CISC 498 Information Technology Project
School of Computing		Proposed Projects 2024-2025

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. Designing an Interface for SOLUS to track students’ community involvement (Reserved)

Customer: The Principal’s Advisory Council on Community Engagement: Sophia Coppolino and Wendy Craig, PhD.

This project provides an exciting opportunity to collaborate with the Registrar’s Office to create an interface to work with SOLUS (PeopleSoft) system to that has the ability to tracking students’ community involvement (i.e., through coursework, co-curricular involvement, research). The goal is to create a user-friendly and visually appealing addition to SOLUS that enables students at Queen’s University to document their research, curricular, and extracurricular community activities.

Objectives:

1. Interface Design and Development: Create an intuitive and engaging interface that allows students to log their community experiences.
2. Portfolio Generation: Enable students to download a complete personal portfolio showcasing their activities and accomplishments.
3. Skill Assessment and Reflection: Incorporate features such as skill self-assessment quizzes, self-reflection prompts, and video modules that can be easily updated by university personnel.
4. Data Collection: Develop a backend system to effectively collect and manage data on students’ activities and involvement.

By participating in this project, you will have the chance to make a meaningful difference to the student experience at Queen’s. Not only will this project enhance your technical skills, but it will create a valuable tool for you and your peers to track your community involvement and incorporate these experiences into your CV.

2. 3D Data Analysis and Visualization

Customer: Dr. Kevin Stamplecoskie, Queen's University, Chemistry

Develop new software to analyze three-dimensional emission data via Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC). Ideally, the software would read files from our dedicated fluorescence instrument, crop the data to a 3-D triangle, and analyze by PARAFAC analysis. The software would hopefully be very user friendly, for chemists with little or no programming skills, and with the ability to crop data should give a much more statistically valuable analysis of the components contributing to fluorescence in a sample. We currently use software to perform this analysis but it is very limited and not the most user friendly. The work woul d be supported by several graduate students and data from existing samples that can be used for instant and continuous feedback on the software being developed.

3. The Sexual Configurations Theory (SCT) Platform

Customer: Sari van Anders, Ph.D. Canada 150 Research Chair in Social Neuroendocrinology, Sexuality, and Gender/Sex.

The Sexual Configurations Theory (SCT) Platform. The SCT Platform will allow people to access an online way to learn about and map out their gender/sex and sexuality using SCT diagrams (3-D visual "cones" and "strength axes") that are in existence. People can do this for themselves, as part of research projects, as part of educational programs, and as part of clinical, therapy, and counseling engagements. Their data would either be downloadable by themselves, by us and/or other specified researchers, or by specified clinicians/therapists/counselors. The platform would also include other information about SCT, including pre-existing videos, zines, cartoons, translations, and other materials.

4. Archival Research Tool

Customer: Veronika Kratz, APostdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, Queen's University.

The proposed project involves creating software designed to aid humanities scholars doing archival-based research. A typical archival research trip within the humanitites involves visiting collections and reading through/recording as much material as possible in a very short amount of time. The materials recorded can be anything from photographs, policy documents, and various drafts to letters, recipes and post-it notes. The goal of this project is to create software that will streamline the process of collecting/recording archival materials on-site (usually by taking pictures) and then managing these materials so that they can be integrated into research projects. In essence, this software needs to organize a high volume of photographs and digital files and provide an interface for note-taking, transcription, and citation of specific photographs and groups of photographs.

Key features:

1. Ability to work both online and offline
2. Interface for both phones and computers (and ability to quickly synch between devices)
3. Ability to collaborate on a project with others
4. Some capacity to store images
5. Some ability to read text from photos

5. Developing an app to track individual carbon emissions in real time

Customer: Warren Mabee, Policy Studies/Geography and Planning, Queen’s University.

The carbon footprint of individual Canadians has become a priority as reducing emissions is a key component of fighting climate change. Most carbon ‘trackers’ are simply calculators, where you input a few basic lines (what kind of house you live in, how often you drive/fly, type of diet) and a number is generated. This results in a general benchmark which is not conducive to providing feedback and helping individuals address carbon emissions.

