Project Ideas

CS4624 Project Ideas

Below are 2 lists: one of possible new projects and one of old projects that could be extended. When a project is selected, its entry is prefixed by a 3 letter abbreviation and the lab day that is responsible for it. Otherwise, a question mark is shown, indicating it is unassigned. Ones with question marks have been moved toward the top to make them easier to find.

Students who have not selected a project should either sign up for a group already scheduled in their lab, pick a project of interest to them and find a group to work with, or form a new group. By Feb. 4 the instructor will begin to assign students to his favorite projects if no prior decision has been made.

Projects

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Training: Groups are invited to work on each of the following aspects of helping up to 200K graduate students/year learn how to prepare an electronic thesis or dissertation. In general, see our current guidelines for submission for a view of the current training materials, all just in text. The aim is to prepare multimedia training. Steps include: design, having the storyboard approved, posting the results on a page to be accessed from WWW (with appropriate plug-ins), and testing with graduate students till friendly. See the work already done by Win Heagy as an example: HTML/RealAudio/VoxWare/Video Tutorials and his step-by-step instructions.
1. (WRD - Thu) Word to PDF, Word Perfect to PDF
  Given an ETD in word processor (e.g., Word or Word Perfect) format, teach the steps involved in generating a PDF file on the Windows and Macintosh platforms.
2. (LNK - Thu) Add hyperlinks to PDF: Given an ETD in PDF format, teach the steps involved in editing a PDF file using Adobe Exchange on Macintosh or Windows platform. Show how to add a bookmark, how to add a yellow sticky, and how to add a link to an external multmedia object. If possible, add in about Adobe's new tool Aesop, a tool which allows you to put PDF buttons, form elements, and movies and sounds into your source documents, before you distill them, and without using Exchange.
3. (TEX - ?) Like the above, but working with LaTeX, which is convenient for mathematical documents.
4. (SCN - ?) Like the above, but focusing on scanning and other multimedia capture methods. This will help students who want to scan in a photograph, or capture audio or video.
(AHS - Thu) Art History Slide Collection: Jane Aiken, Art and Art History, x1-8417, jane.aiken@vt.edu, can advise. The Art History Slide Collection currently maintains its collection's database on a PC using an old databaseprogram. The office is now Macintosh based, and the faculty would like to migrate the collection's database to a platform that is accessible via Web browsers.
(CAV - ?) Campaign Ads: Glen Richardson, Political Science, x1-6814, grichard@vt.edu, can advise. He would like to be able to create a way to view a campaign ad (Quicktime movie) where the viewer would have an option to freeze the frame, just like a pause button, but when you hit this particular freeze frame button, commentary on that part of the ad or movie would pop up in a side window or something.
For example, one of the most studied campaign spots of all time was the 1988 Bush-Quayle ad "Revolving Door," which charged Michael Dukakis with responsiblity for a prison furlough program that let out "first degree murderers not eligible for parole." In fact, the program was started under a previous governor, and Dukakis eventually changed it. The ad also uses printed text in a way that invites viewers to assume that 268 first degree murderers escaped, when in fact only one did. It would be great if, as the ad is playing, the viewer could click on an icon when such claims are being made, freezing the frame and calling up additional information to clarify or correct that ad's charges. Then they could go back to the ad and finish playing it.
(DOM - ?) Adapt West Point Doom-based education activity to use with this or another course, and study how effective it is to aid learning. Jason Foster (sys admin for video.cs.vt.edu) has found useful information to get started. Also, see the CS383 - Computer Information Systems Homepage anchor "Instructional Games". Contact carver@eecs1.eecs.usma.edu or the instructor for more information.
(EID - ?) Documentary, testimonials of NSF-funded Interactive Learning with a Digital Library in Computer Science (contact the instructor)
(IBM - ?) One or several projects beta testing IBM's MediaMiner software. See paper overview and invitation message and online information. Natural for this class are Query by Image Content and ImageMiner, but other of the tools listed are appropriate too. Contact the instructor for more information.
(IRV - ?) Best of SIGIR videotape plus WWW pages (contact the instructor)
