CISC 498
Information Technology Project

1) Project title: Graduate Teaching Assistant Allocation System for the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing

Customers involved in the project: Adeline Johns-Putra, Professor and Graduate Chair, Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Queen's University, adeline.johnsputra@queensu.ca

Project short description: Each year, the Graduate Chair of the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing must allocate Teaching Assistant (TA) positions across approximately 40 undergraduate courses to a pool of approximately 40 graduate students. This is currently done manually using spreadsheets and involves simultaneously satisfying a large number of hard and soft constraints:

• students’ ranked preferences across Fall, Winter, and year-long course assignments;
• eligibility rules based on program year and funding status;
• tutorial teaching hour requirements for professional development;
• timetabling constraints across both graduate and undergraduate schedules;
• enrollment-driven staffing thresholds;
• and a fixed departmental budget.

The process currently takes several weeks of intensive manual work and involves significant risk of error, missed constraints, and cascading changes when circumstances shift mid-process (e.g., enrollment changes, student award outcomes, course cancellations).

The proposed software would automate the generation of a draft TA allocation that maximises student preference satisfaction within all applicable constraints, present this draft to the Graduate Chair through an interactive interface allowing:

• review and override
• recalculation of budget costs in real time
• flag compliance issues against a defined ruleset
• monitor enrollment figures against staffing thresholds
• track students’ cumulative tutorial teaching history
• and generate an email template for communications to instructors and TAs at the conclusion of the process.

The system would significantly reduce the time and cognitive burden of TA allocation while improving consistency, auditability, and compliance with departmental policy and collective agreement obligations.

2) Project title: Software for Degree Audits [Assigned to Group 2]

Customers involved in the project: Prof Nicolas Hudon, Undergraduate Chair, Chemical Engineering, nicolas.hudon@queensu.ca

Project short description: This project aims to develop a secure software application for monitoring students’ progression through an engineering degree. The system will provide a graphical user interface allowing authorized users to create and retrieve student files, assign curricula, record completed or planned courses and grades, manage electives, substitutions, and waivers, and identify outstanding degree requirements.

The core of the application will be a relational database that separates curriculum definitions from individual student records. Programs and curriculum versions should be defined once and subsequently assigned to students, while student-specific information such as grades, elective choices, course substitutions, waivers, and approval status is stored separately. The system should also securely associate administrative forms or approval documents with each student file, with appropriate authentication, access control, and audit mechanisms.

3) Project title: Whatì Environmental Data Explorer

Customers involved in the project: Abbi Baran (Research Coordinator, abigail.baran@queensu.ca), Stephanie Wright (Assistant Prof, stephanie.wright@queensu.ca), Élise Devoie (Assistant Prof, elise.devoie@queensu.ca); Queen's Civil Engineering, also on behalf of the Whatì Community Government and the Tłı̨chǫ Government

Project short description: Whatì is a Tłı̨chǫ community located in the Northwest Territories within a rapidly changing sub-Arctic environment. As permafrost thaws due to climate change, there are implications for water resources, infrastructure, traditional ways of life, and ecosystem health. Since 2022, researchers from Queen’s University have partnered with the community to collect field-based observations of environmental change. As part of this research, monitoring infrastructure has been established at locations in and around the community, generating a growing collection of water-level, water-quality, ground-temperature, geophysical and other environmental observations.

We would like to develop a web-based platform for managing, exploring, and sharing these data. The platform should:

• Reliably store observations and monitoring-site information in a database.
• Provide an interactive map to discover and explore monitoring locations, including site photos.
• Allow users to filter, compare, and visualize measurements by location, date, and observation type.
• Support the addition and management of new observations.
• Provide accessible views for both researchers and community members.
• Provide accessible visualizations and explanations of environmental change.
• Be simple, maintainable, and well documented so researchers can manage and extend the system.

4) Project title: Engineering DFAI Dashboard for Large Courses [Assigned to Group 4]

Customers involved in the project: Sean Kauffman, ECE, sean.k@queensu.ca

Project short description: This project is to design and build a dashboard and set of related tools to manage the tasks associated with the Queen's Smith Engineering (QSE) Departures from Academic Integrity (DFAI) workflow for a large course. For good reason, the DFAI process at QSE is thorough and complex. For upper-year courses with fewer students, this process is time consuming but manageable. For large, first-year courses, however, the process can be overwhelming. This is a software engineering project to solicit requirements from stakeholders and build a tools to help ensure that all policies are followed, privacy is maintained, the workload on faculty is reduced, and cheating is discouraged.

