ODL335 Project Suggestions

This page contains supervisors' suggestions for ODL projects. Please see the Supervision page for the supervisor's contact details and to check whether the supervisor is still accepting students.

Lourdes Agapito

Silvano Barros

Theme 2 Computer Simulation
The intention is to specify, design and implement a simulation system (e.g. Logic simulation, etc). Within the chosen area, the student must specify a reasonable scope and functionality for the system. E.g. In the case of logic simulation, the student should make provision for the description of simple logic circuits (comprising logic gates) and stimulli for the inputs. It should then carry out simulation and display the behavior of the design for design verification purposes. no Students should not normally work on the same area for simulation. Students are expected to have of read up to familiarise themselves with their chosen topics

Theme 3 Stock Market System
The intention is to specify, design and implement a stock price or option system displaying price trends graphically and attempting to make simple buy/sell predictions. The pricing data will have to be collected by the student from websites that make them available and used to test and demonstrate the system. The student must specify a reasonable scope and functionality for the system. e.g. types of displays, setting and removing triggers, etc. There will be a strict limit of 3 students who will be permitted to work under this theme. Students are expected to have of read up to familiarise themselves with the generalities of such trading systems, seek their own data sources and look up models that are used commonly (e.g. Black-Scholes for traded options).

John Bell

Marie-Luce Bourguet

• Investigating the effectiveness of Distance Learning systems and devising/prototyping improvements to their user interfaces.
• Specifying requirements, designing and prototyping user interfaces for small (e.g. mobile) computing systems.
• Designing adapted user interfaces to CASE tools.

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

• Tutoring systems for improving listening skills of second language learners.
• Tutoring systems for supporting language acquisition by children.
• Tutoring systems for languages with different writing systems.
• Investigating and prototyping new CALL paradigms.

Multimodal Interfaces

• Multimodal (e.g. speech and pen) map systems
• Spoken and auditory interfaces
• Pen gesture recognition
• Design toolkit for multimodal interfaces

Nick Bryan-Kinns

New Interfaces for Musical Expression

1. A gesture based musical instrument interface. Rather than using a conventional piano-style keyboard to produce sound a mouse is used to create live sound using gesture input
2. An algorithmic ambient sound device. An artificial life algorithm is used to generate ambient sound based on a set of user defined parameters such as processor load, typing, network load, time of day, weather, etc.
3. An algorithmic beat accompanist. An algorithm is developed which can accompany a user playing a piece of music using a conventional keyboard style interface. The algorithm produces appropriate rhythms in real time e.g. using markov chains
4. An algorithmic soloist. An algorithm listens to what a user plays and then produces a solo piece to fit with the user's piece e.g. using markov chains
5. A swarm based algorithm. Swarm algorithms are linked together to create a music playing algorithm which may, or may not, additionally take user input.
6. A collaborative jam environment. A tool is constructed based on a client-server model where clients each have a replicated loop of music which users interact with. User interactions are shared with other clients so producing a semi-synchronous shared music experience.
7. An image to music convertor. An algorithm takes a still image and produces a piece of music based somehow on the properties of the image.
8. A video to music convertor. An algorithm takes a live moving image as its input and produced some musical output based on the video (e.g. from a webcam).
9. A music masher. An algorithm takes two musical sound files and produces one musical output which is somehow the combination of the two (e.g. using the beat from one and the melody from another).
10. A novel music learning environment. A user interface is developed which teaches music in a non-conventional manner - that is, without the use of score and note representation. E.g. by analogy with colour mixing.
11. A novel composition environment. A user interface is developed which allows composition of music in a non-conventional manner - that is, without the use of score and note representation. E.g. by analogy with colour mixing and painting.
12. An ambient sound space. An algorithm collects sounds from an environment (e.g. through microphones) and uses them to produce continuous music for the environment.

Paul Curzon

Norman Fenton

Web-based learning of topics in probability, risk and Bayesian nets.

• Basics of probability theory and Bayes theorem
• Risk assessment
• Basics Bayesian nets
• Using the AgenaRisk tool
• Building Bayesian nets in the AgenaRisk tool
• Advanced analysis using the AgenaRisk tool

• Material arranged in lessons (typically about 5) that all must contain some kind of interactive learning feature.
• Each lesson must end with a test. Users taking the test will be marked and feedback provided.
• Appropriate easy to navigate menu structure
• Links to other relevant resources

Shaogang Gong

Pegwei Hao

Basic Group 1: 3D computer animation

Variants (each for one student) :

1. Human motion animation: more than 5 types of motion, such as gesture, walk, run, jump, sit-down, lay-down, get-up, and so on.
2. Wind-plant animation: more than 3 types of wind, such as breezes, gales and hurricanes, and more than 3 types of plants, such as grass, shrubs, trees with/without leaves.
3. Liquid animation: more than 3 types of liquid materials, such as water, oil and milk, and more than 3 types of motion, such as flowing, tides, drops, splashes.
4. Crash animation: more than 3 types of moving objects, such as cars, bullets and animals/humans, and more than 3 types of hit objects, such as railings, trees and buildings.
5. Floating boat animation: more than 3 types of boats such as sailboats, vessels and steamships, and more than 3 types of background, such as river across a forest, a river across a city and a stormy sea.
6. Martial art animation: more than 5 types of body motion, such as side-kick, roundhouse-kick, push-kick, back-swing, sweep, stamp, punch, palm-push, palm-chop, palm-thrust.

