profpartha
Hello,I am a teacher of Computer Science, from India.
More ideas, more projects
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Project work, suggestions
2008-08-19
drpartha@gmail.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suggested duration : 16-20 weeks, full-time involvement
Suggested level : Final year B Tech/ B E students
General skills required : Discrete mathematics, Linux, software
engineering, programming in C -- other specific skills will be
mentioned in the respective project outline given below. ***No
product-specific, or proprietary technology will be necessary.***
Suggested team size : Not more than two persons
NOTE : This is a very tentative, speculative and preliminary
document. It is meant to give you some ideas to start you up in
your project work. You will have to discusss this with your
teachers and project supervisors before you make up your mind to
start on a specific project mentioned here. You will be expected
to select a topic,and then work on it for a few days, and submit
1) a literature survey 2) a project synopsis, work plan cum
proposal document (1 page). The choice of subjects is only a
matter of my personal familiarity of these subjects. You may find
many more ideas, if you search elsewhere or ask others. Some of
these topics will expect you to acquire new skills in areas not
taught to you till now. This is the very purpose of doing
projects, so that you can explore new areas and new ideas.
---------
1. SOFTWARE USABILITY
Project focus area : Survey of usability. Usability case study.
Special skills needed :
Risks :
Project outline:
This project will examine the concept of software usability. It will
study the trends and approaches to usability analysis and evaluation.
It will also involve a detailed case-study. Suggested are -- Indain
Railways information systems, train and travel planning, railway
reservation, railway time table consultation etc. This is a very
useful and practical area of work.
------
2. LUSTRE -- Linux Usability testing, reviewe and evaluation.
Project focus area : Study of the usability aspects of Linux and
common, Linux based packages.
Special skills needed : Strong Linux skills.
Risks :
Project outline: In spite of its enormous strengths, Linux is still
not very popular or attractive to many people. In this project, we
will examine the causes and remedies for this hesitation. It is an
introspection into Linux technology.
---------
3. SCILAB
Project focus area : Implementation and testing of SCILAB
Special skills needed : Good knowledge of computer aided mathematics.
Familiarity with packages liek MATLAB, MAPLE, MATHEMATICA etc. Good
Linux background (since SCILAB works only under Linux)
Risks :
Project outline: SCILAB is a very rich and powerful package for doing
mathematics. It comes from teh famous French institution -- INRIA. It
is a popular and free and public domain software package. Students and
institutions in India can benefit enormously from SCILAB. In this
project, we will try to install and test out SCILAB, and compare it
with the more expensive and commercial poducts like MATLAB, MAPLE,
MATHEMATICA etc.
---------
4. LINUX DESKTOPS
Project focus area : Evaluation of desktop interfaces in Linux.
Comparison of KDE vs. GNOME
Special skills needed : Strong Linux skills
Risks :
Project outline: LINUX is a very strong choice for server
applicatiuons. But its use as a desktop, office tool is still limited.
in this project we will examine scientifically what features will make
Linux more attractive in the desktop/office segment. A special
emphasis will be made on KDE and GNOME.
---------
5. FAULT-TOLERANT SYTEM
Project focus area : Creating a fault-tolerant sytem using RAID
technology.
Special skills needed : Linux
Risks :
Project outline: Linux offers tools for creating RAID based
fault-tolerant systems. We will examine various aspects of fault
tolerance, and then use the RAID approach for fault-tolerance. We will
then implement a real fault tolerant syste using Linux.
---------
6. CLUSTER COMPUTING
Project focus area : Creating a five node Linux cluster. Conduct benchmark
tests on the cluster.
Special skills needed : Networking under Linux
Risks : This is a very ambitious, high-risk project. Can be very challenging.
Project outline: Survey the concept of cluster computing. Compare
BEOWULF and MOSIX. Implement a real 5-node cluster. Conduct
benchmark tests.
---------
7. REAL TIME SYSTEMS
Project focus area : Simulating various concepts of real time systems,
using Petri nets
Special skills needed : Working knowledge of Petri nets, graph theory,
matrix algebra, Linux.