There are many aspects that make this project interesting. For it to be usable, it must be developed with a high level of security in mind. Formal correctness guarantees are not required, but would add tremendously to the assurance level that the result is functionally correct. The workflow also requires a number of difficult file generation tasks, such as filling out docx templates and file redaction that could be automated with a fair degree of effort. The customer in this case is also an expert in software engineering and formal methods, so there could be opportunities for extra advising if the students wanted it.

5) Project title: ClinMotion: An Easy-to-Use Markerless Motion Capture Platform for Clinical Movement Assessment [Assigned to Group 6]

Customers involved in the project: Pouya Amiri, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, 301G, p.amiri@queensu.ca, 613-533-6000 extension 7898; Dr. Xiong Zhao, xzhao117@uottawa.ca

Project short description: We propose the development of an easy-to-use markerless motion capture platform for clinical and rehabilitation use that relies on commonly available mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, for video recording. The goal is to minimize the technical burden on clinicians, physiotherapists, and patients by providing a simple guided workflow with little required training and, where calibration is needed, a simplified or largely automated calibration process. Users should be able to record a movement task with one or more mobile devices and submit the video for analysis without needing expertise in biomechanics, computer vision, or motion capture.

The primary input would be recorded video, which would be processed using an existing markerless pose-estimation or motion-capture pipeline. The outputs would include clinically useful joint kinematics, such as joint angles, range of motion, and movement trajectories, together with a 3D rendering of the reconstructed human model. The software could also allow users to review the original video alongside the reconstructed motion, visualize joint-angle curves, compare sessions or trials, and export results.

The project would focus on software architecture, mobile-device integration, simplified calibration, data processing, visualization, and development of an intuitive interface suitable for routine clinical and potentially home-based use.

6) Project title: Laboratory Workflow Database and Management

Customers involved in the project: Michela Lai, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy, michela.lai@queensu.ca

Project short description: A major requirement in experimental research groups—especially those developing R&D projects—is a proper workflow within the laboratory, with particular attention to infrastructure and consumable items. All items, once selected by the research group, need to be ordered and inventoried in the lab in a clearly known location. These same items must then be monitored throughout their use, maintenance, or replacement to ensure an efficient workflow within the research group.

The database needs to be:

• Intuitive interface: user‑friendly and mobile‑friendly
• Query‑capable: able to retrieve items according to key features such as cost, area, status, or storage location within the lab, whether already purchased or in use
• Cross‑platform: easily accessed from PC and Mac, and compatible with existing University servers

7) Project title: Database development and management for United Nations Security Council resolutions

Customer: Dr. Jane Boulden, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP), bouldenj@queensu.ca

Project short description: The requirement is to develop a system to house and support two linked but separate databases. The databases need to be easily updated over time.

The datasets are based on United Nations Security Council resolutions. One dataset tracks all draft Security Council resolutions – every draft resolution ever put forward at the Security Council (over 3,000 at this point). It covers who proposed it, whether it was put to a vote and what the outcome was. This dataset is mainly about what type of draft resolution is most likely to be successful, both in terms of issue area and in terms of who backs the draft.

The second dataset (over 2,000 entries) tracks all passed formal Security Council resolutions. For each resolution there is also a voting record, as well as keywords that establish what the resolution deals with. So, for example, if a researcher wants every Security Council resolution that deals with human rights and sanctions, they would type those keywords in to generate the list of resolutions. The existing United Nations database allows you to search resolutions, but it does so based on the language of the resolution. But Security Council resolutions use diplomatic and legal language so they don’t use terms like human rights, or civil wars. The value added of this database is to make the resolutions usable by linking them to research and context-sensitive keywords, and then to provide that in an easily searchable format.

The final result is a searchable pair of databases available online where researchers can undertake searches using multiple combinations of terms, including the possibility of undertaking a search the uses both datasets simultaneously.

