Pictured from left to right: Szu-Wei Wang, Dr. Peter Yu, Chien-An (Jay) Chen, Che-Hao Chen, Vincent C.W. Chen and Jia-Hao Fan.

A team of graduate students from Texas A&M University have developed H-Radar, an app that won first place in the 2013 "Go Viral to Improve Health: IOM-NAE (Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering) Health Data Collegiate Challenge."

Che-Hao Chen, Chien-An (Jay) Chen, Szu-Wei Wang, Vincent C.W. Chen and Jia-Hao Fan took top honors and $10,000 in this year's competition with the android app H-Radar [1]. H-Radar delivers and tracks diseases and symptoms by using a cell phone's global positioning system and real-time health bulletins.

Four members of the Texas A&M team are graduate students in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Che-Hao Chen is studying with Dr. Yoonsuck Choe [2] for his master's degree in computer science. His research interests include image processing, human-user interface and information retrieval skills.

Ph.D. student Jay Chen is a member of the Laboratory for Embedded & Networked Sensor Systems [3] under the direction of Dr. Radu Stoleru [4]. He explores mobile computing, wireless networking, wireless security and distributed systems.

Jia-Hao Fan is a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant whose adviser is Dr. Jianer Chen [5].

Although computer engineering graduate student Szu-Wei Wang is interested in numerical problems using parallel programming, his major focus is on tridiagonal solvers on the graphics processing unit. He is advised by Dr. Vivek Sarin [6] and works at the Texas A&M Health Science Center.

Vincent Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Health and Kinesiology whose adviser is Dr. Steven E. Riechman [7].

When asked how the students got together, team spokesman Vincent Chen said, "We are a group of friends who hang out a lot. It was Che-Hao who found this competition and asked everybody if we were interested in participating. Although I'm not a computer science major, I have been working as a web/graphic designer for several years and my major is health related. Therefore, we formed a team consisting of programmers and a designer. Dr. Peter Yu is a team adviser and he graduated in 2010 from Texas A&M with a Ph.D. in computer science."

In second place was a team of students from the University of California, Los Angeles; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Harvard University; and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The second-place team devised a mobile app that allows the user to track flu vaccinations and outbreaks. Third place was awarded to a team whose app allows direct access to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.