Two student teams from ECE won the first and the second prizes in the Schurz Communications Innovation Challenge, which is organized by Purdue Foundry.  The third year of this competition was held on April 29, 2014. This semester’s grand prize of $5,000 was awarded to an app called "Alfred". The team includes ECE graduate students Mohammed Ameen Maalej, Ishaan Biswas, Richanka Prabbu, and Eric Villasenor. Alfred "simplifies your shopping experience, manages your pantry and suggests recipes intelligently." This project uses smartphones to scan grocery receipts and builds a personal database of grocery items. It also learns the personal history of shopping preferences of a user and from the history and the currently available grocery items, this system can suggest recipes to the user.

The second place was CAM2, and the team received $3,500. This team consists of ECE students Everett Berry, Anthony Kang, Erik Rozolis, Ahmed Kaseb, Youngsol Koh, Ganesh Gingade, Wenyi Chen, James Tay, He Li, Yuhao Chen, and Luke Neuman. CAM2 allows users to see live views of many places using public cameras deployed by governments (such as departments of transportation and national park services), universities, and individuals.  CAM2 has a function that allows users to see the live view from the cameras along a route specified by the origin and the destination.

Both are the semester projects for the graduate course "Mobile Computing Systems". The instructor is Associate Professor Yung-Hsiang Lu.  The second team also includes undergraduate students taking the course "Vertically Integrated Project". The advisors are Distinguished Professor Edward J Delp and Associate Professor Yung-Hsiang Lu.