Basic Group 2: Image/video recognition

Variants (each for one student) :

1. 2D shape matching: all the test images and candidate images are just binary, and the patterns should be extratced first and then to compare the geometric shapes of the patterns and to find the similarity between the shapes of the test pattern and the candidate patterns. Finally, to find the best matched image by finding the shape with the highest similarity.
2. Jigsaw puzzle making: Step 1: to generate the patterns for a jigsaw puzzle by using a colour picture with abundant details and using several similar patterns to split the whole image into small pieces. Step 2: to ramdomly generate the pieces for a jigsaw puzzle by rotating all the patterns and putting them into square images with blank background. Step 3: to find the solution by finding the rotation angles and matching positions. The method for Step 3 can be colour comparision or/and pattern comparison.
3. Image indexing/management: Step 1: Automatically to classify a number of images (taken by his own cameras or downloaded from websites) into some classes by content (colour or/and pattern, such as animal, people, mountain, sea, sunset, etc.). Step 2: Automatically to find some indexing structure to make all the images retrievable by using a sample image of different size and different content. Step 3: To make a simple manage system for adding new images into the database and for image retrieval by samples.
4. Face/object tracking: To find a face (or the fatest moving object) in a given video sequence and then track it to find the trajectory of the moving face (or the moving object).
5. Video indexing: shot boundary detection, video features (colour or/and pattern) extraction, video feature classification, and indexing.
6. Face modeling: Given a clip of face video, to find the 3D face model that is consistent with the video clip by using a reference 3D face model or another person's 3D face model.

Pat Healey

• A chat tool experiment on human interaction. This project would involve carrying out a psychological experiment that examines how changes to the resources available for communication alters peoples ability to understand one another. Some programming would be required but the main challenge would be to carry out a properly designed and controlled experiment.
• A project using the principles and strategies used in set design to develop a one-off performance that engages with remote participants. This might take the form of a drama or live performance of some kind that exploits the possibilities offered by technology to include the audience in the interaction.
• Design an alternate reality game, based around the mile-end campus, that exploits the college's wireless network, physical layout and the use of mobile devices.
• An experiment investigating the effects of symmetry of access to communicative channels (e.g., voice, whiteboard, text) on interaction in multi-party groups.

Kohei Honda

Matthew Huntbach

Max Kanovich

• Analysis and simulation of automata (finite-state machines, non-deterministic finite automata, deterministic push-down automata, Turing machines, and alike)
• Analysis of communication protocols (security protocols, mathematical analysis of cryptosystems, and alike)
• Real-time systems (Hybrid systems, Embedded systems, Sensor systems, and alike)
• Planning in Artificial Intelligence (planners and their analysis, planning under uncertainty, and alike)

William Marsh

Peter McOwan

The following will be required and each stage will be included in the final report

1. Students need to select an application area and find an appropriate end user or 'customer' for their system. This could be for example a multimedia training system for staff in a local store, in which case students would identify a shopkeeper willing to take part in the project.
2. Literature review- what's been done before? What can we learn from past attempts? The student should research other such systems available for the chosen application, and analyse their strengths and weaknesses. The results for this review should inform the discussions with the user on the new system.
3. User requirements-what's the system for? What does the user want the system to do? For a particular application students would document the users requirements for the system, in terms of content, user interaction with the system, computer technical specification and 'look and feel' of the interface. While discussing this with the user be aware of the time and resource limitations on you. It is better to produce a smaller well defined system that works rather than a large ambitious system that doesn't work.
4. Formal requirements specification- Have you clearly found what the user wants? The student would then formalise these system requirements in a document, and have them agreed by the user.
5. Implementation Design: design the system, and decide how to construct it Students then prepares an implementation design for the applications, perhaps employing UML techniques
6. Software development: write and test the code, and detail how the systems developing Students should then implement the system, and detail the testing done of the software at each stage
7. User testing: does the system do what the user and the target group want it to do? The user and other appropriate participants should then test the final system, and its usability and fitness for purpose assessed using for example questionnaire studies or other usability methods. Students should where possible also include a statement from the user that they are happy the system performs to the given specification.
8. Analysis: what's good and bad about using your system? Students should then critically analyse theirs system in the light of the user feedback identifying where their systems strengths and weaknesses lie.
9. Conclusions- what would you do differently the next time, what have you learned? Students should indicate which elements of the system would need to be modified, and how they could be improved if time permitted.

Christof Monz

Andrew Moore

Martin Neil

I invite projects each on one of three themes, all involving building knowledge-based or decision support systems using Bayesian networks and using a modelling tool called AgenaRisk. The project themes are:

• modelling risk be it of a project, business, environmental or systems nature (student's choice),
• developing a diagnostic model to identify and rank causes given a set of observed effects. Example systems might involve medical diagnosis and fault diagnosis.
• modelling financial and business risk using standard accounting measures such as ROI etc.

