CISC 498
Information Technology Project

School of Computing

Proposed Projects 2022-2023

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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).

Projects
Each group must claim a different project inform the course coordinator as soon as possible. Before claiming a project, you can contact the corresponding customer of the project to better understand the software system needs.

1. Exchange slotting program (Taken)

Customer: Margaret Maliszewska, International Programs Office, Queen’s University.

The process: The International Programs Office facilities exchanges for students in the Faculty of Arts and Science. Each year, the IPO receives about 400 applications for an exchange. Each student can select up to six institutions on their application. Each partner university has separate conditions, such as a certain GPA threshold, restrictions on specific degree plans or unique start and end term dates. Each university differs in how many spaces are available. The applications are scored by our team, and candidates are ranked accordingly. A higher score may give the applicant a better chance of getting their first choice of university.

The request: We are in need of a user-interface program that would help us with assigning the student to a university of their choice. This program should contain the “inventory” or “database” of our partner institutions (with all their characteristics and requirements) and the “inventory” of the applicants with the information on their application score, GPA, academic Plan, and requested exchange term. The program should then take into account the ranking of the students and match the applicants to the best appropriate university they have selected on their application.


2. Cyclist Map of Kingston

Customer: Carla Teixeira, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen's University.

The current City of Kingston cycling network shows the official cycling infrastructure and the type of infrastructure in different locations (e.g. cycle track, bike lane, multi-use pathway, etc.). Often, these spaces are next to streets and roads with high traffic which may intimidate potential active transpiration users from leaving their car at home and using a bicycle to transport themselves. While some of the official infrastructure is perfectly safe and well constructed, novice cyclists may not be aware of this. Additionally, there is a network of residential streets which are not part of the official cycling network that are very safe and remove a cyclist from high traffic areas. The goal of this project is to a create a way in which local cyclists can rate a stretch of street/road based on their perceived safety. The data collected from cyclists' input would then be averaged to visually display a more comprehensive cycling network composed of official cycling infrastructure and unofficial residential roads and pathways. Ideally this cycling network would be readily available to the public via website, app, or something else.

A similar project to this existed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was called Lanespotter and it was an app-based cyclist-sourced map. Unfortunately, it was sidelined as a project in 2019. I am interested in developing a resource similar to this, but just for the Kingston area.


3. Journal Database Slurp (Taken)

Customer: Nancy Salay, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and School of Computing, Queen’s University.

Supervisor: Burton Ma, School of Computing, Queen's University

A database of potential reviewers for an academic journal needs updating. The database is part of a third-party manuscript management software system -- hosted by cambridge university press – access to which is typically via a user interface. There may be the possibility of a back-end method of inputting data. Either way, the task is to slurp the relevant information from department websites (internationally) and input to the database avoiding duplication.
A sample entry looks like this:

Full Name: Dr. John Doe
User ID: doe@queensu.ca
ID #: 0000000
Primary affiliation: Doe University, Philosophy, Kingston, ON, Canada
Primary E-Mail Address: doe@queensu.ca
Roles: Reviewer
Areas of Expertise: Philosophy of Cognitive Science , Philosophy of Language , Metaphysics


4. The Witch Video Store Database and Interactive Website

Customer: Tamara de Szegheo Lang, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Film and Media Project Manager, Vulnerable Media Lab, Queen’s University.

Department of Film and Media faculty members Emily Pelstring, Dan Vena, and Tamara de Szegheo Lang are co-founders of The Witch Institute, a research group which held a seven-day international symposium last August. We are now moving into the knowledge mobilization phase of the project and are, among other things, taking a digital humanities approach to this dissemination. We are hoping that the computing students in CISC 498 can help us realize our vision.

In response to the recent explosion of mainstream television, film, and social media representations of witches as feminist icons, we are researching the history of representations of witches and witchcraft in film. We currently have records of 540 films (and their associated movie poster image files) that were released in years from 1898 to 2022. Our goals with these records are twofold: 1) We would like to create a database of the film records and posters that is easy to update for project-associated students and researchers who may not have specialized computing or information science training. The records are currently in an ‘Airtable’ and CSV format but we would like something conforming to metadata standards and with a publicly-accessible display as well as the potential of adding video clips and crowd sourced information; 2) We are creating an interactive website so that the public can view these records in an accessible and playful way. Therefore, the database system must be able to speak to the website and, ideally, allow for user contributions such as reviews of films and user filtering by keyword or other factors. Additionally, the website will have image-mapping, data visualizations, and a film recommendation generator. We envision the website as somewhat immersive in that users will have options on how to navigate the database – either in a traditional record-based format or through the navigation of the ‘rooms’ of a video store.


