Senior Projects for 2004-05
(Team membership as listed is for the Winter 2004-05 term. L stands for Leader of the team.)

Team 1 page Team 2 page Team 3 page Team 4 page Team 5 page Team 6 page

#	Team Members [Supervisor] Team Homepage	Client Organization [Contact]	Project (as proposed), with Project Subject in boldface
1	Peter Winton (L), Alex Halfpenny amd Matt Pellegrini [Don Bagert] Team 1 page	Rose-Hulman Recreational Sports [Al Morrison]	Intramural Sports Scheduler There is currently a desperate need for good, effective and easy to use scheduling software for the intramural program. There is no effective intramural scheduling software available on the market right now. There are basically two that are used by a majority of colleges, and practically no IM directors are happy with them. E-mails come in every month to the national organization, National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association, written by IM directors who cannot find a descent program. Here at Rose-Hulman, we are currently using IPS, which is the Intramural Participation System. We have found this system to work better than any other system currently on the market, but find that it still needs many improvements to be more effective. The program has many flaws, but could be made very effective and useful with the proper adjustments. For this project we would like for you to develop scheduling software that would benefit not only our intramural program, but maybe even help out other schools with the same scheduling software conflict. Here are some of the problems that we have come across, which we believe could use improvement: 1.  Not easy to go from one page to the next 2.  Do not know if the information has been saved 3.  Adding players to roster is difficult 4.  Pulling up roster 5.  User friendly 6.  Closes periodically 7.  Allows player to be on multiple teams 8.  Does not allow multiple windows open to make easier 9.  Easier print pages 10. Score sheet 11. Roster needs to be bigger 12. Easy scheduling (i.e. inserting teams into leagues, cancellations and rescheduling) 13. Playoffs (brackets) 14. Report forms (standings, statistics) 15. Needs to be linked to student data base for easier updating 16. Playoff criteria (make bracket automatically) 17. Needs to acknowledge if 4 games are played in 3 weeks how to schedule 18. Playing on 2 teams(window needs to state player, team, league and question as to whether or not to add player) 19. Master schedule for scheduling needs to be able to manually pick and choose actual dates if needed
2	Drew Boese (L), Tyler Hicks-Wright, Dave Knauer and Pat Roby [Salman Azhar] Team 2 page	City of Terre Haute [Greg Lankston]	Virtual Reality Golf Course I would like to have a virtual reality golf course of Rea Park and Hulman Links developed in a possible Macromedia Flash environment or some web based software package. What the intent would be is to allow people to play both the City golf courses online before they actually show up in person. We think this would be a great added feature to the new coming websites for the courses.
3	Matt Gordon (L), Ben Fredericksen, Jason Gladish and Alec Marin [Salman Azhar] Team 3 page	Xetron [Jarrod Gray]	Database PDB Export Software Interactive Disassembler (IDA) Pro is the “most advanced tool for hostile code analysis, vulnerability research and software reverse engineering.” IDA is used to disassemble a target binary and then comment and name the functions, variables, structures and strings by reverse engineering the resulting assembly code. A well commented and named IDA disassembly database is key to the reverse engineering process. Once all of the functions, variables, and structures are named and commented it would be beneficial to load this information into a debugger to use while debugging the target binary. Xetron proposes a project to take the data held in the IDA database and export it into the Microsoft PDB file format. The officially undocumented PDB file format is used by the Microsoft Windows Debugger (WinDbg) and Microsoft Visual Studio. This project would entail reverse engineering and documenting the PDB file format as well as creating an IDA Pro plug-in that is capable of writing data in this format. More information on IDA can be obtained at: http://www.datarescue.com/idabase/
4	Eric Borzello (L), Dylan Havard, George Nixon, David Rickard and Jacob Silvia [Salman Azhar] Team 4 page	Indiana State University (ISU) and Rose-Hulman [Gary Stuart (ISU) and Jeff Leader (RHIT)]	Phylogenetic Tree Reconstruction Gary Stuart of Indiana State University has suggested a technique for reconstructing phylogenetic trees, of species or of proteins, that does not use local alignments. The heart of Stuart's approach is the singular value decomposition of an extremely large matrix. Pre-processing of the genetic data and post-processing of the left and right singular vectors is difficult because of the amount of data and the need to convert numerical results back to biologically meaningful quantities. We would like to have the group focus on problems related to the interpretation of the left singular vectors, representing copeptide motifs (i.e., idealized segments of proteins) and the right singular vectors, representing protein families. We need to select parts of the data based on simple numerical criteria and display the corresponding amino acid sequences in a form suitable for investigation by humans. We also need to be able to cluster them based on similarity and to compare them to standard sequences in motif databases. We need to be able to cluster parts of phylogenetic trees when the number of species is on the order of ten thousand, and to have an interface that allows us to view such trees in a reasonable way. These programs would be integrated with our current software for pre-processing the sequence data, performing the SVD, and sending info. to the publicly available package PHYLIP which calculates the information needed to construct the tree.
