Course Overview

Mobile App with Embedded AI

Design and Development

Section 002

Fall 2026

Create mobile apps with embedded agent that can use tools and retrieve data to augment its training. Code with AI as a team. Defend your choices in code reviews. Experience working in a "two-pizza" team of 5-7 students. What features shall you include in your app? How good is your UI/UX design, really? We will adopt a data-driven approach to validate your design decisions. If you have never written a line of mobile code? Don’t worry, we will start from how to use a mobile IDE all the way to how to build reactive native mobile apps.

FA26 ADD DEADLINE Sep. 11th, 2026: in many CSE MDE/Capstone courses students form teams and begin accelerated work early in the semester. Attendance early in the term is critical for success. For the Fall 2026 term, the last day to enroll in these courses, including this course, is Sept. 11th, 2026.

Prereq: EECS 281 & 1 ULCS Satisfies MDE / Capstone

Note: This course has combined lectures with the ULCS special-topic course EECS 498-008, Mobile Full-Stack with Streaming Data and Agentic AI. You cannot get credit for both. Only the projects and exams are different between them. The MDE version (498-002) has a team-defined semester-long project with presentations but no exams. The ULCS version (498-008) has smaller projects throughout the term, with two exams, like other ULCS courses. You can sign up for either, but not both.

If you have any questions about either course, please feel free to ask Prof. Sugih Jamin (uniqname: sugih).

Students who have taken EECS 441 Sections 3 & 4 with Prof. Jamin cannot take either course for credit.

Room & Time

Lecture

1005 EECS

Discussion

3427 EECS

Tues. & Thurs.

10:30 – 12:00

Fri.

11:30 – 12:30

Staff & Office Hours

Sugih Jamin (sugih)

Tues. & Thurs. after lecture

And by appointment — 4737 BBB

Ryan Chen (chenryan)

Mon. & Tues. from 6:00 – 7:00

BBB Learning Center, Table 1

Resources

Discord — important course-related information and answers to FAQs.

There is no textbook. Instead, the tutorial specs and lecture notes are both required readings.

Visit the Gallery to view a sample of projects from previous terms.

Tutorials (optional)

Preliminaries

llmPrompt

Chatter

llmChat

Maps

Audio

Images

llmTools

Signin

MDE Project

Pitch

Proposal

Story Map

UIUX

Skeletal

MVP

Course Schedule

Loading schedule…

Grading Policy

Letter grades

Posted after the last day of final exams. There is no standard mapping from grade point ranges to letter grades.

Rubric

A+ — Perfect

Perfect. Has that WOW factor.

A — Outstanding

Engineering work is outstanding. Creativity and novelty are clearly observable. The project goes beyond simply calling a third-party API and CRUD functionalities and presents the best possible accomplishments given the difficulty level and experience level of the student team. The amount of effort invested is substantial.

To qualify for an A-range grade, you must additionally satisfy one of the following:

  1. Make your team's project repo, agile management board, and presentation videos publicly available for posting on the course's gallery page; or
  2. Publicly beta test your project, either through Apple's TestFlight or Google's Testing Tracks and published it later on either Apple's App Store or Play Store.

B — Very Good

Engineering work is very good, though falls short in a few areas. Traces of creativity and novelty are observable. Project draws upon advanced coverage of ULCS coursework yet no noteworthy extension of knowledge is readily observable. The amount of effort invested is substantial but could be increased. Projects whose value proposition is met simply by calling a single third-party API, e.g., ChatGPT, Google speech recognition, or Amazon celebrity face recognition, would fall into this category and earn at most a B-range grade.

C — Minimally Acceptable

Engineering work is minimally acceptable. Projects core functionalities do not extend beyond simple CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations. Design fails to materialize through a refined process. Questionable design decisions are noted. Design rationale is not well-documented or simply not credible or not sound from a technical perspective. The project is below expectations with respect to a number of criteria; however it does score some successes which suggest project for the future. Students appear to be minimally prepared to undertake such endeavors unless significant refinement is implemented.

D — Questionable

Engineering work is questionable. Most deliverables are substandard. The project draws upon shallow and limited knowledge base. Given the difficulty level, accomplishments are minor although promising in certain aspects. There is potential that a fully functional prototype could be delivered if additional time is allotted.

E — Unclassifiable

Project could not possibly be classified into any of the above categories.

Policy on collaboration

You are required to work in a team of 5-7 members on course project. Tutorials may be completed either individually or in teams of at most 2 people. You may partner differently for each tutorial.

Acts of cheating and plagiarizing will be reported to the Engineering Honor Council. Cheating is when you copy, with or without modification, someone else's work that is not meant to be publicly accessible. Plagiarizing is when you copy, with or without modification, someone else's work that is publicly available without acknowledging the original author. Please further review the College of Engineering Honor Code.

If you received substantial help from another person or AI/LLM to complete your assignment, you must name and acknowledge them in your work. If you use any published materials (books, papers, or materials found on the Web) in any submitted work, you must give full citation that enable the location of the original materials (for example, the URL of the website).

Regrade and late submission

You will have ONE opportunity to fix bugs in each graded tutorial by the assigned office hour following the tutorial's due date. Corrected code can be credited up to 50% of its original grade points. Code not submitted by deadline will be ineligible for regrade. To be eligible for regrade, do not modify the code on your git repo past the due date. Code with commit time past the deadline will not be eligible for regrade.

Other than the tutorials, you have two business days from when a grade is communicated to you to ask for regrade. To ask for regrade, you must submit a written request explaining the technical reasons that would make a regrade necessary. A regrade means regrading your whole work and may result in an overall lower grade.

Due to the nature of the assignments, no late work will be accepted. All presentations must be submitted through Canvas by the deadline and, where requested, link to video posted on a Google spreadsheet. If you do not turn in an assignment by its due date, you will receive a zero for the assignment.

You will have at least one week to complete each assignment or quiz. Extensions will be given only for documented medical and family emergencies.

Cloud services such as compute engine (AWS or GCP), git repo (GitHub), collaborative apps (Trello, Figma), video hosting site (YouTube) have been known to become inaccessible for 24 hours or more. Video encoding and uploading can take longer than expected. Your laptop could crash, or you could be locked out by Bitlocker or other security measures on your laptop. CAEN/ITCS computer labs could be full or closed and machines slowed down due to overload. NO extension will be given for any of these reasons. Plan on them happening and have your work done a couple of days before any due dates. Extensions will also not be given for job interview nor any other non-emergency activities.

Keep a backup of your work off-site, for example, on a remote git repo, and keep your backup fresh.

Class participation extra credits

Completing in-lecture code exercises, participation in peer evaluations, and providing feedback to other team's presentations allow you to earn extra credits which can be used to top up your overall course grade. You cannot make up for missed extra-credit opportunities.

Tools

Course Infrastructure

Back-End Server

Go / Echo Python / Starlette + Granian Rust / Axum TypeScript / Express PostgreSQL Ubuntu

Teamwork

Development