COMP 599 - Topics in Mobile Application Development

Offered by Martin Robillard in the McGill School of Computer Science in Winter 2021 (4 credits). Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:35-3:55 via Zoom.

Overview

The ubiquitous use of mobile devices raise important questions for both software technology users and developers, and in particular regarding privacy. This course will explore the human and technical aspects of engineering privacy in software, with a special focus on mobile applications.

Target Audience

The course targets students with a reasonable amount of programming experience and an interest in software research. A good performance in COMP 303 - Software Design (or equivalent) is recommended. It is not necessary to know how to develop with a mobile application framework, as you will be expected to pick up some of this knowledge as part of the course.

Learning Outcomes

This course is intended to provide students with knowledge and experience in different areas:

Privacy Engineering: You will learn the basics concepts of privacy protection, common practices for implementing privacy protections, and technologies such as encryption, access controls, and auditing.
Mobile Application Development: You will learn the basics of mobile software development, including the architecture of Andoid applications, application design fundamentals, and common design patterns.
State-of-the-art of Privacy Protection Research: You will become familiar with some of the latest research on innovative solutions to discover and address data privacy threats by software.
Research Skills: You will learn how to effectively read research papers and how to rigorously collect and analyze data to evaluate design and engineering decisions. You will gain experience with working in a team and giving oral presentations.

Course Work and Evaluation

This course is offered in seminar style, with the lectures consisting of activities and discussions where students are expected to take an active part.

Class participation: 10%
Two individual assignments: 40%
A term project to be completed in groups of 3 or 4 students: 50%

The first assignment is a case study paper of a privacy protection failure. The second assignment is the critical review of a technical research paper. The project targets the analysis of an existing mobile application.