Please Note: ECE 1778 will not be taught in the academic year 2021-2022.  It is also likely that this course will be replaced with a different course, tentatively titled: “Creative Applications of Natural Language Processing”

This site archives the ECE 1778 Course taught between January and April 2021.

Mobile and wearable devices, combined with web-based software, have given rise to an explosion in creativity over the past several years.  There have been exciting, inspiring and incredibly useful software apps in the areas of medicine, music, psychology, senior support, banking, cooking, global health, exploring, travel, shopping, games and many more.  

These applications have only just scratched the surface of the potential of mobile devices and software. As our understanding of how mobile technology evolves, combined with the web and perhaps machine learning, many new possibilities will occur to each of us.  As new sensors and other capabilities are added to the phones and made available as wearable devices, ever-more clever ways of advancing knowledge and capability will be created.

The purpose of this course is to create new inter-disciplinary applications of mobile devices and software in general.  Graduate students from all disciplines at the University of Toronto are invited to take the course for credit.   This website describes the edition of the course that will be from January to April, 2021. 

This is primarily a project-based course in which the goal is to produce a working software application prototype by the end of course.    Projects will typically be done in groups of three.  Students with computer programming skills will be matched with those who bring expertise from other backgrounds to do projects in the latter students’ disciplines. 

The course will support the use of Google Android-based and Apple iOS-based platforms, and teams will have to come to agreement on which of these platforms to use.  

Students with two kinds of backgrounds should consider taking this course:

• 1. Students with graduate-level programming skills, typically from the Computer disciplines (in the ECE and CS and other departments), but possibly from the many other disciplines that make use of computers and that program them.  These students will be given exercises to learn the mobile applications development environment, and guidance towards the completion of a major project. Note that you must have significant software experience to take this course.
• 2. Students from any other graduate discipline that have a clear expertise that can be applied within a mobile application.   These students will be given lectures and exercises to learn the basic capabilities of mobile devices, and to explore what has already done in their field by way of mobile applications.  They will also be trained in the use of tools that can help mock up the visual design of a mobile application.  In addition, these students will perform work in their own discipline to show how the new software enhances some aspect of that discipline. 

You can see if the kinds of projects in this course are of interest to you by looking at the videos and reports of the students from the previous versions of the course, which you can find here: