I have chosen to do my senior project on data compression and my adviser for the project will be Xunfei Jiang.

Data compression is the concept of compressing data to fit into a smaller space.  Lossless compression is when when some form of data, like a video file, is compressed into less space with no loss in quality.  In lossy compression, a file can be compression even more, but at the expense of the quality of the data.

There are many different types of data one may want to compress.  For instance, we can compress the amount of space it takes to store text using a technique like run-length encoding.  In run-length encoding, we count the repetitions of characters, and store the number of times that character repeats itself.  If the sequence EEEEE appears in a string, we could instead store it as 5E so that it takes up less space.  This would be an example of lossless compression since the original string can still be perfectly reproduced despite requiring less storage space.

If one was compressing a video file, one might use bit rate compression.  In bit rate compression, the number of bits used to determine the colors the pixels can turn is reduced.  This will cause the video to require far less storage space, but at the cost of quality, since not as many color options are available.  Thus, this would be an example of lossy compression.

For my personal project, I will read papers published on various data compression techniques.  I will write my paper describing various compression techniques used in computer science.  I will also come up with my own method of compressing data, probably for video files.  I will write code to demonstrate this compression technique, and I will explain the method and how it works in my paper.