Potential Project Ideas
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  1. Connecting a seemingly similar history to a surprisingly variable present

With this project, I would examine how a set of nations (a subset of Scandinavian nations) that are today relatively homogeneous in terms of race and economic capacity have vastly differing attitudes and policies around immigration and integration of immigrants. This interest developed as I was reading about Iceland’s policies around immigration before visiting there, and being struck by it’s vastly open immigration policy. Part of the reason this was so striking to me was it’s proximity to nations that in comparison, are very closed to immigration. I am yet to find the serious Computer Science in this project, but I am hoping that in learning more about the question I am trying to ask, I am helping myself find the Computer Science tools I could use to answer it.

 

2. Analyzing twitter data to study emotional health as tied to disordered eating

Social media is in our homes, and in our kitchens. This project would be an advent into studying twitter data about eating preferences. With information about healthy eating at everyone’s finger tips, it’s easy to get pulled into the 1234 fad diets that are popular on the interwebs on any given day. Through this project, I would study how patterns in popularity of fad diets affect dietary preferences as projected on twitter. Disordered eating is on the rise in the US, as is veganism. The question I will be trying to ask in this project is whether so called lifestyle changes(such as switching to a vegan lifestyle) have become the ad-hoc way of normlising disordered eating, and whether this phenomenon is discoverable through twitter data.

Ideas
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I’m primarily interested in human-computer interaction (HCI) and, extending the notion further, how the principles of computer science, when applied through software or social networks, produce changes in human behavior.

In general I’m drawing my thoughts from behavioral economics, network theory, research into user experience of software, and the general principles of software engineering and structuring information.

My three ideas on that general theme follow. Each contains a paragraph about the topic, a few areas of computer science that potentially relate to it, specific examples I’ve encountered, and some project possibilities. Nothing in the descriptions is final, comprehensive, or definitive, so change is not only possible but expected. It’s also not clear I have the CS in every one of these ideas, but they’re moving the right direction. The list is unordered.

Nudges as a strategy in application design and development

We know that small changes in an environment can cause dramatic changes in behavior. In the social sciences, research has shown that switching employee retirement accounts from opt-in to opt-out, for example, can dramatically increase the percentage of employees who enroll in the accounts. Application and web developers must always consider how their design decisions, from the surface layer to the data structure layer, impact the human experience of interacting with the application and its information.

Computer science topics: HCI, Application/Web Design, Software Development, UI/UX

Potential examples: nudge literature in behavioral economics, campaign web design to encourage donations (Obama and HRC in particular, NPR story), user experience elements, Apple design guidelines

Project possibilities: Test two app designs (a la A/B testing) to determine how behavior changes; website designed to demonstrate the principles in various ways in the service of some simple task (to-do list, search, etc.)

Group behavior on social media

Group behavior on social media and the filter bubble: Social media wants to keep you onsite and, if you move offsite, to do it by way of their site. Therefore they want you to stay, and in turn they give you what you want (think Facebook’s News Feed algorithm). The problem is that this breeds the dreaded filter bubble, in which epistemic closure takes over and only things you like or agree with ever have to come across your timeline. Is it possible to design systems to reduce this problem and therefore improve public understanding and social behavior?

Computer science topics: HCI, Network Theory, Information Architecture, Interface Design, UI/UX

Potential examples: Nextdoor and racial profiling, Twitter harassment and quality filtering algorithm, Facebook News Feed

Project possibilities: website or mobile app analyzing data mined from Twitter or Instagram

How humans understand data

Big data is confusing, and we use visualizations to reduce the confusion and potentially communicate a message. Some vis forms are better – more comprehensible, less misleading, nicer to look at – than others. Does this matter for how humans experience the information? This emphasizes explanatory as opposed to exploratory data science.

Computer science topics: HCI, Application/Web Design, Scientific Computing, Databases

Potential examples: Dozens of vis/comp modeling websites exist now, so NYT Upshot/538/Our World In Data all potentially valuable; Tufte and other researchers in the field have covered this extensively

Project possibilities: Data visualizations of various kinds, some interactive and some not (may build on some existing projects at ECCS for this)

Potential Projects (UPDATED: SEP21)
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UPDATED IDEA: Object Recognition and Tracking for Augmented Reality

While exploring more about Augmented Reality and AR-based applications currently circulating on the internet, I have seen limitations of Augmented Reality, especially in object recognition and tracking. I would like to see the current status of the capability of object recognition and tracking technologies available and how we can improve them. If possible, I want to push further so that markerless augmented reality can be less complex and frustrating and we do not have to rely heavily on markers anymore.

 

 

Idea 1: Educational/Fun Augmented Reality Application

Seeing and interacting with digital creations of your favorite characters in reality would sound like an unrealistic fantasy but, thanks to the rapidly advancing realm of technology, we can bring our imaginations into reality now. I would like to make an educational yet fun application targeted to kids but the idea is not limited to only kids or education. The application allows the user to explore his/her surroundings and interact with the objects by using any devices that can do AR. The application should recognize the object or a part of an object and create an overlay which the user can interact with.