Objectives:

1. Investigate, identify and implement software solutions that can track personal spending via either (a) financial institutions and/or (b) loyalty programs
2. Identify or develop tools to interpret financial data using filters that can identify specific types of spending (e.g., mobility might include spending on transit or fuel; food might include meat and non-meat purchases; etc.)
3. Link filtered financial data to libraries developed by the customer that assign a footprint to different activities, and upload calculated footprints to a central ledger
4. Develop an application interface that presents footprint data to the users through a ledger query

6. An online application for tick-borne disease testing

Customer: Robert I. Colautti (he/him), Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Queen’s University.

Description: Lyme disease and other tick-borne epidemics are a growing problem in Canada and around the world. Our lab has developed new tests to screen for tick-borne pathogens in Ontario, using high-throughput sequencing technology. In collaboration with myLyme.ca, this project will develop an online application to enable end-users to explore the results of our assays. The CISC 498 project team will focus on data visualizations and the end-user interface. To develop this application prototype, the project team will meet with the Principal Investigator (Colautti) and other members of the Colautti Lab to learn about high-throughput sequencing data and how to interpret it. This will be followed by periodic meetings focusing on data visualizations, communicating key results, and the overall user experience.

Links:

7. A Gaming Platform for Measuring Attention

Customer: Effie J. Pereira, PhD, , Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Queen’s University.

In the area of cognitive science, we often conduct a number of computerized tasks to assess our measures of interest. For example, participants might be asked to do a repetitive sustained attention task for 15mins (“press the left arrow when you see a square and the right arrow when you see a circle”) or a long memory task for 40mins (“memorize this 1st list of words and match them to the words on a 2nd list”). These tasks have helped us learn a lot about *maximal* abilities but given that they are very removed from what we do in regular life (in addition to being mind-numbingly boring), they don’t really tell us about *functional everyday* abilities, which is what we really care about. For this problem, we would like to build a smartphone app that would allow us to gamify our data collection by re-designing our computerized tasks in a more fun and accessible way. Essentially, we imagine participants being invited to download this app, create a user profile, and when they do so, they will be asked to play any of the games in the app (for however many sessions or days) until they complete their allotted data collection time. The gamified tasks would then have the same components of the original but ideally be fun to play through. So a gamified sustained attention task could involve something similar to a Fruit Ninja game (“slice through all fruit by swiping left, but make sure you don’t slice through a bomb”) or a gamified memory task could be a Card Flipping game (“flip the cards over and match them as quickly as you can”)(see attachment of a prior mockup). Participants’ data (i.e., response time, swipes, timing) would then be sent to a secure server and linked only by their user profile to protect their anonymity. We could then even visualize to participants how well they did over multiple sessions or days, over different difficulty levels, how they compare to other participants on the app, etc.

8. A novel tool for identifying potential threats to Canadian lakes (Reserved)

Customer: Diane Orihel (she/her), Associate Professor, Queen's National Scholar in Aquatic Ecotoxicology, School of Environmental Studies/Department of Biology, Queen's University, 116 Barrie Street, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

We are interested in developing software that can create a new score card for threats to the health of freshwater lakes - a tool that could be applied to lakes across Canada (or, as a starting point, lakes in a particular region of Canada). We propose the use of IUCN's "threats calculator", which is a globally accepted approach for assessing the threats to species-at-risk. We think threat categories defined by the IUCN can easily be transferrable to freshwater lakes.

An overview of the IUCN threat classification scheme is here:

A detailed description of each threat category is here:

9. Interactive (decolonialized) art database (Reserved)

Customer: Danielle Lussier, PhD, , Queens National Scholar and the Chair of Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives in the Faculty of Arts and Science.

We are keen to explore the possibility of a program that would support the mobilization of my extra-intellectual research product and the return of research findings to Indigenous communities. We are a Red River Métis beadwork artist, and a significant part of our research output is generated through embodied pedagogical practice. We create beadwork that serves both to revitalize knowledge systems that have long been denigrated and impacted by colonialism, and that work as mnemonic devices to help translate my research findings for a wide variety of audiences. Our decolonial research practises are critical to ensure that we respect the communities to whom we are accountable, and to ensure that the academy begins to repair relationships that have been damaged following decades of extractive academic research in Indigenous communities.

