Today's social networking and communication software are closed and proprietary, built with the goal of monetizing users' data. This talk calls upon the Computer Science students in universities to help create a programmable open mobile internet. Developed expressly for the mobile device, Omlet provides a rich platform for impactful computer science research.

Omlet is (1) a chat app and (2) an open and distributed mobile app platform, made commercially available by a spinout from the Computer Science Department at Stanford after 4 years of research funded by the National Science Foundation. This platform makes possible a new ecosystem where

(1) users can share and communicate freely while owning their data

(2) app developers can easily create social mobile apps, uncontrolled by proprietary social networks.

(3) cloud services can interoperate to host users' social data.

The core technologies in this system are an identity-based group message routing system and a distributed semantic file system.

Launched in March 2014, Omlet has already been adopted by Stanford and shipped on Asus's new line of smartphones--the ZenFones. It has partnered with Baidu Cloud, Box, Dropbox, Flickr to provide users a choice of storage for their data. Omlet is available in the Google app store, iTunes store, as well as Wandoujia.

Monica S. Lam has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1988; she is also the founding Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. She received her BS in Computer Science from University of British Columbia and her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests spanned high-performance computing, computer architecture, compiler optimizations, security analysis, virtualization-based computer management, and most recently, open social networks. She loves working on disruptive startups--she was on the founding team of Tensilica (configurable processor cores) in 1998, and she was the founding CEO of both MokaFive (desktop management using virtual machines, 2005) and MobiSocial (open social networking, 2012). She is a co-author of the "Dragon book" and an ACM Fellow.