CS4624 Project Ideas

Below are 2 lists: one of possible new projects and one of old projects that could be extended. Each entry is prefixed by a 3-5 letter abbreviation. When a project is selected, its abbreviation is followed by the number of the lab section that is responsible for it.

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. 5 the instructor will begin to assign students to his favorite projects if no prior decision has been made.

New Projects

1. (ACL - 1407: Pham, Gehman, Chapel, Erway) Advanced Computing Lab supporting multimedia education - develop a module for CS4624 so that students this year and next can learn how to use the SGI systems in the Advanced Computing Lab (in Math Emporium) to work with digital video and audio. Your tutorial also might help other students interested in using these systems for projects, electroni theses, etc. Contact is Steve Greenfield, feats@ozone.cc.vt.edu.
2. (ACU - 1406: DeRose, Sutton, Mirick, Murphy, Staley) Acupressure for improving health. Contacts are Terry M. Lee, lee@acupressure.com, and the instructor.
3. (CAVE - 5492: Petras, Pilone, Strobridge; 1406 - Annino, Brown, Laudati, Morgan, Williams) The VT-CAVE supports high-end virtual reality immersion. In the fall there were a number of interesting student projects in ESM4984. It is possible to have some new projects. To explore this, please visit the CAVE for a demo any Tue or Thu at 7:30am, 200 Krafft Drive, Suite 2400 (2nd floor on left). CAVE lab manager is John Kelso (kelso@vt.edu, x1-2054). Lead person is Professor Ron Kriz, kriz@wave.esm.vt.edu. Please see his detailed explanation of how this would work. That message points to an introduction to CAVE programming and an example of a WWW page for a finished project. See also about the CAVE simulator that might be of value. Note that most programming is in C++, using a library (either OpenGL, which is a graphics package running on may systems, or Performer, that runs atop OpenGL). One can load and explore virtual worlds in the CAVE, developed using VTML, 3D Studio, and other tools, but programming is needed if any interaction is required. Another idea is to extend PAD++ to work in the CAVE in 3D.
4. (CAVE3D - 5492: 3D drawing tool - Adkinson, Bouck, Ostryniec, Shoemaker)
5. (CAVEO) The VT-CAVE will be used for the game of orienteering. Contact person is Professor Carstensen, Geography.
6. (CITE) Citations and electronic theses and dissertations - would be a cooperative project with ISI, which runs Citation Databases, Web of Science, Current Contents, and other services that are based on keeping records regarding citations to journal and manuscript publications. One possibility is for counts of references to ETDs to be kept by ISI. Another possibility is for a service to be provided to students so when they create their bibliographies, these can be enhanced, by a client used by students, or by subsequent batch processing, so that references to items in the ISI database are corrected and assigned an ISI ID number. All of these would add hypertext linking between ETDs, and also allow visualization of the clustering of related works. Contact person is Paul Mather, paul@csgrad.cs.vt.edu
7. (CIVIL - 5492 - Burris, Jenkins, Le, Nolley) Civil War CD-ROM for 5th graders with music, maps, images, speeches, poetry. Contact person is Melissa Matusevich, melissa@bev.net, who has been very active in local efforts for innovative teaching.
8. (CRIM - 1406: Sheen) Curriculum Resources in Interactive Multimedia is a newly funded NSF project to support teaching and learning in interactive multimedia. We wish to collect materials, in similar fashion to the CSTC effort below, but focused on multimedia. These could be tested to see if they help in CS4624, through usability studies. In addition, we aim to develop curricular materials like syllabi, so one can teach a course like CS4624, or a similar course at the graduate level; or a course sequence; or similar courses in Art, Music, Education, ISE, or other areas; or a minor or major in multimedia, ... A student team could search for all courses relating to multimedia, tabulate coverage on topics, identify popular textbook selections, and prepare draft information so that a faculty workshop can try to prepare curricular guidelines. There have been a number of meetings described in an earlier WWW site. The student helping with this is Rajat Gupta, rgupta@vt.edu
9. (CSTC - 1406: Buchholz, Martin) Computer Science Teaching Center is a newly funded NSF project to support teaching and learning in computer science by having a refereed repository of useful resources, such as Java applets to illustrate important concepts, tools to support algorithm animation, image or digital video demonstrations, lab exercise booklets, etc. One part is the Visualization Resource Center (VRC) for Computer Science Education, managed by Scott Grissom, grissom@uis.edu. The overall project is managed by Deborah Knox, knox@tcnj.edu, who runs the SIGCSE - Computing Laboratory Repository. We provide digital library and other support. 1-3 projects can support this effort. One might help set up our WWW site, collecting pointers to all available materials supporting CS education, and identifying specific items warranting review. Another might help develop and test criteria for reviewing materials. Another might develop and test various tools to help users of the repository, and to support its maintenance. This group could do usability studies periodically to ensure ease of use. Local student contact is Rajat Gupta, rgupta@vt.edu.
10. (ETDV - 1407: LaBranche) Electronic Thesis and Dissertations project videotape. Contact Neill Kipp, nkipp@vt.edu, who helped coordinate the amateurish 90 minute tape now in use. A new tape, with several separate parts, is needed, to suit an international audience. We can shoot new footage, include voice over on a PowerPoint slide show, and make use of prior footage, including short introductory statements from members of our Steering Committee (from Adobe, IBM, NSF, US Dept. of Education, ...). A version for CD-ROM and one for WWW also is desired. (Optionally, the speakers for a seminar series on electronic scholarship who will be speaking this semester could be recorded and some of that material used too.)
11. (FED) Federated search means that one can in parallel search one or more search sites and have the results all merged together. This is a very difficult and interesting problem. We have a number of projects to support this, for the campus and for electronic theses and dissertations. One to three groups can help in this area. James Powell, jpowell@vt.edu, who directed campus distributed computing, is the contact for one group. He has some useful online information regarding supporting this at the campus level. Paul Mather, paul@csgrad.cs.vt.edu, is coordinating several efforts about this related to electronic theses and dissertations One will make use of the Dienst protocol that is used for federation in the CS technical report service, NCSTRL. There already is a partial implementation of a gateway from Dienst to Z39.50, built by Jianxin Zhao, jxzhao@csgrad.cs.vt.edu, and the SiteSearch system from OCLC, which Paul Mather supervises, can support Z39.50 federated search too.
