The Wonder YearsProject Manager(s): Alaa Abuelif; Fatimah Alqassab Team Members: Ronan Lambert; Sulhan Saamee; Bob Sharp; Lee So Weekly Update Tine: G1.15, Wed 2-3pm |
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Key Idea: A software environment to capture the things your kids do and produce as they grow up through their "Wonder Years": artwork (2D and 3D!), essays, school performances, sports, birthday heightmap ...
I've found one of the delights of being a dad is experiencing the very wide ranging (!!) creative things my kids get up to through school, clubs, and when I'm foolish enough to leave them unsupervised. The haunted house 'movie' my daughters made when they were ages 8 and 6, shot in the garage, is ... well ... a SCREAM! I've got photos of them receiving awards, videos of school performances, the list goes on. The trouble is the content is all over the place. I know I've never deleted any of it, but for some of it I'd be hard pressed to remember just where exactly squirrelled it away. The aim of the project is to develop a software environment to capture, store and help organize all this. This project will see you working with a wide range of multimedia formats—photos, audio, video, and 3D models—in addition to text document formats such as PDF. While this handily lends itself to establishing clearly defined along the lines of handling the different media, the key to this project will be developing a software system that brings it all together. For that I'd recommend looking at a software solution such as a Digital Library toolkit, or else some other form of Content Management System. Useful Links:
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e-Health-e (eHealthy)Project Manager: Ryan Le Quesne Team Members: Andrei Dalusong; Pratik Jivanji; Annelisa Tiddy Equipment on loan: 2 x Android Phones Weekly Update Tine: G1.15, Wed 2-3pm |
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Key Idea: Develop inexpensive non-invasive monitoring and assistance software for senior citizens.
Much has been written about the role technology can play in supporting health care for the elderly as our populations grow, as even a cursory web search on healthcare for the elderly technology shows. Many countries are thinking big, and have big budgets to match. This is not this project—think more Kiwi Ingenuity and Number-8 Fencing Wire! Today it is extremely easy to pick up a smartphone for under $40, and this provides "the way in" for this project, as that's actually a pretty powerful piece of general computer kit you have there, comes with its own display, battery power and comms, (and not a cable in sight!), and which is available for you to re-program. Now bump the number of smartphones up to 3-4 (still cheaper than a fitbit), and you've got a long-lasting, versatile source of computer kit to work with. Deployed in a eHealth setting for the elderly around the home, say with one of the smartphones slipped into a back-pocket for convenience, imagine that utility such a reprogrammed device could have: a big one would be detecting if the person using the device has had a fall; others that spring to mind are helping keep track of medication to take, and providing both audio reminders (tied in with calendering?) and allowing the user to record things as a memory aid. But put your thinking caps and don't be held back by the suggestions made here. I'm sure there are many other examples you can think of. If, for example, you can figure out how using the device would help keep track of your keys, glasses and whether you've locked the house, and you'll have a product that's going to be of interest to a demographic much larger than the elderly at home! Useful Links:
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R & R (Reading and Research)Project Manager(s): Dalyn Anderson; Kieran Frewen Team Members: Alex Grant; Ryan Mccarthy; Hayden Osborne; Isaac Read Weekly Update Tine: G1.15, Wed 2-3pm |
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Key Idea: Develop a software environment that helps in the study of legal documents.
More so than perhaps other subject at university, law students have a lot of material to learn. Iterating over your substantial (!) course readings, a common technique is to gradually refine the highlighting, notes, and annotations made on the documents. Course readings are made available in both electronic and printed form, and the nature of the work is that it is important to be able to switch back and forth between the two medium, as best suits the circumstances. The technical work for this project centers on document content processing and electronic document representation. PDF would be a strong candidate for working with on the electronic side of things, image processing and OCR for working the printed form, and the small matter of some software that makes it easy to transition back-and-forth between the two forms! Useful Links: |
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Mashup: Snakes and Ladders++Project Manager: Christopher Symon Team Members: Matthw Anderson; Anders Bjerring; Youssef Elwakil Weekly Update Tine: G1.15, Wed 3-4pm |
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Key Idea: An adaptive/Dynamic version of Snakes and Ladders that sets a challenge at the point where you might go up a ladder or down a snake, for example combining the game-play with Matching Pairs/Pelmanism.
