Yan Chen,
Professor
Tech L459, 491-4946. ychen@northwestern.edu
Lectures: Mon and Wed 1:00-2:20pm, Tech M345.
We have entered the post-PC era -- the mobile devices have become the dominating computing platform. In this course, we will study the emerging mobile apps and systems. We will first focus on the system framework and app programming for the two most popular smartphone systems: Android and iOS. Then we study other important aspects of mobile computing, such as mobile advertisement, mobile networking/system performance profiling and prediction, security and privacy issues, enterprise mobility management systems (EMM), etc. This course is intended for both CS and CE undergraduates and graduate students. During the course, we will study and discuss online tutorials, industry white papers and research papers for these topics. Students will work on a quarter-long group-based projects on mobile apps and systems. There will be no exams. Students are encouraged to take 399/499 courses with me, and use the same project for 399/499 and this course. This course is counted for the project requirement, and the depth areas of system and security.
No exams for this class.
There is no required textbook. All reading will be from
papers. Whenever possible, handouts and papers will be
placed online on the web page. A schedule of assigned
readings is available online.
Given the grand new area of mobile computing, this class
will heavily depends on students to prepare the lecture
materials and deliver the lecture. For each lecture,
there will be a team of three to four
students. The team search on the Internet for
the best and most suitable materials, and prepare a
lecture. The instructor will give some suggestions
on the materials. The students will give a
list of best references found, and deliver the lecture.
The lecture must include a slide presentation, with demo
and video clip as optional. For demo and video
clip, make sure you understand it thoroughly.
Pause the video from time to time and ask questions to the
audience. If you choose a video clip from
youtube, a tip is to select those with large number of
views (e.g., >10,000) and suitable as introductory
materials.
To enable live discussion with the students, the
presenters must prepare some questions or problems, which
will be given as an exercise at the end of class or as
homework. For the former, it should be answered
within about 10 minutes given good understanding of the
materials taught in the class, and we will reserve the
last 5-10 minute of the class for such exercise. The
homework is usually due before the next class. The
lectuers will share the solution after the exercise, but
they don't need to grade them.
1. references to be listed online
2. slides, demo/video
3. exercise/homework
On the other hand, each student only need to present
once, so we expect you will do a great job, for the
benefits of everyone in the class.
Projects (done in groups of size 3-4) are a critical component of this course. Your goal is to design, build and evaluate interesting systems that address issues, solve problems and exploit techniques from classroom discussions and readings.
Projects must be written up in a term paper and teams will present their results at the end of the course in a mini-conference and write up a report. The list of potential ideas for projects will be posted soon. Feel free to use one, propose something completely different, or refine one of these into your own idea.
Project
Deliverables and Deadlines (all due at 11:59pm of the
due date)
Proposal -- April 10: 3-4 pages describing the purpose of the project, work to be done and potential load distribution, expected outcome/results, etc. Make sure to describe the context and related work for the proposed project.
Weekly Meeting and Progress Report -- April 13 - May 27: Each team will schedule a weekly meeting (30 minutes) with the instructors. Send us the updated report and highlight the new updated part (except the May 5 week). For each week, we expect updates of 1-2 pages on the project status, initial results, and problems encountered, etc. The report is due 24 hours ahead of the meeting. Please send it to your mentor and the instructor.
Midterm presentation -- May 4 and May 6: Presentation of your project in progress to the class (20 minutes each group).
Project Presentation -- June 1 and June 3: The final project presentation should have the following content: 1) briefly state the goal of the project; 2) present the algorithms and results; 3) any remaining work to be finished by the final project report; 4) work division among the group. The presentation is expected to be 30 minute each, including Q&A.
Final Report -- June 10: The final report is a workshop-level paper describing your work, evaluation, related research, potential avenues to explore, etc. You should incorporate the comments received during the presentation. At the end of report, there should be an appendix of README which describes 1) where the code is; and 2) how to run the code (including the library and environment needed).