FAU Android

Three courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate level are planned for this summer ’12. We are also planning to offer 3 or 5 full day courses for company engineers. Here are the details:

ENG1935 (Mobile Applications for Google’s Android) is geared to high school students and has been offered during summer ’10 and summer ‘11. A total of 60  high school juniors and seniors with high GPA and diverse backgrounds, from 8 high schools,  have taken this course. They worked in teams of three and combined self-identified strengths in arts, science, and business, to develop commercially relevant applications. These teams also  competed for scholarships totaling $12,000 during the first year (No scholarship funds are available for this summer). See http://www.ceecs.fau.edu/news/nurturing-young-minds.. For videos of top three winners during summer ’11, see: http://vimeo.com/album/1660512. The syllabus is at  ENG 1935 Android Apps for High School Students

CEN 4214 (Software-Hardware CoDesign) – this popular undergraduate level course has been offered every semester since fall 2009, with a typical enrollment of 24. In this course, the students, in groups of two or three,  develop an Android application on gaming or social networking. They combine  functionality with aesthetics, animation, and/or promotional video, to enhance the App’s commercial potential.   Some of these projects are amenable to be carried forward as  ED (engineering Design) Capstone projects. These Apps also become platforms for high school students in ensuing summers to innovate with, as detailed below. We are offering this course as an eLearning course this summer ’12, concurrently with a course from the college of Arts & Letters that emphasizes Android Graphics aspects. We expect to team   engineering and graphics students to develop Apps that are both functional and aesthetic. This will bring in two groups of students with complementary strengths and also will build their team skills. The syllabus is at CEN 4214 Software Hardware Codesign (Summer 2012)

COT 6930 (Android  Components) – this was offered in spring ‘10 as a distance learning course and attracted 35 graduate and senior undergraduate students. The students in groups of one to three focused on the development of a  framework / library, or a component for their term project. This course will be offered this summer again. This is a graduate course and students are expected to explore advanced concepts. The syllabus is at COT6930 Android Components (Summer 2012)

Short 3-day/5-day courses for company engineers: We are equipped to train company engineers in a 3-day or 5-day course, as appropriate. Here is a customized syllabus we used last year for LexisNexis engineers:  Android Application Development for companies (example syllabus, used for LexisNexis)

If you are interested, please contact me at shankar@fau.edu

This past semester I have conducted some research in two of my courses that were conducted with Android. The first is an investigation into the privilege escalation attack on Android where activities or components can access restricted components by proxy. The other project was an attempt to implement a Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) object recognition mechanism on Android without relying on the computations being done out in the cloud. In other words, the calculating interest point descriptors is done on the mobile device. Reports for both research projects can be found in experiment documents section for those who are interested.

Sooner or later there will come an instance where one is developing applications on Android and will have to provide some kind of mechanism for making their applications compatible with different hardware platforms. Reasons for using this class can vary from ensuring that the user interface looks proper across different resolutions, changing parameters within algorithms in order to optimize performance, etc. Fortunately, the Android engineers have provided developers the android.os.Build class which can be used to acquire this information. An example of its use is depicted below:


private String TAG = "SSLA";

//Example application of using the Build class.
if ((Build.MODEL.equals("T-Mobile G1"))
|| (Build.MODEL.equals("HTC Dream"))
|| (Build.MODEL.equals("Era G1")))//T-Mobile G1 or HTC Dream
slideRate = 6;
else if (Build.MODEL.equals("Nexus One"))//Google Nexus One
slideRate = 4;
else//Default sliding background rate.
slideRate = 4;


The giant log statement produces the following output on the DDMS Logcat:

We offered a 3-week course on Android Application development during 6/14/10 to 7/2/10 to 28 high school students, primarily from the Palm Beach and Broward school counties. A team of four faculty members (two each with background in engineering and arts/graphics), six engineering/business student mentors, and an administrator supported the intense effort. The students formed nine teams and presented their applications on 7/2 to a panel of eight judges (with background in engineering, business, and/or graphics). The students received scholarship amounts of $2,400 to $300 per group, depending upon their team rankings. One of these Applications will be posted on the Android market soon, while another six of them will be improved upon further before posting them. These Applications are available for licensing and further improvement. For photographs of the event, see FAU Facebook Group.

We plan to offer two Android courses in the fall’10 semester. The first one, entitled “Software-Hardware CoDesign” will have groups of 3 students who will develop marketable game/social applications on Android. The second course, entitled “Android Robotics” will focus on physical computing. In this latter course, the goal is to develop applications that can coordinate and control the activities of autonomous and concurrent robots.

Please contact me for more information. Thank you.

Related Links:
Press: Nurturing Young Minds

-Dr. Ravi Shankar.

Ceremony Photos:

Group 1: Zubir Husein, Ravik Samaroo, and Devon Smith

Group 2: Dhaval Khamar, Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan, and Suneel Viralam

Group 3: Samantha Lebofsky, Dorian Rossi, Kevin Stepanek, and John Trimble

Group 4: Chase Perez, Matthew Rhon, and Steven Roth

Group 5: Joseph Ryan, Sergio Ruiz, and Noah Spenser

Group 6: Bryan Bravo, Darin Singh, and Gregory Tobar

Group 7: Michael Capone, Christina Dixon, and Cynthia Hodge-Thorne

Group 8: Rixon Fletcher, Albin Matthew, and Akilah Somersall

Group 9: Jett Anderson, Aaron Klier, and Samuel Nason

By the closing of week two our students had made significant progress on their projects. In the first week the students only had conceptual designs and artwork while some had the beginnings of pre-rendered artwork created with the use of Autodesk Maya 2010. As week three began our FAU Android group started to see more and more progress as the conceptual thinking of our students slowly came to fruition on the development phones we provided them to work on.
The main focus of week two was finalizing and fleshing out the conceptual work the students had done. One by one Dr. Shankar along with Professors Norman Silva, Fran McAfee, and Dr. Georgian Carvalho met with each group along with their primary mentor to give a peer-mentor review and offer guidance. Most of the students had already implemented menus, settings menus, and/or splash screens but the common remaining task was the implementation of their game or the extension of their program’s main functionality. This would be the focus of week three.