5. Experimental Game Design, Delivery, and Analysis

Customer: Anya Hageman, Department of Economics, Queen’s University.

Are game players with a need for speed less likely to buy insurance? And how does chosen speed change once insurance is purchased? You will provide a computer game plus software which leads users to the computer game after a preliminary survey, while recording users’ inputs. The computer game should offer a choice of speeds plus optional insurance packages. Users’ survey responses and game data will be stored securely in a simple database. The software will keep track of a user’s completion rate, completion times, choice of speeds, and current and cumulative game scores; it will also design an insurance offer based on previous scores, record whether the insurance offer was taken, and if so, adjust the game scoring accordingly. The software must determine the payment awarded to each user on the basis of time spent, task completion, and game scores.

Your team will oversee the technical aspects of having this software hosted for players to access, and you will analyze the results of a pilot run with machine learning.


6. Web-based Real-time Data Explorer(Taken)

Customer: Maddie Myers, Dr. Chris Omelon , Dr. Laura Thomson, Department of Geography and Planning, Queen's University.

Supervisor: Jianbing Ni, School of Computing, Queen's University

Researchers are actively seeking ways to communicate their scientific findings more broadly and effectively. One approach is to make research data accessible and easier to understand to better inform and engage people within our community. Specifically, the Ice Climate, and Environment Lab (ICELab) at Queen’s manages and compiles data from a network of 4 high-Arctic weather stations that is currently used by Arctic researchers at Queen’s. However, we would like to make this data accessible to other students and researchers at Queen’s as well as the larger scientific community so that it can used for their studies and projects. These weather stations send near-real-time climate data to Queen’s via a satellite network, so the project objective would be to create a website or module for a website hosted by Queen's that would:

  1. allow secure access to data existing on either a Dropbox account or file(s) on a Queen's computer,
  2. allow users to download specific weather data based on their checkbox selections (e.g., wind speed and direction from June to July 2013),
  3. allow users to perform simple statistical analyses (e.g., mean, standard deviation), display analytical results in a figure window, and with an option to download the results (e.g., monthly mean temperature from 2010 to 2015).

7. Generating a Navigable 3D World from a 2D Fantasy Map(Taken)

Customer: Daniel Gagnon-King, School of Computing, Queen’s University.

Supervisor: David Lamb, School of Computing, Queen's University

The application should allow users to draw 2D fantasy maps on a canvas (as seen in media like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones) with a variety of basic assets for mountains, towns, villages, trees, etc. There will be tools to draw rivers, lakes, and coastlines. The user will then have the option to generate a 3D world from their map, and be able to navigate it and explore. The goal of this project is to support creatives in making fantasy worlds of their own, and to visualize them in a context that makes sense for their characters (I.e., the 3D space).


8. “Internship in Political Studies” Management System(Taken)

Customer: Stephen Larin, Assistant Professor and Internship Coordinator, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University.

Supervisor: Bram Adams, School of Computing, Queen's University

The Department of Political Studies has a new internship program and needs a system to help manage it. This system would have three main components:

  1. an internship application web app that allows students to input their details, rank their preferred placements from our roster, and upload supporting documentation;
  2. an administration portal that is integrated with the application app and allows us to manage partner organizations, applicants, and internships; and
  3. an intern allocation function within the administration portal that will allow us to accept a specified number of applicants according to criteria such as GPA rank, then allocate the available internships using a lottery–preference system that places applicants in random order and then assigns a placement according to their highest preference that is still available when it is their turn.

Since we will be using sensitive student and partner data, the entire system must comply with Queen’s data security requirements. We have a straightforward plan for this system and look forward to working with you to implement it!


9. Mobile Augmented Reality (MobileAR) app for the deep-ocean-based high-energy neutrino telescope P-ONE

Customer: Dr. Nahee Park, Assistant Professor, The department of Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy, Queen’s University.

