SMU Associate Professor of Information Systems Rajesh Balan is working towards the vision of leveraging on mobile devices such as smartphones to save time, improve quality of life, and make cities run more efficiently. One of Prof Balan’s earlier projects involved working with a large taxi company in Singapore to build a real-time trip information system. By rapidly searching a huge database of historical data, the system could predict the duration of any taxi trip to within one minute, and the fare to within 50 cents. For Prof Balan, solutions to research questions should always be useful to people. In 2012, this focus on the end-user led him and colleague Associate Professor Archan Misra to start LiveLabs, a platform that enables researchers to test lifestyle-related mobile computing technologies on real people in real environments. LiveLabs is currently available across the SMU campus, with 3,000 students voluntarily signed up thus far. Professor Balan believes that in the near future, mobile connectivity can be leveraged to create the concept of a “smart citizen”, where “each individual will play a much stronger role in the welfare and upkeep of their environment”.