Idea 2: Facial/Image Recognition (Computer Vision) and Algorithms Behind it

While neurologists and other scientists are debating whether the ability to recognize is an innate ability, facial/image recognition has been an easy task for humans. It is so easy that we are not even aware of the fact that we can operate because we can recognize stuffs. However, it is still difficult for computers to perform this task. I think this part would be challenging in perfecting my idea 1 and I would like to spend time researching how we make computers recognize faces or objects under different circumstances.

Idea 3: Schedule Planner

At the beginning of every semester, the supervisor of libraries has to make a work schedule that works around the student workers’ timetable and it is a very tedious process. I want to come up with a software or at least an algorithm that would take in students’ varied timetable and build a schedule that makes everyone happy.

Project Ideas
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1.)  Data Compression

I am interested in how data is represented as MPEG, JPEG, and other file formats, and how this data can be used to display an image or video.  In particular, I am interested in the compression algorithms used to store this data in a smaller space, with little or no loss in the quality of the information.  I would explore various lossless and lossy compression algorithms in the paper, and explain their strengths and weaknesses.  I could then create some code to illustrate some compression algorithms and how they work.

 

2.)  3-D Passwords

While passwords are crucial to how we protect our information, they are also tedious to remember.  One interesting alternative is 3-D passwords.  The idea is the user is placed in some sort of 3-D environment with various objects that can be interacted with.  The user could enter a passwords by interacting with various objects in the environment in a specific sequence.  For example, a user might move a chair, head to a thermostat, and then change it to a specific temperature as a way of entering a password.  This would be an appealing idea to explore in a project as well.

 

3.)  Soft Computing

I was reading about soft computing and the idea seemed interesting and different from other ideas I have encountered so far in computer science.  I would be interested in exploring it further, but don’t have a specific idea yet.

Project Ideas
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Topic: bioinformatics to track ones health:

The goal of this research is to be able to use ones personal health data to track and display a time line of ones health progress. By first gathering relevant data from various inputs, this software will be able to organize and store all the data. Second is the display of health records for easy access as well as reminders for prescription refills, appointments, and when to take medicine. The last part of this is to incorporate an algorithm that tracks ones heath record to create a time line or data sheet of once health for personal and medical use. The Computer Science aspect of this research will include a lot of machine learning such as input organization, and variance tracking.

Project Topic
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Facial Recognition

Facial recognition is something that we as human beings have been doing since the beginning of time. We have also become masters at identifying a person’s mood or emotion simply by looking at their facial expression. Today, we have harnessed the powers of artificial intelligence and are now able to apply it to facial recognition software. This software usually consists of “faceprints” which are collections of data that contain certain features and dimensions of the face (length/width of nose, depth of eye socket, ect..). And with this software we are able to not only scan an image for a face, but we are able to determine the expression or emotion that the face is portraying.  This is where I want to focus my research. I want to study facial recognition and how the software is able to detect faces and their expressions to determine human emotions.

 

Project Ideas
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Idea 1 (Intelligent Personal Assistant for Medicine):

I want to build a software (potentially mobile application) that acts as an intelligent personal assistant for medical purpose. The inspiration comes from modern programs like Siri, but instead of being a general purpose, I want it to have a narrower focus (i.e. medicine). While I am still working on the details, I envision that you can talk to the app about various things such as diseases, medicines, hospitals and so on. I want the communication style to be as human-like as possible. The app will also do other things like remind you to take your medicine, tell you when it’s time to go for a regular check-up and so on. I anticipate integrating other 3rd party web services to make some of these functionalities possible. I am also expecting to go through the works of CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) among other resources.

Idea 2 (Optimal Character Recognition):

The process of OCR of converting images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text has always been something I have been interested/curious about. I want to research on how this process is done and hopefully recreate the technology. For a more personalized experience, I will try to learn the particular user’s handwriting style better through the app and then hopefully have a higher degree of recognition accuracy.

Idea 3 (Dissecting/Adding functionality to a machine):

While this idea seems increasingly less likely, I thought I would make a note of this regardless. Having had some interest in working with hardware/circuits, I wanted to open up a machine, learn more about the internal components/circuits. Along with that, I also wanted to add some other piece of hardware and add functionality to the machine.

