CUSP (Consortium for Smart Phone, Mobile and Web Applications) represents a vision for growth of our university based on our collaborative efforts in App development for smart phones,  robotics, and  the semantic web. We now have three years of experience that has brought together faculty members and students  from arts, business, education, engineering, K-12, social science, and urban planning in developing Apps in these three domains.  We expect to involve other colleges, such as nursing and medicine, in the near future. This integrates teaching, research, innovation, and App development into one seamless process. Apps and kits developed with open source tools will not only generate revenue for the participants and the institution, but also have the potential to help faculty members to connect across disciplines and collaborate on research (and proposal submission)  on cross-disciplinary topics that tend to be difficult and challenging, but unaddressed because other universities may not have this infrastructure. Our students, by working across disciplines on projects with common goals, tend to acquire real-world experience and life-long alliances that may translate into small business and other entrepreneurial initiatives. Our university will gain recognition as a hot bed of innovation since such research and teaching collaborations will lay the foundation for new ideas and enterprises. Our community will benefit from the increased economic activity and our schools will benefit from increased interest in STEM disciplines.

Recently,  there have been local media articles on our work. We welcome that. More information on these three disciplines may be found at android.fau.edu, robotics.fau.edu,and semanticweb.fau.edu. In these sites, you will find links to blog sites of student Apps and research, and their App videos, photos, documentation, and code.  You will also find  much relevant material such as tutorials, tool links, and presentations.  Our quick establishment over the past 3 years has been driven by the availability of open source tools. We intend to contribute to the open source community all our material in an attempt to further their goal to help everyone.

Here is a PowerPoint presentation on our vision:   NSF_CUSP_Infrastructure

Some other links:

A Prezi Presentation on personal semantic web made to MTC (Mobile Technology Consortium) in April 2012:  http://prezi.com/km3gmfsvplne/personal-semantic-web/

Marketing Videos from three top winners of our summer 2011 Android Smart Phone App Development course offered to high school students:  http://vimeo.com/album/1660512

News release from FAU on our summer 2010 Android Smart Phone App Development course offered to high school students: http://www.ceecs.fau.edu/news/nurturing-young-minds