For this project I've pitched the idea of combining Snakes and Ladders with Memory/Matching Pairs, but really I'm interested in any creative idea (that the whole team can get behind) that creates a new game out of the mashup of two different games. In making a mashup, if moving from physical games to digital versions, the option that the "setting" of the game can be different each time the game is played in a digital version is a particular interesting dynamic to play around with. Implementing everything from scratch is one way to approach this projet. The other is to select existing, open source, code bases for the two games and develop the new game out of that. The latter saves time in terms of providing large portions of code providing needed functionality, however this needs to be offset against the time you spent looking through th code and understanding it. Choosing between these two approaches is a common dilema at the start of computer projects, and for most projects it is by no means clear which is the best tack to take. Since most of your university assessment in Computer Science largely follows the implement-everything-from-scratch approach, I highlight the opportunity in this project to gain experience with the working-with-existing-code approach. To be absolutely clear, for this project, your team is free to choose which approach to take. Heading down the working-with-existing-code approach, the complexity of the mashup game idea strikes me as compatible with developing a web-app, and in doing so, you can hit the mark of developing mobile devices as well as the desktop through cross-platform development environment such as Meteor or React Native. Demoing the end result on a tablet would seem like the best form-factor to choose: the department has a loan pool of mobile devices, including tablets, which can be checked-out through the School reception on the ground floor of the FG-link tower. From some initial searching on the web, there seem to be a variety of web-based implementations of Snakes and Ladders and the Memory/Matching Pairs game. See Useful Links below for an example of each: time would need to in determining how suitable they might be, and also in locating other potential code-bases. But that presupposes your team decides to do a mashup around these two games. You might decide on an entirely different course of action to develop a mashup game! Useful Links: |
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DIY USB Thumb-print-driveProject Manager: Jacob Hobbs Team Members: Yaser Azfar; Daniel Barnett; Ben Greenwood; Mansill Smith Equipment on loan: 1 USB Thumb-drive Weekly Update Tine: G1.15, Wed 3-4pm |
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Key Idea: Turn any USB thumbdrive into a more secure device by combining features of your phone: fingerprint recognition to decode, alert you that the thumbdrive is still in the computer when it looks like you're leaving it behind by mistake.
While some companies do make USB thumbdrives that require fingerprint authentication to access the data stored on it (for example Lexar, how about all the people that didn't have the forethought to buy such a device, but would like the convenience of being able to add such functionality to the existing USB thumbdrives they already have? Enter DIY USB Thumb-print-drive. The idea to this project is to take advantage of the fact that most people have smartphones, and those devices support bioinformatic forms of identification, such as fingerprint and face recognition. Hook that up with some software that can detect when the phone and a USB flashdrive have been plugged into the same computer, and the software can effectively make the device operate as if it was one of those fancy fingerprint thumbdrives. Next, through the GPS/location serives on the phone, if the software can detect that the person who owns the phone appears to be moving away without unplugging the USB thumbdrive, it can sound an alert on the phone. Taking this project to the next level would be developing a solution that doesn't require the phone to be plugged in at all to a host PC to have this functionality work! Useful Links: |
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Cryptic Music PlaylistsProject Manager: Rhys Compton Team Members: Ricko Agluba; Nicholas McAdam; Luke Mcgregor; James West Weekly Update Tine: G1.15, Wed 3-4pm |
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Key Idea: Something engaging to pass the time while commuting by train, subway, or bus: develop software that can create playlist for you to listen to, where the songs in the list have a hidden connection or link behind them.
At various times in my life I've worked a job that meant I had a lengthy commute on public transport (typically an hour each way) ... along with several other million people! Back then it was an iPod I was plugged in to, to while away the hours. Well iPods have given way to smartphones as our mobile source of music, and that opens the door to a much more interesting way to experience music while traveling non-trivial distances by bus, train, subway, or plane. At the same time, there has also been an explosion on machine readable music information through projects such MusicBrainz that centre on Linked Open Data. This provides fertile in which to frame this project. There are various trajectories this project can take: does it produce playlists from the galatic choice of songs available through providers such iTunes? Or how about you make it work off the songs you have on your phone, thereby having the side-effect of getting you to listen to songs you put on your phone, and have been meaning to listen to. Or how about doing both?!? Do you assume the software app is online the whole time, or if travelling by underground train, perhaps the playlists can be created by the app before the journey starts (when there is readily available internet access), and then have everything store on the phone for the trip. This could even include the linked data content that was used to form the links in the first place, allowing the user the browser around the slide of knowledge base that was utilized to form the cryptic connection. Is the connection in the title (could be fairly easy), or else more deeply embeded, such in the name of the band or album the song comes from? The range of knowledge people have about the music they like is quite varied, so having a level of difficulty would seems like a useful feature. Useful Links:
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