CISC 498 Information Technology Project
School of Computing		Proposed Projects 2023-2024

This page lists potential projects proposed by customers from across the university and Kingston community. This year we have many anxious customers who can use your help! You may choose to pursue one of these projects, or find a customer and project of your own, possibly related to clubs or organizations you are involved with..

Projects from past years developed the Queen's Community Service Learning web portal, project management and secure reporting system, the Queen's squash court booking system, a particle size analysis system for Geology, an artifact archival and secure access system for Classics, and many other systems. Ideally your project should create a software system or product that can serve the customer for many years to come.

A good project will normally involve a human interface (such as a web portal), a persistent database, user roles, secure access isssues, and multiple technologies for you to learn about. But it can also be a challenging computational system or data management problem - it's up to you.

Some example past project descriptions from the last year are available here. Those projects are not available this year (if not listed below).

1. Development of an Auto-grader System (Taken)

Customer: Asli Sari, Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining, Queen’s University.

Manual marking of programming assessments takes a significant amount of TA and instructor time. The students receive feedback about their submissions up to weeks later because of this process. An autograder is a tool that automates the process of programming assessment by assessing the code with certain input/output tests. Based on how many tests were passed or failed, the autograder assigns a mark to the student assessment. This feedback can be either communicated directly with the students or later, after TA/instructor review.

The goal of this project would be to develop an autograder tool (from scratch or utilizing existing open source projects) that would get the student assessments in one of two ways: file upload or typing the code into a text box. The code needs to be evaluated through user defined tests and the results displayed to the student directly or after the instructor approval/modifications, along with the instructor’s feedback. Therefore, a student and an instructor view of the submissions are needed. Submissions should be checked for plagiarism, possibly by sending the codes to Moss. Student marks should be transferred to onQ either directly or through a CSV/Excel output file.

2. Canadian Collection of Agricultural Soil Microbes (CCASM) database and web portal (Taken)

Customer: George diCenzo, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Queen’s University

As part of the recently funded BENEFIT project, we will be establishing a new publicly available microbial strain collection. Researchers internal and external to Queen’s University will be able to deposit and request access to microbial strains. This project is to design a searchable database that will hold the metadata associated with each strain (e.g., strain name, species, geographic origin, etc.) as well as links to relevant external webpages (e.g., DNA sequences hosted by NCBI); build a web portal for users to access and search the database and metadata, and request the deposition of strains and access of strains; develop and implement a way for users to employ bioinformatics tools (e.g., BLAST) to perform basic genomic analyses of the strain collection via a graphical user interface on the web portal, with analyses performed on the server hosting the database. The project would inspiration from the following databases:

https://knowpulse.usask.ca/
https://www.dsmz.de/collection/catalogue/microorganisms/catalogue

3. Development of a make-shift LMS platform (Taken)

Customer: Meghan E. Norris (She/her), PhD, Undergraduate Chair in Psychology, Department of Psychology.

Organizations have needs to make continuing professional development accessible for members in such a way that reliability, accurately, and confidentially tracks completion. The goal of this project is to develop an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) that allows for the hosting of content and tracking of completion. Ideally this software is able to be cloned so that it can be used across organizations for different professional development needs. As part of this project , it is hoped that the project will be written up and submitted for publication in an open access journal, with developers as co-authors with the faculty supervisor.

4. Queen's Phytotron Administration Software (Taken)

Customer: Saeid Mobini Ph.D.| Phytotron Manager – Adj Professor | Department of Biology, Biosciences Complex Rm. 5603 |Queen’s University.

The Biosciences Complex building's Department of Biology boasts a unique research facility called Phytotron , which is IP and environmentally controlled. At Phytotron, we aim to create simple and user-friendly software that can manage reservations and bookings for 29 growth chambers and six greenhouse zones for internal and external users. This software will also generate user invoices for rental fees and consumables charges and include inventory management for Phytotron supplies and consumables. An ideal template to follow for this software is Microsoft's professional software, Microsoft Dynamic NAV.