8) Project title: Collaborative Image Parsing/Processing Tool for Scanning Probe Microscopy Researchers [Assigned to Group 5]

Customer: Taleana Huff, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry & Department of Physics, Queen’s University, taleana.huff@queensu.ca
Customer-Supervisor (Primary Contact): Willow Strey, PhD Student, Department of Physics, Queen’s University, willow.strey@queensu.ca

Project short description: Interpreting scanning probe microscope (SPM) data currently requires many hours of time even for a well-trained specialist. SPM images are uniquely impacted by mechanical and electrical noise through the probe, the shape of the probe, the stability of the probe shape, stage tilt, and piezoelectric physics (the physics that guide fine-scale tip movement). Additionally, identifying single molecules, multi-molecule arrays, tall protrusions, etc. can be challenging and unintuitive as the features which identify a molecule may differ based on its electronic states. Therefore, tools that can simplify or streamline image analysis, image processing, and data parsing are very valuable for SPM research.

In this project, we are looking to develop a locally hosted software similar to SpmImage Tycoon where Nanonis file types can be uploaded into a bulk-style view port for data parsing. We would like to host a server for this software on our local NAS drive and have the ability to allow collaborators to view/upload/download data via a per-person login system. We would like to be able to apply standard image processing to our files in a way that does not modify the original upload, either by automatically duplicating and saving as a new file or with some other method proposed by the student team. SPM .xsm files and .dat files for spectroscopy can be quite large and handling this data may require some ingenuity on behalf of the student team. As a secondary goal, we would like to be able to tag file uploads with descriptors (such as substrate material, doping levels, or a user-defined and normalized image quality rating) and search the database using said filters as a baseline. This is meant to be a highly collaborative software where the primary stakeholders are university researchers and scientists in research-heavy facets of the surface science/nanoscience industries.

9) Project title: VR Video Games for Undergraduate Geology Education [Assigned to Group 3]

Customer: Rob Harrap, Professor & Alexis Willson, MSc Student, Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering; harrap@queensu.ca & vrl3@queensu.ca

Project short description: Video games meet undergraduate education in this project that will develop interactive geology tutorials for first and second-year students in VR. These will serve as supplements to student field trips, as well as to reinforce understanding of how geologists interact with visual aspects of their environment. We’re looking for students with interest in game development and ideally experience in Unreal Engine and who are interested in the user interface aspects of VR experiences. We’d like to have a final product containing at least 2 playable VR environments, a stylized classroom and a small forest scene, showcasing our departments virtual outcrops, hand samples, and other models with interactive features presented along an educational narrative for lower year undergraduate geology courses. These resources, and versions of the two environments, are available to the team as the focus of the student work on this project will be interaction. We also have prototype tracking and interaction work done during the summer of 2026. Working in Unreal’s Blueprints visual development environment and/or C++, you would design and execute a range of hand tracking-based interactive features such as zooming in and out from a hand sample to inspect its crystal lattice, touch-based interacting with virtual samples with text popups, and virtual measurement tools. These goals are of course subject to discussion as the project progresses. Experience with the Meta Quest 3 VR headset or similar tech would be a plus.

10) Project title: Continued Development of a Smartwatch App for Automated Research Participant Consent and Collection of Exercise Metrics

Customers involved in the project: Jessica Selinger, Associate Professor, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Principal Investigator of the Queen’s Neuromechanics Lab, j.selinger@queensu.ca; Renée Hachey, 20rmh4@queensu.ca

Project short description: The Queen’s Neuromechanics Lab investigates human locomotion, from biomechanics to behaviour. While many of our walking and running studies are conducted in the lab, we are increasingly exploring movement in real-world settings, using wearable fitness tracking devices to capture more ecologically valid data. We currently have 40 Apple Watch Ultra 2s for research use, provided as in-kind support through the Apple Investigator Support Program. We have developed an initial iOS/watchOS application (in collaboration with previous CISC 498 Students) that allows for: i) study information and electronic participant consent on the phone/watch; ii) participant control over when data is logged/contributed to the study, including tagging logged activity with context (i.e. what they were doing, where they were, how they felt); iii) secure storage of exercise-related timeseries metrics during logged activities, including GPS (latitude and longitude), speed (m/s), cumulative distance (m), step rate (steps per minute), terrain slope (%), heart rate (beats per minute), and energy estimate (W/kg); and iv) a brief activity summary and thank you message to the participant after logging. We are now seeking support to: v) debug and optimize overall app performance to improve stability and reliability; vi) add a new pain/discomfort survey component, allowing participants to rate and describe pain or discomfort associated with a logged activity; vii) add session reminders and scheduling, so participants receive prompts for upcoming exercise sessions and outstanding surveys; and viii) implement any additional features identified as valuable during development, such as offline data caching, sync status indicators, or a researcher-facing dashboard for monitoring participant compliance and exporting data.