12. (FILM - 5492: Swami, Graffam) Film of Jean Pierre Bekolo: African film-maker Jean Pierre Bekolo (director of "Aristotle's Plot" and "Quartier Mozart") will be collaborating with the Virginia Tech Theater Arts dept. this semester to shoot a full length video/film. Theater Arts would like a multimedia project done to publicize and showcase the film Bekolo will be producing with Tech students. This project will involve producing a video interview/documentary about Bekolo and the film, and also constructing web-pages that will provide information about the film. Using digital video, audio, Premiere, audio and video on web-pages, Photoshop, etc. will be part of this project. A pilot video will be produced before the interview/documentary. Overall, this project will connect technology and creativity in exciting and educational ways. The Theater Arts client for this project is Dr. B. Carlisle. Contact Jay Swami (jswami@vt.edu, 953-1972) for more information.
13. (FILTR) Filtering of information (sometimes called selective dissemination of information) allows people to create and revise a profile (description of interest) and then be notified when some new information object is added to the collection. We would like to provide this service for the electronic thesis and dissertation collection. That can be done using IBM Digital Library, or other systems. Contact person is Paul Mather, paul@csgrad.cs.vt.edu
14. (IBM) IBM Digital Library is one of the very few such systems commercially available, and Virginia Tech is one of the founding and lead members for its user group. There are a number of interesting and important applications, such as to support electronic theses and dissertations. Versions run on both NT and UNIX. (See the different but related project, ETD.) Contact person is Paul Mather, paul@csgrad.cs.vt.edu, whose Ph.D. work relates to this work.
15. (IDEAL) The IDEAL system, developed over a number of years to support usability studies, handles 2 video feeds plus audio and typing from an observer, for later review and analysis. This carefully thought out project can accomodate 2 teams, to design and build a next generation system using digital video and audio. An overview is available as PDF and Word files. Contact is Professor Hartson, hartson@cs.vt.edu.
16. (IRV) Best of SIGIR videotape plus WWW pages: Using a number of videotapes from conferences on information retrieval and/or digital libraries, prepare a useful educational overview / highlights. Contact the instructor who served as videographer.
17. (MART - 1407: Rulis, Sinnot, Moore, Fricke) Martial arts information and demonstration: Paul Rulis, prulis@VT.EDU, explains: "I have a friend that owns and runs a martial arts school. I am interested in doing a web page for the school so that students can access information concerning the school, and instruction via the web. The page could include on-line instruction for students that wanted to practice on their own, demonstrations of different techniques and moves, as well as a forum for students to ask questions to eachother and the instructors. I'm sure it could include an inumerable host of other things but these were just a few of my ideas."
18. (PRSRV) Preserving multimedia materials for the long term is a crucial problem for the entire industry, especially for those involved in digital libraries or archives. We need to explore and explain the problems, solutions, and economics involved and document this in a useful WWW site that can help students, faculty, and administrators. See a thorough overview and project description written by Paul Mather, paul@csgrad.cs.vt.edu. See also background materials by:
    • Michael Lesk
    • Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information
    • Cornell U. Department of Preservation and Conservation
    • Research Libraries Group
19. (READI) Readiness aiding Services for Students with Disabilities, a function of the Dean of Students Office.
20. (STU - 1407: Dinh, Pacione, Singh, Chuankasem, Sathanoori, Lee) Student affairs WWW pages and interactive applications to help with orientation. See online info. Contact is Timothy A. Reed, reedta@vt.edu, Special Assistant to the Vice President, Division of Student Affairs
21. (TUT) Tutorials aiding Services for Students with Disabilities, a function of the Dean of Students Office.
22. (USABL) Creating a Searchable Collection of Digital Video Illustrating Usability Issues and Interaction in Virtual Environments (VEs) --- help a graduate effort and learn how to create and catalog collections of digital video as well as how to develop usable VE systems. Digital video footage will be taken of CAVE and other VR users interacting in virtual worlds. The collection will then be annotated to reflect video footage content and to support more general use. Contact is Joey Gabbard, jgabbard@csgrad.cs.vt.edu, working on a Ph.D. in this area.
23. (VIS) Visualization of information searching - for the CAVE. Contact Dr. Harry M. Kriz (Harry_M_Kriz@vt.edu) in Newman Library. A newer and extended version of this idea has been developed by the instructor and OCLC on 1/29-30/98 and should be very exciting.
24. (VTC - 1406: Danis, Giffin, Creque, Morris) Virtual Tour of VT Campus - student proposed project. This would coordinate with the groups giving real tours, to capture video and audio, and also with those involved in student orientation. More details to be supplied by students interested.
25. (VTR - 1407: Zeckoski, Vernon, James, Dale) Virtual Tour aiding Services for Students with Disabilities, a function of the Dean of Students Office.
26. (VCONF - 5492: Hernandez, Bartlett, Tan) Video tutoring could be established inside McBryde so that students in labs could connect with each other and/or with faculty for online videoconferencing to support tutoring and mentoring. This also could be extended to dorms where networking permits. One technology that can help is MBONE. Further, ATM connections inside Virginia, through NET.WORK.VIRGINIA and to universities on vBNS and through it to other places like Singapore could be established for video conferencing. The object of this project is to plan, design, propose, and implement some or all of these capabilities. We have some funds and can order equipment to help. There is a testbed in the Andrews Information Systems Building, 1700 Pratt Drive, and also one in Whittemore, run by Jeff Bevis of Video Broadcast Services, bevisjg@vbs.vt.edu. CNS would assist, probably through Carl Harris, ceharris@cns.vt.edu, x1-4319 or John.Nichols@vt.edu, x1-4336. Contact person on ordering is John Kelso, kelso@vt.edu