Risks :
Project outline: Petri nets are very intuitive tools for modelling
asynchronous, concurrent systems. They have a strict mathematical
basis. Many public domain Petri net tools are available for free. Using
these tools we will build a battery of simulation packages to show
grahpically verious real time systems concepts.
---------
8. CLOCK SYNCHRONISATION
Project focus area : Simulation of clock synchronisation problems, and
algorithms for clock sysnchronisation in a distribute computing
environment.
Special skills needed : Working knowledge of Petri nets, graph theory,
matrix algebra, Linux.
Risks :
Project outline: Clock synchronisation in a distributed, real time
system, is a very complex, and poorly understood problem. This problem
has been studied by many experts and powerful synchronisation tools
have been proposed. This project will survey the subject of clock
synchronisationa nd implement some of these algolrithms in a
simulation environment, using Petri nets.
---------
9. TOOLS FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN THE LARGE
Project focus area : Study of contemporary tools for huge
trans-national software engineering projects.
Special skills needed : Linux utilities liek make, RCS, CVS,
shell-scripting
Risks :
Project outline: Linux offers various tools for managing large
software engineering projects. Linux itself is a succeess story of the
use of these tools. This project will make a critical study of these
tools and document their comparative strengths and weaknesses.
---------
10. WEBGRAPH
Project focus area : Study of graph-theoretic proerties of large web
sites. Development of tools for analysis of these properties.
Special skills needed : shell-scripting, programming in Perl.
Risks :
Project outline: Any web site can be modeled as an oriented graph.
Given a website, it would be interesting to develop tools which would
analyse the graph theoretic properties of the site. The tools should
extract these properties automatically from teh source code.
---------
11. SEMANTIC WEB
Project focus area : Study of knoweldge representation models for use
in a semantic web. Study of query languages for semantic web.
Special skills needed :
Risks : Very speculative field. Literature may not be available
easily. Could be a very abstract subject.
Project outline: The present WWW technology permits only simple
syntactic queries of the web. For instance, it would be very difficult
to formulate queries which distinguish between -- "all the books
**by** Agatha Christie**" versus "all the books **about** Agatha
Christie". How can knowledge representation tools be used in such
situations ? What kind of interface will they need ? How will these
choices affect search engines ?
---------
12. TEMPORAL KNOWLEDGE
Project focus area : Representation of temporal knoweldge. Temporal
reasoning.
Special skills needed : Graph theory, logic programming
Risks :
Project outline: Temporal knowledge i.e. knowledge about temporal
relatuonships between various events and activities could be of great
use in many contexts. For instance, in the case of an investigation
into an accident, one would like to know the sequence of events and
the combination of events that lead to the accident. Making an
abstract mathematical modl would be of great help in this context.
---------
13. GAME THEORY
Project focus area : Investigation into the application of game theory
in software engineering.
Special skills needed : Strong mathematical skills.
Risks : This is a very abstract subject.
Project outline: Game theory is a mathematical approach to problems
involving conflicting goals and competing adversaries. It ahs been
applied in many engineering fields. It has a special attraction for
handling teh kind of imponderables encountered in software
engineering. We will investigate the areas of software engineering
where game theory could be adopted.
---------
14. SELF ORGANISING MAPS (SOM)
Project focus area : Survey of applications of SOM
Special skills needed : Strong mathematical skills.
Risks : This is a very abstract subject.
Project outline: SOM have been proposed recently for covering various
problems involving fuzzy logic and neural nets. Application areas
include finance, medicine, maitenance engineering, data mining etc. In
this project we will survey the various applications of SOM and
discuss their advantages/disadvantages.
---------
15. STANDARDS
Project focus area : Survey and analysis of software engineering
standards, particularly in the area of Verification and Validation.
Special skills needed : Knowledge of V&V
Risks : Access to standards may be difficult or very expnsive.