We are looking for a program that will facilitate the translation of information held in my beadwork. In real life situations, we called this process “reading the beads.“ we are unsure if the more appropriate vehicle would be an application or a program that could be mobilized more generally on the web, however, the critical elements that we would seek to include are:

1. A database of images
2. Ability for the end user to “mouse over“ images and have text, audio files, and/or video clips “pop out” so that they can learn more about the information encoded in the art
3. Ease-of-use for me, as the researcher, to upload images and the “pop out” information without needing to worry about programming
4. It will be important that the data included in the database be catalogued in such a way that it is somehow citable under APA/MLA/McGill Guide and other standard citation guides (one of my research areas inquires on issues of decolonization of citation practices)

Other desirable elements would be:

1. Multilingual end-user experience
2. Ability to support Indigenous languages

The end users for the program as we will use it will range from other researchers to learners in primary secondary, and post-secondary education, to Indigenous community members and members of the public writ large. One could imagine that such an application or program could also be useful to art galleries (the Agnes, perhaps?), museums, public archives, government agencies such as Parks Canada/Ontario Parks, and artists generally.

10. Designing the Communication Systems for the Balloon-borne Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment

Customer: Laura Fissel, Assistant Professor and astrophysicist from the Physics Department, Queen’s University.

Background Information:

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is a technique in astrophysics that combines observations from radio telescopes at different locations around the world to synthesize an "Earth-sized" telescope that can make extremely high-resolution images. High-frequency VLBI has been used by the Event Horizon Telescope to image the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and at the center of nearby galaxy M87.

We believe that using high-frequency radio telescopes suspended from stratospheric balloons can improve VLBI image quality. Stratospheric balloons operate between 30-40km above the Earth's surface, or above 99.5% of the Earth's atmosphere. With funding from the Canadian Space Agency we have built the Balloon-borne VLBI Experiment (BVEX), a microwave radio telescope that we will operate as a test VLBI station on a 12-hour balloon flight launched from Timmins, Ontario in August 2025. The balloon launch, gondola, and communication systems will be provided by the Canadian Space Agency and the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES, the French Space Agency).

The Proposed Project:

We would love to have a group of CISC 498 students design and write the commanding and telemetry downlink software for BVEX. The scope of the project would depend on the number of students and the group interest but could include:

1. Designing the commanding interface software. We need software to send commands to the telescope through the CNES's PASTIS communications system, and write to flight code that monitors for uplinked data and updates a global structure that is monitored by the experiment control software.
2. Telemetry: All our experiment data will be stored on onboard hard drives but we also need to send down compressed and down-sampled in-flight data that we can use to calibrate and monitor the performance of the experiment during the flight. We need to develop software that can send downsampled and compressed experiment data to the onboard PASTIS communications module to be downlinked to a ground station by an S-band transmitter. This software will need to be flexible and commandable so that we can change which fields have the highest priority (and sampling rate), and so that we can throttle our telemetry data rate based on the available downlink bandwidth.
3. Ground station software: Once the telemetry data is downlinked we will need to unpack the data so that it can be monitored. It would also be great to have a GUI that would allow us to monitor the status of the telescope in real time.

11. Department of History Database Design and Management (Reserved)

Customer: Amitava Chowdhury, PhD, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History, Queen’s University.

This project aims to develop several database interfaces for personnel and student data for the Department of History. The end product provides a single user interface for accessing, editing and inputting a wide range of data associated with the administrative and academic management of the department.

12. Accelerated Spell Checking for Kanyen’keha (Mohawk)

Customer: Thanyehténhas / Nathan Brinklow.

Kanyen’kéha is an Indigenous language spoken by ˜2000 people, mostly older first-language speakers, along the northern shores of the St Lawrence River and Lake Ontario. The language standardized its spelling system in the early 1990’s to help facilitate greater sharing and cooperation as Mohawk communities started developing resources for teaching; however, despite standardization, inconsistent spelling remains a barrier to learners and creates problems for analysis.