5. Developing an application for the National Indigenous Diabetes Association

Customer: The National Indigenous Diabetes Association – the contact is the Executive Director: Céleste Thériault

This project will provide you with the opportunity to work directly with the Executive Director of the National Indigenous Diabetes Association (NIDA) to design, develop and deploy a comprehensive application that will serve as an information hosting platform; video repository; annual conference system (which includes registration, payment, calendar integrations and chat functions for attendees); and donation collection platform. The task is to create an intuitive and visually appealing user interface that ensures a seamless user experience across different devices and platforms for professionals (e.g., diabetes educators, community health workers) and the general public (Indigenous community members who are looking for diabetes information and self-management resources) alike. This project offers an opportunity to make a real-world impact through holistic skill development encompassing technical expertise, project management, and community engagement. By contributing to a vital cause, you'll gain valuable experience while leaving a lasting impact on a community in need. I look forward with working with students who are committed to bridging technology and social responsibility, while reducing the devastating effects of diabetes.

6. Ice Files Co, wilderness cold cases of missing people: Interactive (Automated) Global Map pulling internet Data about missing people and survival stories. Using the data create an AI Curated criteria that fits our brand, and then generate AI stories that link to the map locations.

Company Description: Ice Files is a startup social enterprise searching and keeping stories alive about global cold cases of missing people in the wilderness. Encouraging other people (members) to include a search for any clues on trails and rivers they are adventuring on. We also educate and learn from people who have survived misadventures and create interesting trail stories for people to enjoy in the wilderness. Real ghost stories and tales of inspiration.

Company To Date: We have completed 4 people searches in Canada, to create video and audio stories of our missing people search. We are just getting ready to create the website and social media from these stories. We would like to launch the public aspect of the company within the next 6- 8 months.

Tech Requirements:

1. Build a global data base of wilderness misadventures: those still missing and survival stories. Purpose: one, for us to find our next searches, two, gather all the data about the stories so it can be AI curated into the content of small info clips, and three to create an interactive map. It is difficult to find the missing people stories, although they are all on the web, often on FB, but we need a method to find them and automatically curate the story to align with our criteria. Typically adventure activities, extreme sports, and the weekend nature lover, etc. One, we would like an easy method to find our future searches and curate the right stories to pull the data using AI into a story/map on our site.


2. Build an interactive map of all the missing people and survival locations, linked to their AI story clips. Purpose: for our membership (possibly called Ghost Trackers) to find trails and rivers in their area to do their adventures and add to the search story in any way they can. If there is a way to create an automated update (web search) of recent missing people stories so that ongoing we get notifications and the system using AI can add to the database and add locations to the map, that would be great. Some questions we can brainstorm with you include: Is it possible to create an AI tool to do this for us? Can a system find all the story data and sort it into short case files for us?


3. Create a website / metaverse with the map a main component and AI created stories, and for our live searches we would like to have active polling and voting as we gather data and upload video and info from each day. We have looked at possibly creating a linked metaverse in which the stories can come alive. In which we can have certain members and ourselves act as Ice Files 'Rangers' and take people on live case file discussions into 360 wilderness views and walks. I haven't seen many metaverses of wilderness. If we can use google satellite view to get 'street' level trail and wilderness and waterfalls, etc of the last place the person went missing, that would be amazing.

Team Needed: a team who will talk about the different tech we want used and help us understand, brainstorm, and figure out what would be the best approach to get the info we need, create the stories and map, and from a user perspective be highly engaging for followers/members, so that we create a viral site that generates income. We need front and back end, UX design, and people who will help us understand the business / money making aspects.

Contact: Shari Hughson (Cell or WhatsApp: 343-363-8044)

7. WtC Tech Co, a behavior change training and tech company: VR / AI stories for EDI to create behavior change, not just learning.

Company Description: Waking the unConscious Tech is a partnership with Nicole McKinney, who owns WtC Consulting https://www.wakingtheunconscious.com/. The company is a social enterprise creating learning and behavior change for people in corporations related to equity, diversity, and inclusion. The goal is to not just create learning but to create behavior change that impacts corporate culture in a positive way. Although the company is starting with EDI, the actual goal of the company is to create a tech company that creates a VR/AI 'shopify' for behavior change, a platform tool that others can use for their behavior change projects in any industry.

