Sorry, buddy...but, this is no more than a glorified Excel sheet work, or a high school science project...and you know that.
Nonetheless, it's useful..my only objection is for them to say it as if this was unexpected, something new, a discovery...which is not. If they talked to an hardware engineer, he would probably tell them what to expect anyways.
I started to lose respect for people commenting on this board...I don't see what is the big deal with this, and why would you even publish a paper on it.
Here is the thing: Temperature reading of battery may not even be the actual temperature value of the battery. Even the circuits itself that read temperature is sensitive to temperature (they have the same correlation with temp. as battery..Higher the temp. is, higher the leakage current, and hotter your device will be). So temperature reading itself will be combination of things, most of which have similar correlation against temperature of the environment. This is a well-known fact to all people working in semiconductor industry and we simulate things against temp. all the time.
And when you average out thousands of reading from different cell-phones, you will get rid of all those noise coming from phone-usage, whether person holds the phone or keep in in his pocket ..etc.
As a side node, if the batteries in each cell-phone made by different manufacturers, their temp. reading will also be different and will add a noise as well.
You built an app to read temp., OK fine. But, it just annoys me the fact that they talk about it as if this was a new discovery, and publish a scientific paper about it :)
Why should there be any need to explain what Ph.D. is to your own Ph.D. students?
May be, they should not be doing Ph.D. in the first place if they don't know what it is that they are doing.
Ph.D. is the new BS and that's that...most of the thesis coming out of schools are worthless (literally).
There is an inflation (big time) in academia. You would know it if you interviewed any Ph.D student on a technical topic.
The stupidest thing I have ever read. What do you say about all those inventors and thinkers, who did not get a Ph.D., but contributed to human knowledge in major ways....