CISC 498
Information Technology Project

School of Computing

Projects 2009-2010


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Proposed Projects

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.

Proposals for 2009-10

An Interactive Academic Integrity Web Tutorial,
with Searchable Database and Integration to Student Systems

Customer: Professor James K.W. Lee, Academic Integrity Advisor to the Vice-Principal (Academic)

Academic integrity is at the heart of the university's fundamental mission to contribute to the welfare of society through the education of students and the creation of new knowledge. In this context, we would like to develop a web-based online tutorial to inform all students at Queen's about academic integrity. As an educative tool, the tutorial needs to be interactive, instructive, and fun, yet at the same time, students should be required to login to be able to access it, so a record can be kept of who has and hasn't completed it. In addition, we'd like to incorporate online quizzes, record and centrally store quiz scores, and give students the ability to stop part way through the tutorial and be able to continue where they left off at a later time. Ultimately, this project could have significant impact across the university.

The proposed tutorial requires the following technical infrastructure:

  1. An interactive platform on which to build the tutorial content;
  2. A secure means for students to login to tutorial using their Queen's Net ID;
  3. A searchable database that tracks time and date of student logins, tutorial completion, time spent on quiz questions, quiz responses to each question, and quiz results;
  4. Ability to link with the existing Queen's student database;
  5. Flexibility to link with the new Queen's student database in the future;
  6. Ability for users to complete the tutorial at own speed (stop and start functions) and to access the tutorial material after initial completion;
  7. Ability for the tutorial content to be easily updated and modified by the customer.

Picturing the Hydro-Social Cycle

Customer: Dr. Jamie Linton, Department of Geography

The hydrologic cycle (the flow of water from ocean to atmosphere and back to the ocean via precipitation and streamflow) is the predominant model of the circulation of water on Earth. By the time they have reached high school, most students are familiar with this model and with its depiction in diagrammatic form. Increasingly however, flows of water in the hydrosphere are affected by human action. Furthermore, these flows vary greatly, depending on local climatological and hydrological conditions, as well as on social processes operating at various scales. Growing awareness of the complexity of flows of water in the 21st century and appreciation of the need to consider these flows in specific locales have prompted geographers and others to develop the concept of the "hydro-social cycle".

The purpose of this project is to develop a software program that would allow users to produce visual images of the hydro-social cycle in specific places, be they cities, drainage basins, or regions. The main function of the project is to facilitate the translation of hydrological and social data into images based loosely on the concept of the standard hydrologic cycle diagram.

Such a project has potential for a variety of applications, and would be particularly useful in teaching human geography, environmental studies and related subjects. In addition to an interest in graphic design, ideally, I would be looking for a student-partner with an interest in water-related issues and sensitivity to social and environmental concerns.

Questionnaire Processing System for Music Perception Research

Customer: Prof. Lola Cuddy, Department of Psychology

We have for some years developed and used a 44-item questionnaire where we ask listeners in our experiments to report on their music background and interests. The answers have proven very useful to account for some of the variance in results of perceptual experiments. However, to date the work on response collection, data coding and statistical analyses of the questionnaire has been done by hand and is very time consuming.

The project would involve three components:

1. developing an online version of the questionnaire--this would include developing software to present the questionnaire and collect responses to it, collecting demographic identifiers, providing a help screen for FAQs, and checking on questions not answered (asking, did you intend leave that response blank?);

2. collecting some prototypic data from the online version and entering it into a secure data base;

3. formatting the data base for SPSS (originally named Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) so that factor analyses can be carried out by SPSS. Factor analysis is a multivariate statistical method used in the analysis of matrices of correlation coefficients. It is a way of inspecting pattern of relations among variables. You do not have to have extensive experience with either SPSS or factor analysis to begin the project as the essential information can be learned while carrying it out.

If you would like to pursue this project, have further questions and would like a tour of the Acoustics Laboratory where our music research is conducted, please contact Prof. Cuddy, Lola • Cuddy @ queensu • ca

Drug Pharmacokinetics Computer Simulation Laboratory

Customer: Prof. James F. Brien, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, School of Medicine

In drug therapy of various diseases and disorders, it is necessary to determine the dosage regimen for each patient that provides optimal therapeutic effect and avoids toxicity. The term, pharmacokinetics, is defined as the processes by which the body handles a drug, including drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion. The pharmacokinetics of a drug are important for determining the time course of drug action in the body. In medicine, the goal of clinical pharmacokinetics is to determine the drug dosage regimen that provides optimal pharmacotherapy for each individual patient.

