Student Connect - Android Project

Click Here To See The Wireframe

Click Here To See The Playlist Of Video Demonstration

Description

Student Connect is a Social Media app created for android. It has all the basic features like chatting, adding people as friends, posting pictures and interacting with them, searching people and getting in app reccomendations for people that you might know or have a lot in common with. It is created with Google's Firebase Firestore backend to store the user data and we have also incorporated many features offered by the Firebase. This project also includes Machine Learning to suggest potential friends.

Languages Used

1. Kotlin
2. XML
3. JavaScript

Tools Used

1. Android Studio
2. Android Virtual Device
3. Google Map
4. Firebase Authentication
5. Firebase Firestore (database)
6. Firebase Storage
7. Firebase Cloud Fuctions
8. Firebase Machine Learning kit
   • Face Detection (On Device)
   • Image Labeling (On Cloud)

Machine Learning

Our App uses 3 different machine learning models in total. Two of them are inbuild models provided by the Google's Firebase based on the Tenserflow Libraries and the third one is build by us using Weighted KNN Classifier algorithm.

1. Image labeling (Inbuilt)

With Cloud Vision's image labeling API, you can recognize entities in an image without having to provide any additional contextual metadata.
Image labeling gives you insight into the content of images. When you use the API, you get a list of the entities that were recognized: people, things, places, activities, and so on. Each label found comes with a score that indicates the confidence the ML model has in its relevance. With this information, you can perform tasks such as automatic metadata generation and content moderation.
For more information about the Api - Click Here
To understand about the implementation of the Api by us - Click Here

2. Face Detection (Inbuilt)

With ML Kit's face detection API, you can detect faces in an image, identify key facial features, and get the contours of detected faces. Note that the API detects faces, it does not recognize people.
With face detection, you can get the information you need to perform tasks like embellishing selfies and portraits, or generating avatars from a user's photo. Because ML Kit can perform face detection in real time, you can use it in applications like video chat or games that respond to the player's expressions.
For more information about the Api - Click Here
To understand about the implementation of the Api by us - Click Here

3. Friends Recommendation Engine

We use user details to make friend suggestions. Friend suggestions depend on the professional course of the user, the level of completion of their course, posts they have made (Their Personal Interests) and interacted with and the people who they are friends with. We have used Weighted KNN Classifier for friend recommendations. Each tag is assigned particular value. The friend list is assigned the most value, followed by the course and level of course. Then comes the value of tag of each post, uploaded by the user and finally the least priority is given to the posts with which the user has interacted.
To understand more about the algorithm used and how we used it - Click Here

Functionalities

1. Students can Signin or SignUp in the app using appropreate credentials.
2. Users can add other people as their friends.
3. Users can upload posts in the form of photos and tag people in it.
4. Users can view and interact eith the posts uploaded by their friends by liking and comenting them.
5. Usrers also have the option to remove their tag from photos.
6. Users can search for other people by their:
   • Name
   • Username
   • College
   • Branch
7. Users can search for a particular college to get their address and details.
8. Users can get reccomendations of people they can add as a friend based on their college, vacinity and on their interests.
9. Users can chat with other users in our chat feature.
10. In the chat, users can:
    • Like/dislike a message
    • Delete their own message
    • Reply to a message
    • Forward a message
    • Copy a message

Cloud Fucntions

Cloud Functions for Firebase is a serverless framework that lets you automatically run backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTPS requests. Your JavaScript or TypeScript code is stored in Google's cloud and runs in a managed environment. There's no need to manage and scale your own servers. For more information about the Firebase Cloud Funtions Click Here

Cloud Functions Created

We have created in total 7 cloud fucntions out of which 5 cloud functions are used in our application. All these Cloud functions are written in JavaScript by us and executed on Google's Cloud. These fucntions are deployed on the asia-south1 server as it is the nearest to India and provides low latency. The cloud fucntions currently in use by our app are:

1. createUser
2. uploadPost
3. deletePost
4. likePost
5. dislikePost

Click on the fucntion to know more about it.

Gestures Incorporated

• Single Tap
• Double Tap
• Long Press
• Overridden Back buton
• Swipe Up
• Swipe Down
• Swipe Left
• Swipe Right

Navigation through the App

You can navigate to different activities by intuitively swiping left and right to switch between them. Along with that wherever there is a search bar available you can activate it by swiping down and eactivate it by swiping it up.

Click here to get Detailed Information About

1. Login Activity
2. SignUp Activity
3. Main Feed Activity and Search Fucntonality
4. Upload Post Activity
5. Profile Activity
6. Chat Activity
7. Suggestion Activity

APIs and External Libraries Used

• Circular Image View – loads image in a circular fashion
  • de.hdodenhof:circleimageview:3.1.0
• Picasso – image processing tool.
  • com.squareup.picasso:picasso:2.71828
• Glide – image rendering tool.
  • com.github.bumptech.glide:glide:4.11.0

Click Here To See All

• Shape Image View Library – to set image shape.
  • com.github.siyamed:android-shape-imageview:0.9.3@aar
• Justify text library – aligns the text in justified view.
  • me.biubiubiu.justifytext:library:1.1
• Styleable toast – builds custom toast view.
  • com.muddzdev:styleabletoast:2.2.4
• Card View – creates depth effect in the layout.
  • androidx.cardview:cardview:1.0.0
• Palette – extracts prominent colours from the image.
  • androidx.palette:palette:1.0.0
• Groupie View Holder – provides a ready-made adapter for recycler view.
  • com.xwray:groupie:2.8.1
• Android Play Services and Map Utils – provides map view and map functions.
  • com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:17.0.0
  • com.google.maps.android:android-maps-utils-v3:1.3.1
  • com.google.auto.value:auto-value-annotations:1.6.5
  • com.google.android.libraries.maps:maps:3.1.0-beta
• Firebase Cloud Functions - provides the fucntionality of defining javascript fucntions on the cloud.
  • com.google.firebase:firebase-functions:19.2.0
• Image Labeling - used to call the cloud image labling model by firebase.
  • com.google.mlkit:image-labeling:17.0.3
  • com.google.android.gms:play-services-mlkit-image-labeling:16.0.3
• Face Detection - used to call on device face detection model by firebase.
  • com.google.mlkit:face-detection:16.0.6
  • com.google.android.gms:play-services-mlkit-face-detection:16.1.5