Company To Date: The company is a startup, in the process of raising capital at this time as well as research funding. Paul Hungler and Dirk Rodenberg have agreed with Ingenuity Labs at Queen's University to support research on this project once we have the tech built. The consulting company teaches EDI skills to organizations and has multiple large corporate contracts. Nicole realized the training isn't working, from any EDI consulting companies. The stories have the most impact, so she and I partnered to create fully immersive VR / AI experiences. The experiences are intended to create awareness > empathy >feeling > learning > thinking > behavior change > life beliefs/view change (hyperaware) > corporate culture change. The human behavior change aspects of the VR/AI platform build is critical to create a tech company, NOT an EDI company. It is the starting pilot.

Tech Requirements:

1. VR / AI story creation: We need our first stories put into interactive scenarios, in order to start the research on the impact.


2. Impact: We need to incorporate data collection tools to assess impact such as physiological signs, eye tracking, etc. We would need a full dive into the tech available that can measure emotional and thinking responses to the scenarios. Incorporate these into the system, so we can monitor people using the tech. Our research team will need to determine how to measure behavior change post the immersive scenario experiences.


3. Iterations: We would do some early testing on some volunteers, and then iterate the scenarios to see the changing impact.


4. VR/AI Platform build: Once we have the first scenarios tested, the MVP than needs to be transformed into a tech company with a VR/AI platform and measurement system, that is a user-friendly tool that can be sold to other organizations that want to build scenarios in any field/industry that wants behavior change, such as prison system, health care, obesity, addictions, etc.

Team Needed: We hope to find a team that cares about EDI and the possibility of impacting behavior through human - machine interactions, for good. This will be both a pilot / MVP build, and then a user-friendly plug and play build based on the working model.

Contact: To start, Shari Hughson (Cell or WhatsApp: 343-363-8044) and then the lead project person on our team will be identified and become the key contact for the project.

8. Psychedelic Storytelling: Making Meaning from Data for Social Wellness (Taken)

Customer: Neuma, the Centre for Social Wellness (primary contact: Cory Firth)

The Neuma Centre is thrilled to introduce our latest initiative that tracks with our two-decade-long mission of fostering mental-emotional health through evidence-based integrative practices. This new groundbreaking project focuses on creating a state-of-the-art AI tool for collecting and storing subjective stories recounting individual experiences with psychedelics. Recognizing the transformative role of psychedelics in healing, growth, and emotional well-being, our tool aims to accumulate a rich tapestry of human experiences. But we go beyond mere collection. We need a tool that can clean, organize, and label this intricate data, allowing us to fine-tune a larger generative text model that can deepen our understanding of the psychedelic experience. In line with our holistic ethos that emphasizes the interconnectedness of our biological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual selves, this project holds the promise of harm reduction and raising awareness of the safety and precautions for a psychedelic experience.

Technical details:

1. Unique/tailored data collection tool to collect subjective psychedelic narratives (with accessible and aesthetically pleasing front-end design)
2. Automated data organization (labeling/classifying) and storage
3. Data visualization of keywords, trends, and categories of subjective experiences
4. Data modeling to support the creation of a text-generative model through OpenAI

9. Master experimenter

Customer: Jordan Poppenk, Ph.D. Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroimaging Department of Psychology, Centre for Neuroscience Studies, School of Computing Queen's University
http://popmem.com/

Our lab regularly invites participants to take part in large, multi-part brain imaging studies both in-person and online. Software is helpful for keeping us on top of the complex logistics, as our participants often come back up to 20 times! For success, we must coordinate lots of confidential information using our central ubuntu server. This includes information about sessions (scheduling, notes); data (verification; linking online/offline); and participants (payment; identity verification; availability). For online participants, we need the system to offer them relevant add-on sessions in a compelling way (e.g., leaderboard). Finally, it should perform periodic checks for problems (e.g., repeat no-shows, systematic lateness) and support visualization of study / participant progress. All of this should be accessible to experimenters and participant roles through a secure web interface. The proposed software would go a long way to enabling more sophisticated experiments than have been possible before.

10. Linguistic Typology Database + Web Interface (Taken)

Customer: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (she/her), Associate Professor of Linguistics and Department Head Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Queen’s University.

