app ideas

Warblr

This is totally awesome!!  One of my ideas is becoming an app soon.  They just started and are trying to get funding through kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1190241008/warblr-an-app-that-recognises-birds-from-their-son?ref=nav_search.  They seem to have a lot of media support and there app seems to work!  Totally awesome.

Fast Company did an article about it http://www.fastcoexist.com/3037817/fund-this/the-original-tweeting-this-app-is-like-shazam-for-bird-songs.

https://drewsblog.herokuapp.com/?p=1741 my original post on my idea which essentially Warblr.  So, cool.  Can’t wait to try it out.  I’ll have to follow this and see how they do.

Braille with ultrasound

So, 2 ideas 1. use that ultrasound based display to act as a braille display, so blind people could use it as a way to read and interact with the device.

Then the other idea is to have a smartphone app that converts pictures of braille into english alphabet words…  I think computer vision would be able to handle that.

Android exploits

I was just at a seminar on “Automated Detection and Mitigation of Inter-Application Security Vulnerabilities in Android”.  Basically they told us that some Android apps even though they do not require permissions to access some info they acquire the info through the other apps on your phone.  I just learned that millions of people have downloaded flashlight apps that require permissions!  So, it will be really annoying to make sure none of your info is sent to china, russia etc. or you just don’t care.  But you should care.  They could know where you are at all the time!  More importantly they would be draining your battery and using up your data.

So, I wonder if that will be the new way for criminals to hide their data.  They have these huge android networks.  Since they got millions of people to install this app they could be bouncing data around this network of phones.  Or they could be part of a ddos attack and they wouldn’t even know.  Except this ddos could not only be an attack on a server it could be an attack on a phone system.  They could have the phones place phone calls to a call center.  Imagine a million people calling a single police station or hospital over a 30 minute period.  It would be deadly.  It could be done.  I don’t think it could be blocked either.  Actually I can’t believe this isn’t happening.  It seems simple.  They could also use this as a way to make phone calls virtually untraceable.  You would constantly be switching the route through your personal network of devices throughout the world through possibly millions of cell towers and satellites.

The other thing that some people look for is the size of the app.  If it seems too big all you have to do is to exploit one of the other applications to download.  Essentially you are a trojan that will get the payload via another app.  Then install.  All so your main app can look like a nice flashlight app.

So, now how do you find these bad applications?  Because you really don’t want those other bad app on the phone while you are on the phone.  Because basically you would prefer that they don’t act stupid and constantly use up the battery giving away the exploit (since the user will eventually decide to uninstall them).  Basically you could take advantage of those exploitable apps until you have gotten your trojan installed and then use the trojan to cause those exploitable apps to crash when ever they are opened.  Causing the user to either uninstall or to not care (which doesn’t matter since they are never opened).  Then you behave yourself and be the best flashlight app ever.  So, everyone wants to install you :).

This is pretty intimidating.  I wonder how much of this has been done, especially the stuff with the phones?  Any of you spammers that spam my site know? haha 😉

I wonder how this works for apple iphone?

Machine Learning App

My brother got an internship as an accountant.  One of his duties is a pricing things for the marketing department.  Basically figure out how much all of the components cost and add in all the margins, expected demand etc.  This takes about 3 days to put together a single price.  This is crazy.  It is prone to human error, slow and not robust.  This problem certainly could be automated because all of the pricing info is contained in a database and the materials and components are in the database.  So, all the info is there it just takes a while for a human to search for the things and copy the pricing data and add the margins.  It is a long process.  It would be ideal to also include info about competitors prices.  Then the marketers would instantly be able to know the prices.  Which would allow them to sell products so much faster because the competition wouldn’t even have had time to get a price.