P-ONE is a future high-energy neutrino telescope proposed to be built at ~2 km under the water in the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver. The MobileAR project aims to inspire the general public and young students about high-energy neutrino astrophysics by showing the scale of the experiment, physical events, and the particular environment via augmented reality. For example, the application should be able to project the few cubic-kilometre active area of the telescope on a scale set by users. The various types of “events” in the telescopes will be provided based on realistic physics simulations, but how and what to implement them into the application can be discussed during the project after evaluating the effectiveness of the outreach. The project result will be shown to the P-ONE international collaboration and will be widely used for future outreach activities for P-ONE.


10. Remote data quality monitoring program for the NASA stratosphere balloon experiment, HELIX

Customer: Dr. Nahee Park, Assistant Professor, The department of Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy, Queen’s University.

A stratosphere balloon experiment such as HELIX (High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment) takes data at an altitude of 40 km. In such an experiment, all system monitoring and commanding are done remotely through TDRSS satellite communication. The project should construct a data quality monitoring program to show the detector’s health status in real-time, provide a scientific event display projected onto a 2D or 3D geometric model of the detector, and alert the scientists on the shift as soon as possible when bad behaviour is detected in some part of the detector. The HELIX detector has more than 20,000 channels of information to monitor. The key data should also be stored in a database for future offline analysis.


11. Interactive App Exploring David Tudor’s Sound Sculpture Exhibition Rainforest

Customer: Dr. Matt Rogalsky, Dan School of Drama and Music, Queen’s University.

David Tudor (1924-1996) was an influential musician and composer who began his career as a concert pianist and ended as a creator of unique electronic music. His best-known work Rainforest has as its core concept the idea of using found objects as unconventional loudspeakers: sounds played through the objects are transformed by their acoustic qualities. In the version of the piece known as Rainforest IV, sounds are transduced through many objects suspended throughout a space, so the listener hears them all around them. The sounds transduced through the objects can be from any sources, acoustic or electronic, but should be well-matched with the sonic properties of the objects, and should coexist in the space forming an “electroacoustic ecology”, in Tudor’s words .

With the proposed app (intended for best use on a tablet device with larger screen), users will be able to explore a history of Tudor’s Rainforest of the piece, learning about its principles and experimenting with it interactively. The app will include a library of sculptural objects represented in photographs and impulse responses (short audio files which capture the objects’ resonances). The impulse responses may be convolved with other audio sources to make those sources sound as if heard through the objects: the sonic qualities of the object are imparted to the source sound. A library of source material (including some from Tudor’s own collection) will be provided to be freely combined with the impulse responses in order to hear how each object changes the character of the sound, and users will have the facility to load their own sounds into the app to be heard through the virtual objects.

In addition to being able to freely combine impulse responses (representing physical objects) and source sounds, users can distribute these virtual sounding objects in a 2D space around a listener position, to experience hearing the ‘sculptures’ all around them binaurally, much as they would be heard in a gallery exhibition of Rainforest. A further enhancement would be to allow users to create their own ’walking path’ through the field of virtual objects, so that the listener’s relationship to all of the sculptures is constantly changing as virtual objects come closer or recede into the distance.

The customer, Dr Matt Rogalsky, is a ‘younger generation’ member of David Tudor’s performance group Composers Inside Electronics which was formed circa 1973. He has been teaching and performing Rainforest since 1998. Together with original CIE members John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein, he created a new version of Rainforest which was purchased in 2017 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for its permanent collection. The work will be on exhibit from October 2019 to January 2020.


12. E-Training Business - creating high quality and effective e-training solutions for the insurance industry, non profits, etc. (Taken)

Customer: Brad Youmans.

Supervisor: Sidney Givigi, School of Computing, Queen's University

Software Requirements: to create a software program to house the e-training courses/modules.

Outcomes of the software:

I am currently in talks with a province-wide insurance brokerage that needs a service like this in order to streamline and provide consistent training, making it accessible to staff at their convenience, and to reduce in house staffing requirements for trainers.


13. Self Serve Web Portal for Mortgage Brokers (Taken)

Customer: Brad Youmans.

Supervisor: Juergen Dingel, School of Computing, Queen's University

Software Requirements: to create a self serve web portal for Mortgage Brokers providing security options for their private lenders.

Outcomes of the software:


14. Mobile Application for CAN-Sim

Customer: Lola Assad

I work with Dr. Marian Luctkar-Flude from Queen's University School of Nursing and Dr. Jane Tyerman from the University of Ottawa, who are the Co-Presidents of CAN-Sim (Canadian Alliance of Nurse Educators Using Simulation). We are developing a mobile application version of some aspects of the CAN-Sim website.

