Projects
Confirmed Projects
The following projects are currently available for the Fall 2006 offering of 600.392: Senior Design Project. The projects are listed in no particular order whatsoever.
Logical Frameworks in Public Health
Public health practitioners around the world use an approach to problem solving and health-program monitoring and evaluation called the Logical Framework approach. To support these activities, we envision a highly graphical environment that enables public health practitioners to specify their projects but also to track the implications of changed assumptions on the project and to manage the data-analytic components and results, ideally, specifying the database models needed to support the project, making this a knowledge-management environment strongly constrained by logical relationships and usable around the world. Domain experts in medicine, informatics, public health, and monitoring-and-evaluation are available as domain experts on this project, primarily related to HIV therapy in Ethiopia.
Adaptive Programming Tutorial
Develop an adaptive, question-based tutorial to help students learn the basics of imperative programming. The system should only present material that is really needed according to previous solutions entered by the student. There is lots of related work to consider, like computer adaptive testing (currently employed in the GRE and Yahoo! personals, to mention just two) and online tools for teaching (WebCT, Blackboard, moodle, etc.) The system would see use in undergraduate computer science education at JHU, possibly leading to publication.
Automating Client Service Evaluations
Instructional designer for national veterinary company with more than 375 animal hospitals in 37 states is in search of a less labor-intensive, more accurate method of collecting data for a client service training project called Mystery Shop. The goal of the project is find a way to allow Hospital Managers to enter data directly into a web-based form that can then be manipulated by instructional designers, automating the process of collecting data (currently being emailed to a single person file by file) into a summary spreadsheet. Because animal hospital management, from the hospital level to the upper echelons of the corporate structure, all rely upon this data, automation will not only be a boon to those who spend countless hours maneuvering data, but it will also remove at least one degree of human error from the Mystery Shop program.
Digital Choreography
Develop a control system to automatically "choreograph" physical devices such as lights, motors, lasers, etc. to a given soundtrack using Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques. Although initial prototypes of the system could be simulated, the eventual goal is to actually build a complete system including the physical components; a "dancing fountain" of sorts is most likely at this point.
Public Vote Counting for Reliable Elections
POMRAD (Public OMR at a Distance) is a way for multiple interested parties to count OMR-able paper ballots transparently and concurrently with minimal help or interference from a centralized authority. The idea has received praise from secure voting advocate Bev Harris (blackboxvoting.org), among others, for its security, simplicity and transparency. An implementation would involve integrating a camera and PC with simple computer vision algorithms (supplied in libraries such as OpenCV or Gandalf) in order to produce a real-time vote count from a live display of ballots. Depending on the progress made, students may also decide to fine-tune the system to work on as many currently OMR-able paper ballot layouts as possible as well as design their own ballots optimized for the POMRAD system. If developed well and if tests give positive results (as expected) the work may very well be published and the prototype may be further developed and used to ensure the integrity of future elections — possibly affecting history. To ensure full transparency, it is preferable that all code be open source, with Linux (optimally using video4linux) as the preferred platform.
Unconfirmed Projects
The following projects are under consideration but have not been confirmed as "available" yet. The projects are listed in no particular order whatsoever.
