
A student’s daily activity report provides the basis for lifestyle recommendations.
Xing Xie loves the practical aspect of the Smart Campus project. “It’s brought my lifestyle analysis research down to earth,” he says. Professor Guang-Zhong Sun, who leads the project at USTC, adds, “Microsoft Azure makes it convenient to try ideas quickly without wasting resources.”
Smart Campus is already providing USTC students with intelligent services, but the researchers are eager to make it even better. They are now collecting student feedback, with the intention to enhance the lifestyle advice apps and design a motivation mechanism that encourages students to use the system and heed its recommendations.
—Guobin Wu (opens in new tab), Program Manager, Microsoft Research
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