CAN-Sim is a not-for-profit organization that shares resources openly and with its members. The intent of creating the mobile app is to increase the accessibility of their teaching and learning resources. The first virtual simulations that we would like to embed in the app are a series of wound care virtual simulations developed with Dr. Kevin Woo, a wound care expert from the Queen's University School of Nursing. Dr. Woo and Dr. Luctkar-Flude will co-supervise the CISC 498 students who will work on this project, and I will provide the project management support. Essentially, the mobile application would be an interactive platform in which members can complete the games, modules, and pre-simulation prep, all of which are presently available on the website. An example of an app that accomplishes what we are looking for architecture-wise is called Touch Surgery. We would also like to receive analytic reports for the performance of the application, in order to understand how to improve the platform in the future, add a feature where students earn badges and achievements after completion of certain goals, and allow students to access the PDF’s available on the website (ideally a downloadable copy would be sent to the student's email).


15. Corporate GHG Inventory Web Application (Taken)

Customer: Noor Shaikh

Supervisor: Briggs Fisher, School of Computing, Queen's University

There are several start-ups working on developing carbon calculators for companies to estimate their carbon footprint. However, most of those calculators either only focus on a certain set of emissions or require paid subscriptions to access them. Given the urgency of the global climate change problem, I am looking into creating a scalable solution and platform that can be freely available and is targeted toward small and medium-sized businesses.

I have extensive experience in calculating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventories for big corporations according to the GHG Protocol as well as modeling emission reduction scenarios and the goal of this project will be to automate those calculations and models.

There are four sides to the platform, you can get the opportunity to work with any of the following:

Additionally, you will also get the opportunity to learn how to calculate carbon emissions for different scopes and categories.


16. Exam monitoring and access software for computer based paperless exams

Customer: Dr. John Carran, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, Queen's University.

To run final exams and midterms utilizing student’s own laptops in Queen’s exam halls/lecture theatres as an environmental and cost saving exercise to reduce the use/storage/shredding of paper, I would require software that would:

  1. Ensure that students only access allowed materials on their personal laptops via the Queen’s secure Wi-Fi system available in common Queen’s exam halls/lecture theatres during the exam.
  2. Only allow access to any third-party websites required as additional material for that exam and not to any other websites.
  3. Be compatible with exams run through ONQ (the D2L classroom delivery system).
  4. Be easy to run and set up and monitor by the exam’s office/standard proctors with minimal retraining.
  5. Minimize any issues surrounding privacy.
  6. Be compatible with multiple platforms (Apple iOS /windows) and possibly tablets.
  7. Require minimal/easy setup for the students.

Initially, this would be for my 2nd year organic chemistry exams that run through ONQ with access to a third-party website that generates codes for molecular structures. However, if the software were broadly applicable to other subjects it would be a very valuable resource.


17. Software for Mass Flow and Temperature Control in a Catalytic Reactor

Customer: Paul Duchene, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, Queen's University.

The goal of this project is to design control and logging software for both temperature and gas flow in a custom-built catalytic reactor. The software should provide a desktop graphical user interface to control the flow of up to three Mass Flow Controller units and a Temperature Controller unit simultaneously via serial interface, and to periodically save the active flow rates and temperature to a noSQL database for future reference. Basic plotting/graphing of recent settings would also be a valuable addition.

Some relevant reference materials:
MFC Manual Temperature Controller Manual

18. Resistor Reader: A mobile app that reads resistance value from resistor colour stripes (Taken)

Customer: Duncan Mays, MSc student, School of Computing, Queen’s University.

Supervisor: Steven Ding , School of Computing, Queen's University

Electrical resistors are circuit components that are used across labs at Queen's and beyond. They're colour coded with stripes along the sides to give their resistance values, which brings trouble to people who can’t see the full colour spectrum. An automated digital solution would not only make life easier for students but would also make electronics more accessible to colour-blind people, who are around 8% of men and 0.5% of women. The platform for the solution should be readily available to any student in any lab on campus, and be able to take visual input of the colour strips on each resistor. As such, a mobile app that operates on camera input is likely the best choice. One form of the app could be something that takes a snapshot of live video input, identifies the silhouette of the resistor in the static photo, determines the orientation and then where to read the colour values to calculate the resistance.