11) Project title: PIV in your hand

Customers involved in the project: Jason Olsthoorn, Queen’s, Jason.Olsthoorn@queensu.ca

Project short description: As a fluid’s researcher, I often have a camera setup to record how a tracer (dye or particles) moves in a flow to measure the flow velocity. This is typically called PIV – Particle Image Velocimetry. The software is available through MATLAB or elsewhere; however, everything typically needs to be run after the experiment on a desktop.

Idea: Can we produce a real-time software that works off your phone to measure the flow velocity? Is it possible to hold up a phone and get a flow velocity live, that can be recorded for later? This would have to deal with the complexities of a moving hand-held device while capturing the flow.

12) Project title: Black Sonic Pathways in the 1970s

Customer: Katherine McKittrick, Gender Studies and Black Studies, Email: k.mckittrick@queensu.ca

Project short description: This project will explore the patterns and irregularities in across various sectors, texts, and geographies in the 1970s, a decade that encompassed wide-ranging global shifts (the end of the Vietnam war, the deterioration of the 1960s civil rights movements, stagflation and inflation, the oil crises and the cold war, the October crisis, the rise of new technologies, the reshaping of feminist and other minority collectives, the final waves of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean including Soweto, the rise of disco, Afrobeat, funk, the move to analogue workflows and the increased distribution and consumption processed foods).

The task is to gather information from the 1970s and develop a set of data outputs that visually represent black cultural production, specifically music and music-making, in relation to other global patterns and circuits that shaped the decade. The tentative process is:

1. Using the 1970s as a “window” the team and the customer will develop sets of categories loosely based on three major overarching themes:
   • economics (e.g. employment rates, minimum wage(s), gross domestic product, city population, the price of milk, gold, or steel).
   • ecology (e.g. isotherms, precipitation maps, deforestation projects and areas, water levels, pollution rates, boiling water advisories, technological shifts)
   • borders (e.g. war/conflicts, migrations).
2. A fourth minor theme will also be researched: black music, any genre (e.g. song titles, album titles, location of concert venues or recording studios, ticket sales).
3. Develop a tool that compares the three major themes from across geographic and/or regional contexts; track similar and dissimilar patterns, spikes and changes across time (days, months, years); presenting the findings as visual charts/vector graphics. The same tool and method will be used for the fourth, minor theme, black music.

13) Project title: Tracking eye movements using webcams [Assigned to Group 8]

Customers involved in the project: Effie J. Pereira, Department of Psychology at Queen’s University, effie.pereira@queensu.ca

Project short description: The Queen’s Attentional Dynamics Lab (QuAD Lab) is looking to build an open-source platform that can take a user’s webcam video and use this data to estimate where they are looking on their screen. The goal of this platform would be to serve as a flexible way to track eye movements for research studies, and eventually be adaptable for accessibility or gaming needs.

With this software, we aim to (1) record a user’s video data, and in real-time, (2) detect facial landmarks to locate their eyes and pupils, (3) calculate gaze vectors to project their eyes to their screen coordinates, (4) calibrate for accuracy to ensure that vector calculations match physical coordinates, and (5) record all estimates in a rolling SQL database on the lab’s virtual server. The project is a foundational component to the QuAD lab’s long-term research agenda, and as such, the team will work with the Principal Investigator of the lab, Dr. Effie Pereira, along with other senior lab and staff members in the Department of Psychology and the Centre for Neuroscience Studies.

14) Project title: Faculty Management System for Accreditation Data

Customer: Smith School of Business, Office of the Dean, Contact: Kevin Bissonette, Senior Staffing Officer, kb106@queensu.ca

Project short description: We require a system that allows us to track certain faculty data such as teaching load, research output, FTE breakdowns, educational information, etc., in order to assist with the maintenance of our accreditation through AACSB. We would need to be able to do calculations on this data using formulas provided by AACSB to generate a number of specific reports. The system would need to be able to be updated easily as accreditation requirements frequently change with respect to calculation methods, data collected and reported on, etc.

