Working with data on Android is inconvenient!

If you’ve used TensorFlow Lite on Android before, chances are that you’ve had to deal with the tedious task of pre-processing data, working with Float arrays in a statically typed language or resize, transform, normalize, and do any of the other standard tasks required before the data is fit for consumption by the model.

Well, no more! The TFLite support library nightly is now available, and in this post, we’ll go over its usage and build a wrapper around a tflite model.

Note: A companion repository for this post is available here. Follow along, or jump straight into the source!

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I recently participated in the HackOn Hackathon, a pan-India hackathon sponsored by some big names in the tech world: Google, GitHub, Elastic, IBM, Zulip, and Devfolio.

I was stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and wanted something fun to do when my friend Pragati (who was also my teammate for the hackathon) told me about HackOn. Naturally, we were in.

If you’d like to skip to the code directly, you can find the GitHub repository here.

The inspiration

We were initially brainstorming ideas, when I remembered something my dad had said. I’m interested in all things tech, which apparently includes…

Why Rust?

I’ve been hearing about Rust and its powerful features for a while now, and I finally decided to try it out for myself. If you don’t know, here’s a short summary of why Rust is gaining popularity.

1. Rust is extremely safe. It prevents the programmer from making mistakes that might lead to unsafe behaviour (such as data races).
2. Rust is highly performant, on par with C/C++. This makes it a great alternative for systems programming, where speed and safety are critical.
3. Rust has a growing community, and an official package manager called cargo, with many packages (called crates) available at…

I’ve been hearing about Rust and its powerful features for a while now, and I finally decided to try it out for myself. If you don’t know, here’s a short summary of why Rust is gaining popularity.

1. Rust is extremely safe. It prevents the programmer from making mistakes that might lead to unsafe behaviour (such as data races).
2. Rust is highly performant, on par with C/C++. This makes it a great alternative for systems programming, where speed and safety are critical.
3. Rust has a growing community, and an official package manager called cargo, with many packages (called crates) available at…

There’s been a lot of buzz around the MVVM architecture and Android Jetpack in general ever since Google released them back in 2017.

This series of posts aims to demystify and explain the concepts behind this architecture, as well as implement a production-ready app. I don’t aim to explain why you should be using MVVM or Jetpack. I’m assuming that you already know why since you’re here. Let’s start off with a rundown of what we’re going to use.

Note: A companion repository for this project is available here, and contains commits for each logical step in the process.

Requirements

1. ViewModel…