MUNCIE, Ind. - A Web service developed by a May graduate of Ball State University that could help users speak to people from different countries is earning state and national recognition.

Phill Miller of Elwood, a computer science and Honors College graduate, on Friday night will pick up the 2002 Indiana Student Software Awards Competition (ISSAC) Award for the most outstanding undergraduate software. The award will be given at the Indiana Information Technology Association (INITA) CyberStar Awards Gala at the Indiana Roof Ballroom in Indianapolis.

As part of his undergraduate thesis project for Ball State's Honors College, Miller has developed an online translator service that works with Web-enabled devices such as computers, cellular phones and PDAs.

Miller's service was recently a top finalist in Microsoft's Best of the .NET Awards and received an honorable mention at an Association of Information Technology Professionals competition.

The translator service could have endless uses, Miller said. He envisions it helping students learn a new language or assisting business people from different countries talk to one another without a human translator. It could also help leisure travelers.

"You can imagine a traveler sitting in a restaurant in Mexico City who wants to order shrimp, but can't remember the correct word," Miller said. "That person would only have to type in the word on a cell phone and hold it up to the waiter, who would then hear the order in Spanish."

The service has been tested with Spanish and French, but it could be used for any language.

Miller believes the Web translator is more powerful than other translators on the market because it also provides images and audio clips of the words being pronounced properly.

"Pronunciation can often be a major hurdle when trying to communicate in another language, and this multimedia service helps eradicate some of that problem," he said.

A critical piece of this service is a technology Miller is calling "flexible services architecture." This allows the translator to run on any device that is Internet ready and supports XML without installing software. "This type of technology allows communication between devices that hasn't been possible before," Miller said. "It is an idea that is being embraced by many software companies."

In this kind of system, instead of the device working locally from its own memory, the device communicates remotely with a Web server. The server contains software that allows it to communicate with a multitude of devices. This allows the software to be updated much more frequently than when it resides on an individual device.

"What Phill has created is so new, its fundamental technology has not even been standardized yet," said Miller's thesis advisor Fred Kitchens, a Ball State management professor and director of the College of Business' Cluster Computing Research Project.

A paper authored by Miller, Kitchens and another management professor Sushil Sharma about the translator and the technology behind it has been accepted in an international conference on mobile services next month in Lyon, France. Together, the three developed the concept of flexible services architecture.

During the last two years he has been doubling as a college student and a developer at Made2Manage Systems, a publicly traded (NASDAQ: MTMS), Indianapolis-based manufacturing software provider established in 1986.

The company is assisting Miller in developing and marketing the Web translator service to other companies.

(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Miller at pmiller@made2manage.com or (317) 532-7000, Ext. 7236, or Kitchens at fkitchens@bsu.eduor (765) 285-5305.)