CS490-Project

Schedule

January 27 Revised project proposal (about a page long) and research plan, consisting of milestones and their dates.
February 4 Progress report. By this time you should have made some good progress on your project and surveyed the literature.
February 11 More progress. Implementation, if applicable, just about done, thought about extensions, last date to get feedback from class.
February 14, 15 Show and tell in class
February 19 5pm All materials due.

Aim

The aim of the project is to propose a new tool or application for the web, or to propose a significant improvement over something already in existence. The main output of the project is a paper. However, in most cases, you will produce some piece of software that demonstrates the feasibility of your project. The paper has to adress several topics. You have to research and present prior work in your chosen area. You have to demonstrate your own ideas and work, and have to explain how it is new or improves on existing work. Finally, you have to show future avenues along which your work can be extended.

I strongly encourage you to work in groups. This is a research project, which means that you have to give weekly progress reports. The first deadline is the proposal deadline. I want you to give me an informal proposal by Wednesday, January 19, 9am. I will give you feedback by Thursday, class time. You may wish to come and talk to me between now and Wednesday, as this should greatly help you in coming up with a feasible proposal. During the last week of classes, there will be a "show and tell" in which you have to formally present your work, in a roughly 15 minute presentation to the class. The paper and any software are due on February 19th, at 5pm. For any group of size n, where n > 1, a confidential evaluation of each group member (that includes yourself), stating the contribution of each member, is required.

Possible Projects

When it comes to projects, I want you to be as creative as possible. To give you a sense of the scope and nature of the projects, I am listing a couple of examples. If you want, you may pick them. However, I shall be more than happy, if none of them gets chosen. If you have several ideas or are not sure about your ideas, please talk to me.

Projects under the heading: Wire this!

The approach of each of these projects would be to use existing technology in new areas. However, simply hooking up a bunch of sensors to the web does not cut it. We want to use the power of the web to accomplish new tasks. Remember that once you hook things up to the web you get a big disk (to store stuff over time, and distance, i.e. you can check and act on the data from miles and miles away.) A project in this category would actually hook up a bunch of sensors to the web, as a way of demonstrating an overarching project. The idea is that this would be a prototype, to show that something can be done. In the paper accompaying your project, you would put your device in the bigger context of a new idea. A good part of the paper should argue the benefits and potential drawpacks of your project. You also have to discuss why it is important that the device be run/controlled over the web. Furthermore, you have to present and discuss extensions of you project.

A project such as: A video game like tour of the department/institute. All of the above comments apply. While it is not expected that you do a complete video tour of the institute, you should implement as much as necessary to give a flavor of your project. Again, you have to put it in a bigger context and show extensions.

Better search engines or personal agents For such a project, you have to develop new ideas, summarize existing technology and known attempts to write better search engines. A prototype demonstrating your ideas, is desirable but not necessary, depending on how far reaching your ideas are.

A personal radio station In this project, you would combine recorded streaming audio and a good interface to pick streaming audio from existing radio stations. (Once streaming video becomes viable, it would be easy to extend this product.)