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COS Independent Work Seminar:
Apps of Random Kindness
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COS IW06
Fall 2016
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General Information:
Instructor:
Alan Kaplan
ak18 at cs princeton edu
Office Hours: TBD
Office: 221 Nassau St Room 105 (map | streetview)
Meeting time and place:
Tuesdays, 7:30pm - 8:50pm, Room 301 Computer Science Building
TA:
TBD
Office Hours: TBD
Links:
Description,
Schedule,
Resources,
FAQ,
Piazza
Description:
Today there are more than 2.5 billion smartphone users globally, and by 2020, some estimates project over 6 billion smarthphone subscriptions. In 2016, there will be more than 6 billion IoT (Internet of Things) devices, with projections of over 20 billion deployed IoT devices in 2020! This is an incredible number of mobile computers, each with mobile broadband connections, and a host of sensors, including cameras, GPS, accelerometers and barometers. The availability, accessability and the affordability of such mobile computing platforms has enormous potential to help solve many of the problems that individuals and communities face every day.
The overall goal of this IW seminar is to design, develop and experiment with mobile technology that can be used to help individuals or communities.
The goal is not just to "write an app," but rather to produce some innovative approach to a problem and demonstrate/evaluate its utilty and benefits. Application areas include, but are not limited to: environment & climate, social activism, civic computing, health care, philanthropy and crowdsourcing. In general, IW projects must have an impact - locally, nationally or even globally.
Students are highly encouraged to use and/or extend open source platforms. Projects can utilize any combination of mobile devices (e.g., Android smartphones), cloud-based backends (e.g., AWS), open APIs/data (many), hardware sensors (e.g., Raspberry Pi), augmented reality (e.g., Google Cardboard) and programmable UAVs.
Schedule:
Resources:
- Independent Work:
- Getting Started with Android:
- A Sampling of Interesting Resources/Platforms:
- A Sampling of Related Research Papers:
- Stevens, M. and D'Hondt, E. Crowdsourcing of pollution data using smartphones. In Workshop on Ubiquitous Crowdsourcing 2010. 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Copenhagen, Denmark, 2010. PDF
- Moran, S., Pantidi, N., Rodden, T., Chamberlain, A., Griffiths, C., Zilli, D., Merrett, G. and Rogers, A. 2014. Listening to the forest and its curators: lessons learnt from a bioacoustic smartphone application deployment. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2387-2396. PDF
- Heng, I., Zhang, A., Heimbinder, M., and Yap, R. A unique environmental mobile device for detecting hazardous chemicals. 2012 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference. Seatle, WA. October 2012. PDF
- Heo, G., Genong Yu, and Liping Di, "A reconfigurable open GeoSMS mobile client app design for Android smartphones," Second International Conference on Agro-Geoinformatics, 12-16 Aug. 2013. PDF
Frequently Asked Questions:
- Can I partner with someone?
Yes. As long as you can decompose the problem that your team is addressing into individual sub-areas. For example, one partner might be focusing on the native Android client, while another is building a specialized sensor, and a third is focusing on the backend. Each person will still need to write their own proposal, paper and poster. Of course, there will be some overlap.
- Do I have to use Android?
No. Android is only suggested for mobile development since (a) many students already know Java (in contrast to iOS, which requires Objective-C or Swift) (b) students can help each other with Android development issues and (c) it is very easy to deploy Android apps in the Google Play store.
However, past projects have also utilize other platforms, e.g., Java and Python on Raspberry Pi, Node.js for backend servers, standard Java on Mac OS X, etc.
- I don't own an _____ device/platform/sensor/... - will one be provided?
You can apply for funds to purchase equipment and other resources needed for your project. See Funding.