Previous projects that could be extended

1. (BEV - 1407: Field, Keller, Schneider) BEV HistoryBase could be extended to move to a BEV machine and collect more multimedia materials. Contact Andrew Cohill, cohill@vt.edu, Director of BEV.
2. (DAG) Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) describe many useful hypertexts. Shahrooz Feizabadi, shahrooz@appserv.ento.vt.edu, for a CS6604 Fall 1997 class project, built a tool to build WWW sites from a collection of fragments of pages, plus a file specifying links. This tool could be enhanced to help with educational WWW sites. Rajat Gupta, a M.S. student applying this tool to develop a self-study WWW site on digital libraries, is the contact person, rgupta@vt.edu
3. (ENV) Envision Interface - As part of our work on digital libraries, the Envision interface was developed. It includes a query window, a results list window, and a results visualization window. We would like 1-3 teams to convert the X/Motif implementation to JAVA. Contact person is Robert France, france@vt.edu, who works in the Digital Library Research Laboratory at Pointe West Commons (across from Krogers).
4. (ETDS) Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Style Sheets: Groups are invited to work on some aspects of helping up to 200K graduate students/year learn how to prepare an electronic thesis or dissertation. In particular, we need style sheets for Adobe FrameMaker+SGML, SoftQuad Author/Editor and Panorama PRO, ArborText's Adept, DSSSL, for ETD-ML (a DTD) for SGML. Students will learn important and lucrative skills about SGML and help many students worldwide. The client is Neill Kipp, nkipp@vt.edu, an advanced Ph.D. student.
5. (ETDT) Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Training: To help graduate students creating electronic theses or dissertations, 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. See also the online booklet by Robert Hall for another example. Two mini-courses are of particular importance: (a) How to Use Word and Word Perfect to handle automatic table-of-contents creation (slide show); (b) Overview of Acceptable File Formats: which software will create them, which software will convert one to another. The client is Neill Kipp, nkipp@vt.edu.
6. (FSE) 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 Skip Fuhrman (fuhrman@vt.edu). This would build upon work undertaken in Spring 1997.
7. (HCI) Videotape overview of the Center for Human Computer Interaction, extending the one produced in 1997. Contact is Professor J. Carroll, carroll@cs.vt.edu.
8. (RDP - 1406: Lim, Pham, Houston, Quach, Macher, Richardson) Residential and Dining Programs was very pleased with work last year, now in use with some extensions. They have a new request to add new online resources for dining, and also a system for purchasing gift packages. Contact is Tom Duetsch, tomd@vt.edu
9. (VRT - 5492: Kartha, Curtis, Huang) Virtual Reality Theses and Dissertations continues a large project from CS6604 in Fall 1997. A team of students developed both a VRML and HTML version of the ETD collection at Virginia Tech. Their interface needs to be tuned, put into operation, and extended to work for multiple universities. Contact is Neill Kipp, nkipp@vt.edu, whose Ph.D. work relates to this effort.
10. (WOO) MM WOO Design. Contact N. Dwight Barnette,barnette@cs.vt.edu, and the instructor who supervised earlier use of Palace to help in this regard.