Project outline: Verification and validation (V&V) is a very critical
aspect of high-stakes systems. To be able to do V&V in a transparent
and legally-valid manner, various standards have ben developed. This
poject involves a comparative study of these standards and their
application to V&V. Several case studies of application of these
standards will be included in this project. VERY USEFUL AND PRACTICAL
PROJECT.
---------
16. CRYPTOGRAPHY
Project focus area : Elliptic function cryptography
Special skills needed : Strong mathematical skills.
Risks :
Project outline: Conventional cryptographic techniques like RSA
require the use of unsymmetrically complex mathematical functions.
Elliptic functions offfer one such class of asymmetry. In this project,
we will study elliptic functions and the algorithms for use of
elliptic functions in asmmetric key cryptography.
---------
17. HIGH INTEGRITY SYSTEMS IN ADA
Project focus area : Enhancing the integrity o Ada programs using
Spark.
Special skills needed : Programming in Ada.
Risks :
Project outline: This project is a study of Ada programming
language for high integrity systems. It will examine the approach
offered by SPARK -- an Ada program annotator. Spark was developed
based on the idea proposed by Prof. Bernard Carre of Southampton
University. It has been used in many high integrity applications,
particularly in the aviation industry.
---------
18. PROOF ASSISTANTS
Project focus area : Implementation of a proof assistant.
Automatic reasoning. Theorem proving.
Special skills needed : Very strong in predicate calculus.
Risks :
Project outline: The idea of proof of a program correctness is
far superior to the approach of "testing" a program for
correctness. Testing is liable to be incomplete or inconclusive.
Proof on the other ahnd is universal. Automatic or mechanised
proofs is a necessity for large software. This project will
explore the area of automatic reasoning using proof assistants.
---------
19. ANALYSIS OF ACCIDENTS
Project focus area : Tools for analysis of accidents.
Safety-critical systems.
Special skills needed :
Risks :
Project outline: Automation is now increasingly dependent on
processors and software. In acse of any mishap, it becomes very
difficult to trace the sequence of events that led to the
accident. Accident investigation experts rely on a large number
of tools for making time-space models of a pre-accident scenario.
This project will male survey of such models and highlight their
role in automation of safety-critical systems.
---------
20. CONSTRAINT LOGIC PROGRAMMING
Project focus area : Use of CLP for developemnt of timetabling
systems, and rostering systems.
Special skills needed : Logic programming, PROLOG.
Risks :
Project outline: CLP is an ideal tool for programming resource
scheduling problems. We will implement a CLP system and use it
for building a prototype timetabling system.
---------
21. SECURE PROGRAMMING
Project focus area : Study of secure programming concepts. Case
study of programming failures.
Special skills needed : Advanced programming tools in Linux.
Symbolic debuggers. Lint.
Risks :
Project outline: Secure programming is an important aspect of real
time systems used in critical applications. we will examine the
various security related issues and teh tools available for
handling them.
---------
22. REAL TIME CONTROL SYSTEM
Project focus area : Simulation of a lift control system
Special skills needed : Petri net modelling
Risks:
Project outline: A lift is an excellent example of real time
automation. Lift control can be very sophisticated and complex.
This ptroject is an exercise in modeling the control system of a
lift. It will also give the student an exposure to the mechanisms
involved in generating an SRS (software requirements
specicifcations).
-------------
23. SCHEDULING IN REAL TIME SYSTEMS
Project focus area : Simulation of various scheduling algorithms,
using Petri nets. Comparison of scheduling stratgies. Comparison
of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Evaluation of
fairness in scheduling. VERY PRACTICAL PROBLEM
Special skills needed : Petri net modeling
Risks:
Project outline: Scheduling is a fundamental requirement in any
practical real time system. It can appear in many contexts.