Currently, the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology provides our undergraduate students with a computer-simulation laboratory that focuses on the practical application of the basic principles of pharmacokinetics for various clinical scenarios. The technical challenge for this tutorial session is that the DOS-based software package is "tired" and needs "therapeutic intervention" by computing scientists.

The goal of this project is to develop leading-edge computer software, which is platform-independent (to stand the test of time), that current and future learners (undergraduate and graduate pharmacology and toxicology programs and continuing medical education) can use in on-site tutorials or via distance education to understand and apply the basic principles of pharmacokinetics in today's world of drug therapeutics.

If this project description has attracted your interest, please contact me at brienj @ queensu • ca; tel 36114; Botterell Hall 544.

Modification of Communication Abnormalities with Computer-Assisted Reinforcement

Customer: Prof. Christopher Bowie, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry

Individuals with psychotic disorders typically evidence communication abnormalities that interfere with their ability to engage in or maintain meaningful social interactions, interpersonal relationships, and productive employment. These abnormalities are classified as poverty of speech (i.e., generating a quantitatively or qualitatively insufficient response for successful communication) or disorganized speech (i.e., producing responses that veer off topic or are irrelevant to the task at hand). Although one of the hallmark symptoms of psychosis, communication abnormality has minimal response to medication intervention and thus results in sustained functional disability even after patients other symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions are in remission.

The goal of this project is to develop a computer program that will provide feedback and reinforcement to patients with communication abnormalities in order to modify their speech. Spoken words will be captured with commercially available software. The computer program would use this information to provide immediate feedback to the patient by graphically displaying the number of words spoken as a function of an appropriate target. The content of the words will be compared to a pre-defined set of appropriate responses to assist patients in staying on track during conversation.

Students do not need experience in psychology. As part of an intervention, this program would generate a useful new tool for important clinical work in the field, as research has repeatedly demonstrated the links between these symptoms and persistent functional disability.  

Automated Analysis of Eye Movement Data on Images

Customer: Prof. Monica Castelhano, Department of Psychology

I need to develop software to handle eye movement data collected from various experiments on photographs and other visual images. The raw data files need to be automatically parsed, and an additional program is required to summarize it in a form to be statistically analyzed.  Currently we are using a hodgepodge of older software that was made for different eye-trackers in different labs.

We need to implement a system that would be general enough to use with every experiment and will need to be well documented and easy to use (i.e., make it easy for new incoming students to be able to learn and use).

An Interactive Undergraduate Degree Program Management Guide

Customer: Dr. Beverley Mullings, Department of Geography

New students and faculty alike must learn the academic requirements for the successful and timely completion of widely different degree program categories. Students who choose to major or minor or complete a medial in geography must have timely knowledge of the number of credits, course pre-requisites or their equivalents needed to successful complete their degree programs. They also benefit from being aware of upcoming deadlines for scholarship competitions if they choose at the end of their degree programs to go on to graduate school.

An interactive software program that could highlight the number of credits and recommended course options that students within different degree programs could take at different stages within their course of study would be invaluable. Similar to popular software programs like Degree Navigator, a program that was tailored to each individual geography student, that highlighted course deficiencies and requirements and alerted students to course offerings available each year in the department and eligible equivalents in other departments, would go a far way to helping students and advising faculty to make sound choices at every stage of a student's academic program. Such a program would need to be interactive and would allow the undergraduate secretary and co-ordinator to input new opportunities and regulations specific to the department and the wider geography discipline as they come into effect.

An Verification Game to Map "Walker Space"

Customer: Prof. Niko Troje, Department of Psychology

In the past, my lab (http://www.biomotionlab.ca) has been collecting user data over the internet to assess the perception of so called Biological Motion: a few dots moving along with the major joints of a walking human figure. The very degraded displays nevertheless convey rich information about identity, emotion and personality of a "walker". Check out http://biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLrating.html for an example of the stimuli and the sort of data collection we are conducting.

The experiments currently online are not very rewarding to the user. We are now looking into ways to set up experiments which provide us with useful information, but also have the character of social games with both co-operative and competitive characteristics. The games are designed to engage our visitors much more in our research than in the past. Two such games are planned at this stage, the details of which I am happy to outline to any student interested in this project. Both follow the principle of a "verification game" (see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143 for a very inspiring talk by Luis von Ahns on that topic).

The implementation requires an interface to a server based SQL data base, a front end which has to be implemented in Macromedia Flash and the communications between the two via PHP. The games are "social" games (each player gets teamed up with a partner) and one goal (probably beyond the scope of the CISC 498 project) is to integrate them into social network frameworks such as Facebook.