Project Ideas
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Some of this is copy and pasted from the email I sent last spring, but anyway, here’s my two project ideas:

  • Expanding on the research that I have been doing with Forrest, I hope to make a 3D rhythm game that just uses two Raspberry Pi infrared (NoIR) cameras as well as one infrared sensor on the tip of a wand for the cameras to detect. The basic gameplay is that at certain points in the music, the game will indicate where the wand needs to be placed in 3D space and calculate score based on the distance between the intended position and the actual position of the wand. If I have to compare this to any other rhythm game out there, it would be osu!, since the wand would effectively be treated as a mouse cursor for the game to interact with, and the gameplay would look similar, but without the mouse clicking.In terms of development, I may start with one camera and a 2D game for ease of programming and a simpler user interface, and then transition to 3D afterwards using algorithms already discussed with Forrest and Jim Rogers to get coordinates in 3D space using the two cameras. If all of this goes well, I may add a second sensor and a second wand, so that either one person can control both wands for added difficulty, or two people can control one wand each for competitive or cooperative play. My goal for this is to make a game that is relatively cheap on hardware compared to the hardware of most other rhythm games out there, and potentially teach players the gestural motions of a conductor or any other possible motions. For now, the player won’t be in direct control the music, but that may be a feature that can be implemented farther into the future, as part of the game or in a separate DAW application such as Ableton Live.
  • I would like to learn more about data compression and the algorithms that go into it, especially in the context of compressing media files such as music, images, and video, and the difference in algorithms when using lossy or lossless compression. If there is an algorithm that can perform better (in terms of either running time or resulting file size) than what existing file formats currently provide, I can write a program that can compress files using said algorithm (either into a new file format or to improve an existing algorithm) using the new algorithm(s). If the compression is lossless, I can also decompress the compressed files back to their original state as well.

 

Research project ideas
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Possible research: Spatial computational resource allocation

see also: CyberGIS’16 panel

Data structures are fundamental to the efficiency of algorithms pertaining to transfer and storage, computation, and visualization. Parallel and distributed computing comes in many implementations whose purposes vary greatly. Using centralized computing networks, new resources are available to more institutions, however the bridge between onsite spatial data collection and offsite computing is uncertain, even in terms of data structuring. The changes in resolution and computational needs have brought bitmap and vector closer than ever, however the software resources rely on centralized resources, for which there are few designed for LiDAR terrain mapping.

Research topics:

1: Study data structures to store spatial information. Do aspects of existing structures resolve any problems faced by users?

2: Study whether spatial data compression could be implemented to improve computability and

3: Study methods for data browsing and distributed storage solutions. Big data systems may limit the filesizes remote end users can personally compute with, however some data must be represented by the remote end user.

Panel overview
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Panel: Future Directions of CyberGIS and Geospatial Data Science (Chair: Shaowen Wang)
Panelists: Budhendra Bhaduri, Mike Goodchild, Daniel S. Katz, Mansour Raad, Tapani Sarjakoski, and Judy —

Selected topics by Ben Liebersohn

Michael:

  • 3D domains are limited, more GIS integration with 3D rendition and simulation be well received.
  • Support for different types of data, which is sometimes more proprietary or otherwise have limited longevity.
  • Can we do analysis of data which we need 3D representation in order to compute simulations with it. Not everything is just landscapes (possibly meaning >3 dimensions? -B).
  • Decision support systems need more types of data. We need the integration with the applications as well.
  • Real time data streams and distributed loads which serve local decisions on broader, better networked scales.

Judy:

  • Integration needs quantification of size, needs What do we envision as the problem, and the scope? What technology (hardware, network) is needed?
  • What does all this data mean? What do we do about it? This gets you closer to the science policy area.

 

Paul:

“As an outsider, when I see what’s going on in this community I ask: what unique problems is this community facing versus common problems? I presented networking and cloud stuff you may not have seen before. The application can drive the network and the compute resources. Flexible and scalable networks. Maybe both sides can help one another.”

Project Ideas
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<!–Idea 1:

Developing some sort of hardware/software combination that would allow for monitoring of washers and dryers on Earlham’s campus. I would then create an app of some sort so that students could go on to the app and be able to 1) get notifications when a machine is done 2) look to see which machines are available so that they do not have to make the trek to their closest washing machine only to find out that that the machines are all taken.  Right now, my idea for the hardware is just a machine that is plugged into the outlet at the same spot as the machine, kind of like an adaptor, and will broadcast a signal telling whether the machine is running or not.  The software will then simply read the broadcast to determine if a machine is running or not.
–>
Idea 1:

 

Developing a piece of software that is able to perform population estimation by scraping information from popular sites. I would most likely scrape instagram posts with tags, twitter posts that mention a location, facebook photos with location tags, and also if possible recent google searches regarding the location.  For instance, if 1000 people in the last day had searched on google, food locations on Miami beach, it is a good predictor that a high proportion of those 1000 people are visiting Miami beach in the near future.  Then a person would use my piece of software to say, search how busy Miami beach on that day, and a predictor of how busy it will be in the near future. This approach would require a lot of probability into the calculations.

 

Idea 3:

 

This idea would be the same concept as idea 2, but instead of scraping information, i would obtain the location information (or create fake data as charlie suggested) and process that data to then provide a more accurate depiction of the population at a location at any given moment.  The predictive capability will then be based on past data that i had collected.