5	Lab Scheduling Program: Jennifer Ford (L), Charles Lehman and Adam Livingston Maintenance Order System: Amanda Chenery (L), Casey Adkins, Chip Brewer, Tyler Hileman and Dan Shugan Overall Leader: Jennifer Ford [Don Bagert] Team 5 page	Southwest School Corporation [Nancy Hunt]	[This is the integration of two separate proposals from the same organization.  Proposal #1:] Lab Scheduling Program Southwest School Corporation needs an online scheduling program for computer labs and wireless carts. All four of our schools have wireless laptop carts as well as wired labs. The problem is scheduling time to use the labs. Presently at all schools we use a sign-up book to reserve the cart or lab. Using Sullivan High School as an example: If a teacher wants to use the wireless laptop carts or a lab, they must go to the library and find the appropriate book of the four books that are kept there and enter their name on the day and period. Some of the computer labs are classrooms and are only available certain periods during the day. We feel that this could be accomplished much better if teachers or staff could log onto the school’s website and access a booking schedule for these wireless laptop carts or labs. It would need to be dynamic so that as soon as they enter their request this time block would be closed. There are also rules for the carts that would have to be incorporated such as the carts can only be checked out for a ½ day or full day and not for just one period because of power charging issues. An online calendar booking system would be a wonderful tool also for locating the mobile carts or a classroom of students who may have moved to a lab. [Proposal #2]: Maintenance Order System Southwest School Corporation needs an online Maintenance Order System for the custodial staff. When teachers, principals, or other staff needs a maintenance item installed or a problem addressed such as a new light bulb, pencil sharpener, etc, they have to contact the office and/or fill out an AVO (Avoid Verbal Order) form to be left where a custodian will find it. The maintenance workers have radios, but usually only one person in each of the five buildings has a radio to communicate with the custodian. This is usually the secretary’s job. The superintendent also oversees larger projects and needs to communicate important details and information to the maintenance personnel that might not be remembered if it was given over a radio. All custodial staff has access to a computer with Internet. They also all have e-mail addresses. It would be extremely more efficient if they could log onto the SWSC network and see what jobs are needed and what the priority might be for them. It would also be wonderful for all staff to be able to request minor installations such as a light bulb without having to leave their room. It would absolutely be a powerful tool for the superintendent and principals to keep the custodial staff informed and visa versa. Custodial staff could document completed jobs and also request the need for outside vendors to be called in to assist on more complex problems.
6	Brandi Soggs (L), Jonas Collaros, Steven Montgomery and Jason Segal [Salman Azhar] Team 6 page	open source project [Ted Gould]	Online Whiteboarding Application Software Many times a picture can describe ideas that are impossible over simple text based communication (chat). With many work teams having physically diverse locations sometimes sharing and working on pictures can be very difficult. This project is to create a real-time online whiteboarding application using instant messaging protocols. The problems with previous projects of this type is that they use very simplified drawing tools that restrict the user or they use a specially designed protocol that requires special set up (or both). This project aims to remove both of those restrictions by using standards, and an existing vector drawing application. This project involves extending a current vector drawing program (Inkscape) using the standard XMPP messaging protocol (Jabber).   Inkscape is based on the W3C's XML based vector graphics format SVG. Internally, Inkscape maintains the structure of this document, and has events occur when this model is changed by the user. When this occurs, a message can be sent to another instance of Inkscape monitoring an XMPP stream on another host, perhaps in another country. This project would involve learning the Inkscape architecture, SVG and XMPP standard and then extending them to achieve the required functionality. Depending on the team size, group chat should also be supported.