(MBG - Tue) WOO from moosburg: Advice is available from Craig Struble (cstruble@vt.edu), Brian Amento (brian@discus.ise.vt.edu), Jon Kies (jkies@vt.edu), John Carroll (carroll@vtopus.cs.vt.edu). As part of the Learning in Networked Communities project, a front-end to BEV will be developed using WOO or related technology, to resusitate an earlier MOO called moosburg.
(PSG - ?) Public Soil and Ground Water Tutorial: Naraine Persaud, Crops, Soils and Environmental Systems, x1-3817, npers@vt.edu, can advise. Dr. Persaud would like to develop a computer based tutorial to teach the public how to read soil survey maps and to conduct elementary ground water assessments of their property.
(VIS - ?) Visualization of information searching - for the CAVE - contact Dr. Harry M. Kriz (Harry_M_Kriz@vt.edu) in Newman Library.
(AIO - Tue) Art/Architecture Slides with Oracle: A Fall 1996 CS5604 class project almost finished building an Oracle Art Slide Database. The areas which require additional work include the addition of keyword searching, putting the database on the Web (making it accessible to others), and designing an suitable interface for viewing and updating the slides. The student involved is S. Gregory Micheal, gmicheal@vt.edu. The other primary contact people are: 1. Donna S. Abel, Abel@vt.edu (540) 231-3967, Slide Curator, Art & Architecture Library, 302 Cowgill Hall; 2. James Powell, jpowell@vt.edu, Programmer/Analyst (James Powell has the new database files on his office machine.)
(FSE - Thu) Help the Faculty Senate use multimedia to convey faculty expectations so that students will have a more pleasant and productive time at Virginia Tech. Develop animations / videos / interactive photo+sound skits to communicate in a positive, friendly, but effective way about a list of topics you devise with Joel Nachlas (nachlas@vt.edu) and his task force (meeting Tue 1/28 at 12:30 in Whittemore 302H). Possible subjects include: attending class, doing homework, studying, avoiding substance abuse.
(HCI - Thu) Overview of the Center for Human Computer Interaction (contact J. Carroll, carroll@cs.vt.edu)
(HFN - CANCELLED) Analyze and compare foods: Dr. Ann Hertzler, Human Nutrition and Foods, x1-4673, ann.hertzler@vt.edu, developed a Hypercard based program to analyze and compare food items, using a 1000 item food database. She would like this converted to the Web, so that users could easily select list food selections, choose nutrients to view, and make comparisons.
(HUM - Tue) Humanities WWW pages with Java, multimedia - contact Prof. Nancy Simmons (Nancy.Simmons@vt.edu) in CIS/Humanities.
(MHG - Thu) Multimedia User Interface Design Work closely with a visiting professor who directs a center for human-computer interaction research in London on guidelines for developing multimedia applications, with real-life examples - contact Dr. Alistair Sutcliffe. Note: Peter Shires in VetMed is willing to provide some examples.
(PAL - Tue) Applying Palace technology to extend WWW support for CS4624: A pilot effort was done by Howard Haynie (hhaynie@vt.edu) for CS1604, supervised by N. Dwight Barnette, barnette@cs.vt.edu. Click on the "MOO" button - he created the Web site to explain what needs to be know from a client standpoint. Once you have further explored what he created and tried the Palace client yourself, he can help you configure a Palace server. We have a Pentium in McB 110 for this; the disk drive we ordered just arrived, and more memory is on order. This machine would then be a dedicated (NT?) server for courses using Palace support.
(QVR - Thu) QuickTime VR tour of Campus: The University of Texas has an excellent tour site (including QTVR>and a welcome by Walter Cronkite) that may be viewed starting at: http://www.utexas.edu/tours/vrc/ and other tours of the campus may be accessed through the main tour page: http://www.utexas.edu/tours/ - contact David Ulbrich (DrUlbrich@mail.utexas.edu) for information.
(RHP - Tue) Residence Halls Project to create a multimedia repository about residence options for Virginia Tech students, WWW accessible to current and prospective students.
(VRA - Tue) (VR) 3-D modelling of the new ACITC building: Prepare a virtual 3-D model of the new ACITC (Advanced Communications and Information Technology Center) building from the blueprints so that individuals can walk through the building using their computer. Contact Scott Hurst re architectural information; Prof. Joan McLain-Kark (Interior Design - jmkark@vt.edu) re her detailed work to model a few parts of the building with 3D Studio on PC, PC, Self-Navigation Animation on SGI; Prof. Ron Kriz (kriz@wave.esm.vt.edu) regarding making the model work in the CAVE.
(VTA - Thu) Virginia Tech Internet Audio (contact R. Neal Shambaugh, neals@vt.edu) - see PDF description plus new information.

CS4624 Project Ideas

Projects

Previous projects that could be extended