Although there are several scheduling stratgeies available, their
performance can only be judged qualitatively. This project will
demonstrate how quantitative analysis can be done for scheduling
algorithms, using simulation with Petri nets. VERY PRACTICAL
PROBLEM
-------------
+ + + + MORE TO COME ...WATCH THIS SPACE
------------please ignore all the material after this line
NN
Project focus area :
Special skills needed :
Risks:
Project outline:
-------------
Project work, suggestions
2008-08-19
drpartha@gmail.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suggested duration : 16-20 weeks, full-time involvement
Suggested level : Final year B Tech/ B E students
General skills required : Discrete mathematics, Linux, software
engineering, programming in C -- other specific skills will be
mentioned in the respective project outline given below. ***No
product-specific, or proprietary technology will be necessary.***
Suggested team size : Not more than two persons
NOTE : This is a very tentative, speculative and preliminary
document. It is meant to give you some ideas to start you up in
your project work. You will have to discusss this with your
teachers and project supervisors before you make up your mind to
start on a specific project mentioned here. You will be expected
to select a topic,and then work on it for a few days, and submit
1) a literature survey 2) a project synopsis, work plan cum
proposal document (1 page). The choice of subjects is only a
matter of my personal familiarity of these subjects. You may find
many more ideas, if you search elsewhere or ask others. Some of
these topics will expect you to acquire new skills in areas not
taught to you till now. This is the very purpose of doing
projects, so that you can explore new areas and new ideas.
---------
1. SOFTWARE USABILITY
Project focus area : Survey of usability. Usability case study.
Special skills needed :
Risks :
Project outline:
This project will examine the concept of software usability. It will
study the trends and approaches to usability analysis and evaluation.
It will also involve a detailed case-study. Suggested are -- Indain
Railways information systems, train and travel planning, railway
reservation, railway time table consultation etc. This is a very
useful and practical area of work.
------
2. LUSTRE -- Linux Usability testing, reviewe and evaluation.
Project focus area : Study of the usability aspects of Linux and
common, Linux based packages.
Special skills needed : Strong Linux skills.
Risks :
Project outline: In spite of its enormous strengths, Linux is still
not very popular or attractive to many people. In this project, we
will examine the causes and remedies for this hesitation. It is an
introspection into Linux technology.
---------
3. SCILAB
Project focus area : Implementation and testing of SCILAB
Special skills needed : Good knowledge of computer aided mathematics.
Familiarity with packages liek MATLAB, MAPLE, MATHEMATICA etc. Good
Linux background (since SCILAB works only under Linux)
Risks :
Project outline: SCILAB is a very rich and powerful package for doing
mathematics. It comes from teh famous French institution -- INRIA. It
is a popular and free and public domain software package. Students and
institutions in India can benefit enormously from SCILAB. In this
project, we will try to install and test out SCILAB, and compare it
with the more expensive and commercial poducts like MATLAB, MAPLE,
MATHEMATICA etc.
---------
4. LINUX DESKTOPS
Project focus area : Evaluation of desktop interfaces in Linux.
Comparison of KDE vs. GNOME
Special skills needed : Strong Linux skills
Risks :
Project outline: LINUX is a very strong choice for server
applicatiuons. But its use as a desktop, office tool is still limited.
in this project we will examine scientifically what features will make
Linux more attractive in the desktop/office segment. A special
emphasis will be made on KDE and GNOME.
---------
5. FAULT-TOLERANT SYTEM
Project focus area : Creating a fault-tolerant sytem using RAID
technology.
Special skills needed : Linux
Risks :
Project outline: Linux offers tools for creating RAID based
fault-tolerant systems. We will examine various aspects of fault
tolerance, and then use the RAID approach for fault-tolerance. We will
then implement a real fault tolerant syste using Linux.
---------
6. CLUSTER COMPUTING
Project focus area : Creating a five node Linux cluster. Conduct benchmark
tests on the cluster.
Special skills needed : Networking under Linux
Risks : This is a very ambitious, high-risk project. Can be very challenging.
Project outline: Survey the concept of cluster computing. Compare
BEOWULF and MOSIX. Implement a real 5-node cluster. Conduct
benchmark tests.
---------
7. REAL TIME SYSTEMS
Project focus area : Simulating various concepts of real time systems,
using Petri nets
Special skills needed : Working knowledge of Petri nets, graph theory,
matrix algebra, Linux.
