iPhone App Collaboration to Answer "Who Won?"
In less than an hour of brainstorming, students Ali Çevik (CS/IV), Mert Küçük (CS/IV), and A. Yavuz Oruç, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland and visiting professor at Bilkent, had a project to work on: An iPhone app that can gather names, numbers, images, and code all in one place - actually two places (client and server) to produce critical statistics and results about the upcoming elections in Turkey. This would not only be valuable to voters in Turkey but also to anyone with an iPhone around the globe who may be interested in Turkish elections.
The iPhone app that they named "whowon" was the result. Like other iPhone apps, it runs on Apple's iOS operating system. It accomplishes a number of objectives for gathering and analyzing voting data as a client and server app, where iPhones are connected to a remote server that knows how to crunch data. Küçük worked on the iPhone side, and a wrote a robust objective C code to streamline requests to such a server and put together numbers, text, images, and code to deliver valuable election statistics and results to iPhone users. Çevik worked on the server side and developed a data structure for laying out the data efficiently in a mysql database. He wrote translators and java code to serve Küçük's client application that runs on iPhones. Now, voting information collected in urban areas and remote parts of Turkey will be delivered to iPhone users around the globe. Already, the app "whowon" is on its way to Apple's App Store. The server application that Çevik developed is running on a server in a cloud computing server farm in Mississippi. If everything goes well, the work will have a significant impact on the way that election results are communicated around the globe. The three talked about stretching their ideas to make "whowon" a more universal app that can be used to carry election information in other countries to the rest of the world.
A second by-product of the exchange was just as valuable, an education on teamwork. According to Prof. Oruç, success came through adhering to "uncompromising principles" of collaboration: "1. Trust your partner: He or she will deliver what is agreed upon. 2. Have confidence in your competence to work independently. 3. Respect your partner's style of work and never question it." Prof. Oruç also praised Çevik and Küçük by saying: "They are the ultimate Starsky and Hutch of the coding world, and given their youthfulness, the synergy between them is difficult to surpass. I have no doubt that they are destined to greatness in years to come."