I think that this might be something our company might be able make.  This might be something to talk to Mike about.

more passwords

Another idea for an alternative password would be a picture based password.  The idea is that the user uploads a bunch of images.  Some might have faces and others might be scenes etc.  The system would then ask the user to select like 5 of the images from the set of images.  The user would then be asked to trace a free form closed region on each of those 5 images.  The system records those regions.  Accompanying the standard password the user would have to draw that region (within some error bound).  This would be useful as a second precaution.  Might be a pain to do though…

Biometrics and passwords

I’m taking pattern recognition.  We had a discussion on biometrics and we came up with the idea of using the gyro info from a smart phone as a password.  This would allow users to shake and move their phone in some pattern that would allow them to log into their system.

I found this paper that details how mallicious apps can monitor when users are typing and gather gyro data to predict the keystrokes and thus possible passwords.  http://www.cse.psu.edu/~szhu/papers/taplogger.pdf.  By using motion based passwords users would not have to fear that their passwords were being stolen.  Maybe since websites can detect if you are browsing with a phone they could ask you to input a motion based password if you have previously associated one with your account.

They are doing something similar using Leap Motion http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelwolf/2013/02/06/could-that-shake-in-your-hand-replace-your-password-leap-motion-thinks-so/.  This would be great for medical fraud detection.  Can’t use dead people, and you would need the person to be their in order for the system to approve the claim.

Game idea and Engineer

App idea would be a game that game you a loop of string (no breaks) and the goal would be to create a given knot.

Also, I was thinking about the definition of engineer.  By its definition it includes some things that I think like artists, which to us aren’t engineers.  I was wondering if this is a problem in our english language that is resolvable in some other language.

Accident Notification System

So, a friend of mine was just in a really bad car collision (not with another car thankfully).  He was taken to a hospital and was unconscious and had fractured his skull.  It took about 6 hours until his family was notified!  It was on the website of our local newspaper like within the hour of the crash.  I googled it and it seems like others have experienced the same thing where the emergency contacts aren’t called for hours after the collision.

So, my idea is that we could connect a raspberry pi to a bluetooth OBD-II adapter.  Then when the OBD signals that the airbag is deployed the raspberry pi would notify a smartphone to call 911 and any emergency contacts.  However, I did a little googling and found that getting whether the airbag has been deployed would be different for each manufacturer and is proprietary so there is no easy way to get it!  I guess that is why OnStar has got basically a monopoly on providing services like this.

So, I was also thinking that airbags would probably not be the only system affected when in a crash that would cause the airbags to deploy.  Would be interesting to collect data from the OBD to find out what other things are indicators…

So, this idea seems worthy of a kickstarter for Procyon :).  Also, I’ve seen most of the better kickstarters have cool youtube videos.  The guy who was in the accident has a degree in film and has made commercials so maybe we could get him involved.  Would be fun to get into autonomous vehicles eventually.  This might be a good start.

However, back in 2010 someone tried doing this sort of thing only based on the smart phone’s ability to measure Gs by the accelerometer.  Pretty cool.  However, it seems like they had troubles with false positives.  http://mobilware.org/2010/presentations/Car%20Accidents.pdf  But, since then, they haven’t done anything to continue the work.  They did have a neat idea where they would also broadcast location of wreck to a map service so that people could route around it.

EDIT: Well I found someone that offers this as a service http://my-911.com/.  They make you purchase the dongle and then they offer their software as a service that you subscribe to.  They don’t seem to have a big market.  I think that if we could sell it to taxi/limo companies.  Then passengers could provide emergency contact info.  And if the user has the app they would be able to just get into any car and it would be able to interface with the bluetooth device automatically.

EDIT 2: Well I no longer think we should even work on this.  It has been done and done well by https://www.automatic.com/.  It is just about how I would have done it too.  They have a built in accelerometer in the dongle that attaches to the OBD port, so they don’t have to figure out how to know if the air bag has been deployed.  Also, they have really good support so that it isn’t just your phone automatically calling they have a nice protocol set up.  I emailed them and told them about Procyon and an idea I had while I was looking at their site that I think we could provide and a broken link I found on their site.  Cool if they respond.