Risks :
Project outline: Petri nets are very intuitive tools for modelling
asynchronous, concurrent systems. They have a strict mathematical
basis. Many public domain Petri net tools are available for free. Using
these tools we will build a battery of simulation packages to show
grahpically verious real time systems concepts.
---------
8. CLOCK SYNCHRONISATION
Project focus area : Simulation of clock synchronisation problems, and
algorithms for clock sysnchronisation in a distribute computing
environment.
Special skills needed : Working knowledge of Petri nets, graph theory,
matrix algebra, Linux.
Risks :
Project outline: Clock synchronisation in a distributed, real time
system, is a very complex, and poorly understood problem. This problem
has been studied by many experts and powerful synchronisation tools
have been proposed. This project will survey the subject of clock
synchronisationa nd implement some of these algolrithms in a
simulation environment, using Petri nets.
---------
9. TOOLS FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN THE LARGE
Project focus area : Study of contemporary tools for huge
trans-national software engineering projects.
Special skills needed : Linux utilities liek make, RCS, CVS,
shell-scripting
Risks :
Project outline: Linux offers various tools for managing large
software engineering projects. Linux itself is a succeess story of the
use of these tools. This project will make a critical study of these
tools and document their comparative strengths and weaknesses.
---------
10. WEBGRAPH
Project focus area : Study of graph-theoretic proerties of large web
sites. Development of tools for analysis of these properties.
Special skills needed : shell-scripting, programming in Perl.
Risks :
Project outline: Any web site can be modeled as an oriented graph.
Given a website, it would be interesting to develop tools which would
analyse the graph theoretic properties of the site. The tools should
extract these properties automatically from teh source code.
---------
11. SEMANTIC WEB
Project focus area : Study of knoweldge representation models for use
in a semantic web. Study of query languages for semantic web.
Special skills needed :
Risks : Very speculative field. Literature may not be available
easily. Could be a very abstract subject.
Project outline: The present WWW technology permits only simple
syntactic queries of the web. For instance, it would be very difficult
to formulate queries which distinguish between -- "all the books
**by** Agatha Christie**" versus "all the books **about** Agatha
Christie". How can knowledge representation tools be used in such
situations ? What kind of interface will they need ? How will these
choices affect search engines ?
---------
12. TEMPORAL KNOWLEDGE
Project focus area : Representation of temporal knoweldge. Temporal
reasoning.
Special skills needed : Graph theory, logic programming
Risks :
Project outline: Temporal knowledge i.e. knowledge about temporal
relatuonships between various events and activities could be of great
use in many contexts. For instance, in the case of an investigation
into an accident, one would like to know the sequence of events and
the combination of events that lead to the accident. Making an
abstract mathematical modl would be of great help in this context.
---------
13. GAME THEORY
Project focus area : Investigation into the application of game theory
in software engineering.
Special skills needed : Strong mathematical skills.
Risks : This is a very abstract subject.
Project outline: Game theory is a mathematical approach to problems
involving conflicting goals and competing adversaries. It ahs been
applied in many engineering fields. It has a special attraction for
handling teh kind of imponderables encountered in software
engineering. We will investigate the areas of software engineering
where game theory could be adopted.
---------
14. SELF ORGANISING MAPS (SOM)
Project focus area : Survey of applications of SOM
Special skills needed : Strong mathematical skills.
Risks : This is a very abstract subject.
Project outline: SOM have been proposed recently for covering various
problems involving fuzzy logic and neural nets. Application areas
include finance, medicine, maitenance engineering, data mining etc. In
this project we will survey the various applications of SOM and
discuss their advantages/disadvantages.
---------
15. STANDARDS
Project focus area : Survey and analysis of software engineering
standards, particularly in the area of Verification and Validation.
Special skills needed : Knowledge of V&V
Risks : Access to standards may be difficult or very expnsive.
