Question

In Android Studio:

Throughout the course, you have been exposed to a number of technologies that can be utilized in order to create an immersive Android mobile application. For your Portfolio Project, you will identify a prospective idea for development as an Android mobile application. You will create the interface for the application and identify features for the application. You do not need to full implement the application, but instead you should provide a 4-5 page (not including title and reference pages) analysis of the required technologies that would need to be included for your Android Application.  

Answer 1

It's hard for me to give you an idea for a mobile application that is purely immersive but not all that useful. Games are out of the picture since they are hard to make and need too many resources. Being a physicist I would suggest an application that is a math learning tool and a differential equation solver.

Differential equations are extremely hard to solve, most of the times impossible to solve analytically. But they are extremely important because a lot of real world systems are best described by how they change or evolve rather than their state. That is why differential equations are heavily used in not only physics and math, but also computing, biology, medicine, atmospheric science, statistics, and now very relevant in infection growth dynamics. Most differential equations are solved numerically using methods such as Euler's method, modified Euler's method, Runge-Kutta of different orders, finite difference Gauss Seidel etc. These are algorithms used to solve these equations to various accuracies. Some of them can be computationally tedious as well because they are usually intense iterative processes.

But all this sounds very technical and not that immersive. That's where the math learning part comes in. This module of the application can contain interactive presentations and fun videos (the like of which are made by 3blue1brown) with lots of animations and visualization to keep the more casual used involved.

How the Differential equation (DE) solver works: It can take a mathematical input typed in or it can scan a typed or hand-written differential equation. The other input it takes is the method by which the DE is to be solved, i.e.-analytically, or numerically(one of the above mentioned methods). As stated, these methods can be quite cumbersome, so if connected to the internet it uses cloud computing to actually solve the thing. Finally it can plot the results. Any free math package and can be used te generate 2D or 3D (surface and contour) plots. This will help visualize the data.

The technologies that may be used:

• The front end can be handled using CSS or Android studio templates. This would give the app a clean look and make it aesthetically pleasing. It would be able to provide smooth animations to make the app feel robust.
• An image recognition algorithm. There are several machine learning algorithms that are good at reading hand written text. You may want to look at Image Classification Transfer Learning with Inception. This algorithm is extremely good at image recognition, might even be overkill for this app.
• Cloud computing to solve the equation. Google colab allows for usage of google's cloud servers for computing purposes. It supports Python, TensorFlow and much more.
• Wolfram Alpha for data visualization. It is a free math package that can be used to plot the functions.
• For the mathematical learning tool, baked in presentations and interactive environment for learning. Videos are better stored in a server elsewhere to keep the app light-weight and smooth.
• The app may collect user data to cater content to specific users' needs and likes.

That's pretty much it. Couldn't include location services in this app. You don't necessarily have to use this idea. Just try to think of something that uses machine learning, and cloud. Also, there are several scholarly articles and books that you can cite as references when writing.