The project is to design a database structure and user interfaces for a project comparing aspects of grammatical structure across a wide sampling of the world's languages. We are a research team of formal linguists at several Canadian universities, including Queen's, and for several years we have conducted a survey of word-structure patterns in natural languages. With the data we have collected so far (currently from 112 languages), we wish to create a database that:

1. Can be accessed online by other researchers
2. Has an interface that allows complex queries to be easily run (ideally via a web-based interface) and produces a user-friendly display of both overall quantitative results and individual records
3. Allows members of the research team to add new data as the project continues

11. Developing a GUI for a 3D musculoskeletal modelling software

Customer: Pouya Amiri, PhD,School of Kinesiology and Health Studies.

FreeBody is a musculoskeletal modelling software that uses the measured data in a gait lab and provides outputs ranging from force in lower limb joints (e.g. knee) to more complicated variables such as muscle length during movement. It is an open-source software available here. In its current format, the processing is done in 3 steps:

1. The gait lab data including marker trajectories measured by a motion capture system and ground reaction forces measured using a force platform are preprocessed in Matlab and converted to TXT files.
2. A simple Matlab GUI calls an exe file which uses the preprocessed gait data to perform several analysis, called inverse kinematics (finding joint angles), inverse dynamics (finding overall joint moments), and a static optimization (finding muscle forces). These outputs are stored as csv files which can be opened for visualisation or further postprocessing.

Currently, there is no GUI that can perform all the preprocessing, data analysis, and postprocessing in one place. In addition, there is no method that allows the visualisation of the movement of the markers, bones, and muscles which is very important to ensure the data is used correctly. Thus, the following additions will be valuable (this can be decided upon depending on the required complexity needed for the project):

1. Development in an all-in-one GUI that does the data preprocessing, data analysis and postprocessing.
2. Plotting of raw measured data and the postprocessed data
3. Visualization of the movement of the musculoskeletal system

12. Psychology Clinic Test Library Database Application (Taken)

Customers:
Dr. Sheelagh Jamieson, C.Psych.. Director, Queen’s University Psychology Clinic.
Kristy Chalovich, Administrative Assistant, Department of Psychology, The Psychology Clinic at Queen's

The Queen’s Psychology Clinic test library has expanded a lot over the years with each new Clinic Director. This library of testing kits and forms, and the organization of it, is critical to our daily operations. Due to the large volume of current and archived testing materials that we have and the people who have access to them, tracking them is becoming unmanageable with just an Excel spreadsheet.

With the current Excel spreadsheet approach proving unwieldy, we propose the creation of a dynamic and user-friendly database. This solution will not only enhance daily operations by keeping track of the inventory, as well as:

• Be user-friendly, reliable, and secure
• Show both current and archived materials and prompt users when newer versions are available
• Send alerts when supplies are running low
• Allow users to see what test materials are available and enable them to sign out materials
• Send reminders for returning borrowed items
• Provide distinction for items that are being borrowed and returned versus being used (and not returned)
• Alert users of the test ‘level of user’ requirement (i.e., some people won’t be able to use certain materials depending on their qualifications, so we need to make folks aware of that)
• Show information on the distinct location of materials
• Showcase the ordering/supplier information and average cost of materials
• Generate reports of the data with filtering options (e.g., generating a report that shows us only the materials that were most borrowed for a specific term)
• Have different user access options/rights (e.g., a student can fill out they borrowed something but can’t edit the backend)
• Provide instructions (both written and visual) for users on how to use the database
• Provide instructions for clinic employees on how to edit/update the database

This database will serve as the cornerstone of the Psychology Clinic's operations for years to come. The team would work with the Clinic’s director Dr. Sheelagh Jamieson and the Clinic’s administrative assistant.

13. Software to manage and format a list of publications

Customer: Professor Philippe Di Stefano, Faculty, Particle Astrophysics, Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy.

After having conducted a survey of existing software, the students will write code to download a list of publications from google Scholar, select items by date of other means, then output the list in various formats including html and bibtex/latex, with highlighting of certain authors etc.

14. League Management Platform TBC

Customer: Alex Jansen (he/him) , Queen’s Film Dept. | +1.416.886.5234

A mobile-friendly platform/framework for the administration/management of a sports league, including team and player registration (fee tracking, waivers , identification), scheduling, location maps, score reporting, statistics, push notifications and social media integration, with potential in-app purchase and advertising features.