Kanyen’kéha is a low resource language, meaning we does not have large amounts of corpora (text). While it is possible machine learning might be a useful tool in the future, an accurate corpus would be required to make that possible.

The proposal is to develop a web based application that would accelerate spell checking by humans and create a corrected/verified text along with a collection of incorrect/correct pairs that could be used to further accelerate spell checking in a process of iterative development.

13. Gamification of Lexicographical Engagement

Customer: John Chew, Editor-in-Chief, Canadian English Dictionary; Anastasia Riehl

It has been two decades since the last general dictionary of Canadian English was published, and Canadians are in urgent need of a reference that defines English the way it is used in our country today. The Canadian English Dictionary is a digital project being developed to meet this demand by a nationwide nonprofit consortium represented locally by the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University.

Promoting user engagement is key to the success of the project, to build a sense of community to maintain interest in the project, but equally importantly to solicit contributions of variant pronunciations, newly emerging words, meanings and nuances. A previous group of students proposed adding a gamification layer to the basic lexicographical reference functionality, suggesting that a system similar to Google Maps Local Guides would be suitable.

This project therefore is to design and implement a system for encouraging online dictionary users to engage voluntarily in tasks of use to the project, in exchange for rewards such as in-game currency and recognition.

14. Visualizing the Psychological Assessment Report Using a Computerized Template

Customer: Dr. Sheelagh Jamieson, C.Psych, Director, Queen’s Psychology Clinic.

Download proposal here.

15. Dashboard for task scheduling and performance monitoring (Reserved)

Customers: Yuanzhu Chen, Ruslan Kain, School of Computing, Queen's University.

This dashboard is designed as a centralized monitoring tool for managing a network of edge devices, including Raspberry Pis and Jetson Nanos, which serve as a dynamic usage testbed. The platform aims to simulate real-world scenarios where edge devices, referred to as workers or extreme edge devices, are user-owned and configured to perform a variety of tasks dynamically. Following are the key features:

Real-time Resource Monitoring

1. Resource Usage Metrics: View real-time data on CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O utilization.
2. Device Configuration Details: Monitor settings such as CPU frequency, memory size, and bandwidth limits to ensure optimal operation.

Dataset and Model Management

1. Available Datasets: Access detailed information about datasets available on each device, including properties like size, type, and usage.
2. Prediction Models: Review the properties and performance metrics of machine learning models deployed on the devices.

Dynamic Device State Tracking

1. Current State Overview: Track the real-time state of each device, identifying whether it is idle, processing tasks like gaming or video streaming, or handling background applications.

Task Scheduling and Allocation

1. API Integration: The dashboard will include an API for task scheduling and resource allocation, allowing for efficient distribution of tasks according to a customizable scheme.
2. Task Management: Users can manage and allocate tasks dynamically, optimizing resource usage across the network of devices.

Following are the project goals:

Dashboard Development

1. Complete the Front-end: Finalize the development of the dashboard's front-end, building on the existing draft to enhance user experience and interaction design. This involves integrating real-time data visualization and interactive controls for efficient monitoring and management of edge devices.

API Development

1. Build a Robust API: Develop a comprehensive API based on the existing codebase, which currently enables running applications on edge devices and managing task allocations. This API will facilitate real-time data retrieval including resource usage and future predictions, enhancing the dynamic task scheduling capabilities of the system.

Database Implementation

1. Database Creation: Transition from using a JSON file as a mock database to implementing a structured database that can efficiently manage and store large volumes of data. This database will keep track of all devices, their configurations, datasets, and experimental results, ensuring data integrity and quick access for analytics.

Integration and Testing

1. System Integration: Seamlessly integrate the dashboard, API, and database components to create a cohesive system that communicates effectively across all modules.
2. Comprehensive Testing: Conduct thorough testing to ensure that the dashboard is reliable, the API responses are accurate, and the database operations perform optimally under different scenarios.

Possible Future Enhancements

1. Expand Data Analytics Features: Introduce advanced analytics for predictive modeling and decision support, enabling proactive management of resources and tasks.
2. Improve Scalability: Enhance the system architecture to support scalability and cross-platform compatibility, allowing for the addition of any devices and handling increased data flow without performance degradation.