Project outline: Verification and validation (V&V) is a very critical
aspect of high-stakes systems. To be able to do V&V in a transparent
and legally-valid manner, various standards have ben developed. This
poject involves a comparative study of these standards and their
application to V&V. Several case studies of application of these
standards will be included in this project. VERY USEFUL AND PRACTICAL
PROJECT.
---------
16. CRYPTOGRAPHY
Project focus area : Elliptic function cryptography
Special skills needed : Strong mathematical skills.
Risks :
Project outline: Conventional cryptographic techniques like RSA
require the use of unsymmetrically complex mathematical functions.
Elliptic functions offfer one such class of asymmetry. In this project,
we will study elliptic functions and the algorithms for use of
elliptic functions in asmmetric key cryptography.
---------
17. HIGH INTEGRITY SYSTEMS IN ADA
Project focus area : Enhancing the integrity o Ada programs using
Spark.
Special skills needed : Programming in Ada.
Risks :
Project outline: This project is a study of Ada programming
language for high integrity systems. It will examine the approach
offered by SPARK -- an Ada program annotator. Spark was developed
based on the idea proposed by Prof. Bernard Carre of Southampton
University. It has been used in many high integrity applications,
particularly in the aviation industry.
---------
18. PROOF ASSISTANTS
Project focus area : Implementation of a proof assistant.
Automatic reasoning. Theorem proving.
Special skills needed : Very strong in predicate calculus.
Risks :
Project outline: The idea of proof of a program correctness is
far superior to the approach of "testing" a program for
correctness. Testing is liable to be incomplete or inconclusive.
Proof on the other ahnd is universal. Automatic or mechanised
proofs is a necessity for large software. This project will
explore the area of automatic reasoning using proof assistants.
---------
19. ANALYSIS OF ACCIDENTS
Project focus area : Tools for analysis of accidents.
Safety-critical systems.
Special skills needed :
Risks :
Project outline: Automation is now increasingly dependent on
processors and software. In acse of any mishap, it becomes very
difficult to trace the sequence of events that led to the
accident. Accident investigation experts rely on a large number
of tools for making time-space models of a pre-accident scenario.
This project will male survey of such models and highlight their
role in automation of safety-critical systems.
---------
20. CONSTRAINT LOGIC PROGRAMMING
Project focus area : Use of CLP for developemnt of timetabling
systems, and rostering systems.
Special skills needed : Logic programming, PROLOG.
Risks :
Project outline: CLP is an ideal tool for programming resource
scheduling problems. We will implement a CLP system and use it
for building a prototype timetabling system.
---------
21. SECURE PROGRAMMING
Project focus area : Study of secure programming concepts. Case
study of programming failures.
Special skills needed : Advanced programming tools in Linux.
Symbolic debuggers. Lint.
Risks :
Project outline: Secure programming is an important aspect of real
time systems used in critical applications. we will examine the
various security related issues and teh tools available for
handling them.
---------
22. REAL TIME CONTROL SYSTEM
Project focus area : Simulation of a lift control system
Special skills needed : Petri net modelling
Risks:
Project outline: A lift is an excellent example of real time
automation. Lift control can be very sophisticated and complex.
This ptroject is an exercise in modeling the control system of a
lift. It will also give the student an exposure to the mechanisms
involved in generating an SRS (software requirements
specicifcations).
-------------
23. SCHEDULING IN REAL TIME SYSTEMS
Project focus area : Simulation of various scheduling algorithms,
using Petri nets. Comparison of scheduling stratgies. Comparison
of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Evaluation of
fairness in scheduling. VERY PRACTICAL PROBLEM
Special skills needed : Petri net modeling
Risks:
Project outline: Scheduling is a fundamental requirement in any
practical real time system. It can appear in many contexts.
Although there are several scheduling stratgeies available, their
performance can only be judged qualitatively. This project will
demonstrate how quantitative analysis can be done for scheduling
algorithms, using simulation with Petri nets. VERY PRACTICAL
PROBLEM
-------------
+ + + + MORE TO COME ...WATCH THIS SPACE
------------please ignore all the material after this line
NN
Project focus area :
Special skills needed :
Risks:
Project outline:
-------------
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