15) Project title: Graphic User Interface to analyse neuroscience data

Customer: Martin Paré (martin.pare@queensu.ca), Professor, Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Queen’s University

Project short description: This project consists of creating a Matlab-based Graphic User Interface (GUI) to process, display, and interact with digital (neural and behavioural) data. The neural data are discrete times of occurrence of action potentials and local field potentials. The behavioural data are eye positions containing periods of steady fixations and rapid changes (saccadic eye movements). This platform would become a tool integral to our research program that investigates neural correlates of working memory, allowing the users to readily extract meaningful correlations between aspects of neural and behavioural data. This project involves database design, digital signal processing, statistical processing, interface design and information visualization. We seek students with existing experience or strong interests in these areas.

16) Project title: Patient Self Check-In and Appointment Reminder System for Radiation Oncology [Assigned to Group 7]

Customer: Kevin Alexander, PhD, MCCPM, Medical Physicist - Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario at Kingston Health Sciences Centre; Assistant Professor - Dept. of Oncology & Physics, Queen's University; Kevin.Alexander@kingstonhsc.ca

Project short description: The Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario sees a large number of patients each day for radiation treatment, consultation, imaging, and follow-up appointments. Promptly communicating patient arrivals and providing clear reminders about upcoming appointments are important for maintaining an efficient clinic and minimizing missed or delayed visits.

This project proposes the development of a patient-facing check-in and appointment reminder system integrated with ARIA, the centre's radiation oncology information system. Using a touchscreen kiosk or tablet, patients would scan a barcode or QR code associated with their hospital ID, confirm their identity, and select the appropriate appointment. The system would retrieve appointment information from ARIA, record the patient's arrival, display relevant on-screen information about upcoming appointments, and update the check-in status on the staff-facing schedule.

The system would also send patients text message reminders about future appointments. Appointment and check-in information would be exchanged with ARIA using supported healthcare interoperability standards and interfaces, such as HL7, FHIR, and the ARIA application interface.

This project will give students experience in interface design, database architecture, healthcare interoperability, external system integration, messaging services, testing, and deployment. The resulting prototype could provide the Cancer Centre with a foundation for a future patient check-in and appointment reminder system integrated with ARIA.

17) Project title: Queen’s Facility for Isotope Research silicate oxygen extraction line software modernization

Customers involved in the project: QFIR directors Dr. Christopher Spencer, Dr. Matthew Leybourne, and Evelyne Leduc, Stable Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry Laboratory Team Lead, Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering; Email: c.spencer@queensu.ca

Project short description: QFIR is a core facility on campus that provides analytical services to multiple units and researchers at Queen’s, in addition to the broader geological, environmental, biological, chemical and mining research communities, as well as to many industry clients. One of the services we provide is oxygen isotope analyses via BrF₅ offline extraction, following the methods originally described by Clayton & Mayeda (1963). We are one of only a handful of labs offering this type of analysis worldwide.

The extraction line consists of a custom-build vacuum line system which is currently running on obsolete technologies: pressure gauges are read on an external controller with 2 dead ports, and data is being relayed using RS232-to-USB communication; K-type thermocouples gather temperature data that is fed to a motherboard where individual logic modules are programmed to collect and record data. Pneumatically-controlled valves are actuated through a custom javascript software that acts as a user interface for the line, as well as a temperature logger, status display, and allows the operator to calculate oxygen yields based on sample mass and measured pressure. The operating system this all runs on is Win XP.

The line is highly in demand and needs to be modernized; currently if that computer dies, the line would be effectively inoperable until replacement parts can be sourced, and due to the “antiquated” vintage of that computer, that is becoming more and more difficult - the last time the video card died, I had to scavenge quite a bit to find something compatible to even get the computer to boot back up. The project in question would involve coding a relatively simple software (with the current one as a template for functions) that is more future-proof (usability for a decade or upgradability down the road would be ideal) but still enables functionality with existing physical systems. There would therefore be a software and hardware-interface component.