For those students who would prefer a mix of programming and modelling I am prepared to supervise students in the use of the AgenaRiskAPI for the purpose of enabling their own client server, web based or stand alone appplication. However students choosing this type of project will need to develop a small, or reuse an existing, model to run in the finished application.

Jane Reid

• Information seeking and retrieval (including WWW): Mostly user aspects, e.g. how users look for information, how interfaces can support this process, user studies,
• Collaboration
• Teaching and learning support: Primarily for our teaching here in DCS and/or in ODL

Specific project topics:

1. Online Skills Portfolio. We have a new Professional Skills Programme for first year students in DCS, which includes development of a skills portfolio to help planning of professional and career development. This portfolio can be given to potential employers to impress them, and helps staff write good reference for the students. We have much of the basic teaching material already, but how do we support this online? This project will involve analysis of alternative technologies and implementation of a system to support students in developing and maintaining their skills portfolio online.
2. Automatic CV generator. Different employers and different jobs need different emphases and presentation in your CV, but the basic elements and information are the same. We would like to be able to: store and maintain a collection of reusable CV objects, and produce automatically tailored CVs from this collection according to the job / employer information available. This project will involve the development and testing of such a system.
3. Plagiarism detection using anomalies Plagiarism is a growing problem. Automatic plagiarism detection systems mostly use simple text matching, but there are sometimes other clues, e.g. distinctive misspellings. This project will investigate what factors might be employed and how to employ them, and will build a system to do it. Thr project will involve research and will therefore be of a challenging standard.
4. Collaborative information seeking Most information retrieval systems (including the WWW) are built on the assumption of single users, but many people work together. We would like to find out why and how people look for information collaboratively (which will involve a user study), and how to support this in systems and interface design (this will involve implementation). This project can be modified to focus more on either the user or technical aspects of the topic.

Soren Riis

Thomas Roelleke

• Free-text search on relational databases: Develop a key-word-based approach for searching data stored in SQL databases
• Efficient XML data management: Investigate current approaches of loading XML data to databases, measure the performance
• Personalised travel information: Provide users with a personalised stream of travel information containung the information relevant to them
• Personal newspaper: Build a system that exptracts from a number of information sources the news relevant to a user
• Source Code Search: Develop a system for searching source code (can be any language, e.g. Perl, Java, C++)

Tony Stockman

• Database-driven and accessible version of the describe-online web site.
  Explanation:
  www.describe-online.com is a website designed to help people get around using text. For example, it contains directions to the London Underground and other railway stations in the UK. I know the person who runs the Company, and he has asked me if I could get a project student to produce a system where all the information contained on the site could be contained in a web-enabled database system. Because many of the users of the system are visually impaired, a key requirement of the system is that it is accessible to a screen reader. I am happy to talk with you about what this involves and how you can test this.
• Program to make guitar tab in html (as on the guitarnoise web site) accessible.
  Explanation:
  www.guitarnoise.com contains lots of examples of guitar tab. Using a screen reader this is completely inaccessible. The aim of this project is to produce software which can extract the guitar tab information from web pages such as those on the guitarnoise site and play them. A good solution to this project will provide a highly interactive and accessible interface.
• Accessible music composer software.
  Explanation:
  There is, as far as I am aware, currently no music composition software accessible to a screen reader. The input to this system would not be through normal music notation, but by specifying notes and chords together with additional characteristics such as bend, hammer on/off etc. The system should be able to play back the stored music, ideally using either MIDI or pre-recorded instruments.
• Auditory games.
  Explanation:
  There is a growing interest in the development of auditory games (see for example www.gmagames.com). These games use a combination of speech and other sounds to convey information. Currently though there are no auditory versions of some very popular games such as soccer or cricket. This project is to address this need. It may be possible to get input/test the software with one or two members of the England blind football or cricket teams as part of the usability evaluation of the project. The system need not have a visual interface, but this would be desirable in order to examine approaches to matches involving both blind and sighted players.
• Audio tennis game using an auditory software environment such as CSOUND or SuperCollider. Eventually this will use motion capture with gestures, but a basic version could be programmed using cursors or other keys. Equally could be done for cricket or baseball.
• Auditory version of Excel Chart Wizzard
• Designing a mobile phone interface to a spreadsheet sonification system
  Explanation:
  I currently have a prototype application which enables a visually impaired person to review values of cells in a spreadsheet quickly using sound. I would be interested in a project to design, build and evaluate a mobile phone-based interface to this system.
• Research into mental models of rooms and auditory scene analysis.
  Explanation
  Different people visualise rooms, building and routes differently. These mental models vary between sighted people, and probably even more between sighted and blind people. This project is about examining how different people internalize models of space, buildings and routes. Basic research about people's mental models of these things will be followed by the use of a specialized software environment called SLAB, built at NASA, to construct 3D auditory scenes and explore differences in people's mental models of these scenes.

Anastasios Tombros

Graham White