Apps
Although most of our research is theoretical, sometimes we do have projects with a practical benefit. Below are some of our practical highlights: apps, software, and spin-off companies. Some of these are still actively developed or still working, and some are not functional anymore, and merely listed for sentimentality.
Active
Jass
Jass is the most popular Swiss card game. On this site you can play a classic Schieber, with and against your friends or powerful deep-learning bots. The site also offers fair games, so no more excuses about unfair cards.
ConfSearch
Need a conference to submit your paper? Confsearch lets you search matching conferences in various ways (keywords, similar conference, authors, etc.), covering pretty much all computer science conferences.
Trials
Motorcycle trials. Use W, S, A, D for steering. Reinforcement learning is building the course while you drive, based on how you drive.
Multi-Cryptocurrency Node Explorer
Displaying the network state of multiple cryptrocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and more.
Sandwich Attacks on Uniswap
Learn how vulnerable your transaction is. Here is a newspaper article about the phonemenon.
NoKey
NoKey is a distributed password manager without a master password. Just have a second (and depending on your level of security: third, fourth, etc.) device ready, and your devices together will know your password using secret sharing. NoKey is available for Android, Chrome and Firefox.
BitThief
BitThief is a free riding BitTorrent client. More than 10 years later it continues to be popular, especially in places where uploading is costly, e.g. in Africa or Japan.
Hat Hunters
Hat Hunters is a local multiplayer party game for up to four players, combining some of the best elements of Hidden in Plain Sight and Bomberman.
Sinalgo
Sinalgo is a simulation framework for network algorithms in Java. Although our group is not actively developing Sinalgo anymore, Sinalgo is still popular. An active development can be found here.
Smart Route
Ready for some outdoor activities? Find a nice route for running, biking and other activities, and download the result to your smartphone.
Smart Cloud Storage
Smart Cloud Storage (SCS) automates storage management on your Android smartphone, moving your data to and from the cloud if necessary.
Smart Phoney
A meta page about smartphone reviews, with a smartphone finder: For example, you want a headphone jack, a high screen resolution and a good battery? Here are your best matches!
Retired
Wuala
Wuala was a successful startup providing secure online file storage, file synchronization, versioning and backup service. In 2009 Wuala was merged with LaCie, and later bought by Seagate.
Bitsplitters
Bitsplitters was a startup that developed a small UV sensing system called Sunbeat to help skin cancer patients.
StreamForge
StreamForge was a startup that supported the peer-to-peer approach for Internet applications such as content delivery and Internet telephony.
HomeDetective
HomeDetective was a powerful apartment and house search tool for Switzerland, in collaboration with NewHome. With HomeDetective, you could search for your next home with really elaborate search filters: smart map regions, arbitrary weight functions on all data items, full text search, commute time. It allowed you to combine these features to come up with a combined score.
Aircraft Positioning System
We use the position status messages broadcast by aircraft to determine the user's position using trilateration. This works with the same principle as GPS, which uses satellite signals for the same purpose. The link shows a heatmap of planes as discovered by our network of base stations
Spamato
Spamato was a collaborative spam filtering system with thousands of users. Google’s gmail is similar but has 1000 x 1000 x 1000 of users.
Shared Mobility
Shared Mobility was a web page to find the closest rentable wheels in Zurich: it provided live locations of different shared vehicles in a single map. Also, it compared the expected travel time and costs with different providers between any two points. The website was discussed in local media.
Kännsch
Kännsch was a keyboard for Swiss German (and other weird languages), available for Android and iOS. Thousands of people used it back then, and there was quite a bit of media coverage.
Jukefox
Jukefox was an Android music player which knows about music similarity. It used to be pretty popular with almost 1 million downloads.
Adaptive Teaching
Adaptive Teaching (Flashcards) was a tool that generated multiple choice questions based on a file, a website, or a keyword, and more. It scraped the relevant data, and then used machine learning to come up with good multiple choice questions
DiscoMark
DiscoMark was a benchmarking app to test a phone's performance based on app launch times. DiscoMark was popular with major reviewing sites such as AnandTech. Unfortunately, DiscoMark does not work with newer versions of Android.
Old ConfSearch
And for a bit of nostalgia, a screenshot of our old ConfSearch, one of our first apps.