This Year's Summer Projects

BFSNet (Funded, 2 students)

Implementation of a sensor network to monitor habitats (lizard, bird, etc) in the Bernard Field Station. Project involves development of software and hardware. Will involve web development and coding in C like language. Course requirements: CS 5. See our wiki. Directed by Profs. Erlinger and Adolph.

GPS Network Management (Funded, 2 students)

The goal is to create a set of network management tools to be used by operators of the GPS ground network (set of facilities that control the GPS satellites). Will involve web development. Course requirements: CS 5. Directed by Prof. Erlinger.

Web & Wiki Development (Funded, 2 students)

The department currently has information available via the web and a wiki. The department is working on a set of access requirements for the various categories of information. The project will involve implementation of these requirements with the goal of creating a system of web and wiki pages that is easily maintained. Directed by Prof. Erlinger.

Robotics (Funded from NSF, 3 - 4 students)

This project will deploy 5 or more outdoor robots. The goal will be to create a vehicle that can wander autonomously and deliberately around HMC's campus, e.g., for delivery or tour-guide tasks. Although hardware experience is a plus, software design and development will be the major facets of this project. Directed by Prof. Dodds.

Games and Education (subject to funding, ~3 students)

Design and develop an educational computer game to help improve computer literacy. Directed by Prof. Sweedyk.

Software for Sketch Recognition (Funded, up to 4 students)

Research on this project began in the summer of 2006 and will continue this summer and into the next few years. In the summer of 2006, we developed core recognition algorithms and a code base. In 2007 we improved those algorithms and built an initial prototype system. This summer we will continue to improve recognition algorithms and explore user interface issues. The goal is to have a fully functional prototype, ready for use in the classroom, by the start of fall 2008. See web site. Directed by Prof. Alvarado.

Recognizing Military Course of Action Diagrams (Funded, 2-4 positions)

The goal of this project will be to recognize freely-drawn military course of action diagrams to support military commanders during battle planning. This project will focus mainly on sketch recognition algorithms, but may also include a user interface component. The unique and exciting part of this project is that we aim to achieve a working system with high recognition accuracy (>90%) on freely drawn data in only one year. Students will work in teams of two on narrowly defined problems to try to achieve the highest accuracy possible in the shortest time possible. See web site. Directed by Prof. Alvarado.

Trace Repository (Funding pending, 1-2 students)

The SNIA Trace Repository contains over a terabyte of data collected by observing the behavior of real file systems. Harvey Mudd is responsible for the management and enhancement of this repository. Students will work to improve the user interface, develop tools related to traces, and integrate tools contributed by researchers, etc. Directed by Prof. Kuenning.

Summer Staff (Funded, 3-4 students)

The computing staff helps system administrator Tim Buchheim run the Computer Science Department's servers, networks, and labs. Summer is the time for big changes and major tasks. Summer is also the time to learn about the CS Department's systems; prior sys. admin. knowledge is appreciated, but not required. Directed by Prof. Kuenning.

REU Program Projects

The REU program will take up to 5 students total from HMC but the exact distribution of students among the three projects will be determined after students apply.

Intelligent Music Software (Funded, 3-4 students)

This project involves researching techniques for educational software tools to help students learn to understand music. Currently we have been concentrating on jazz improvisation, where our approach is to aid the student in constructing melodies similar to ones that could be improvised. In addition to several papers, the output of this project has been three major versions of the Impro-Visor tool, which is distributed free and has over 700 users. Participants should be interested in music knowledge representation and retrieval, machine-learning of musical knowledge, real-time execution of music, and human-computer interfaces. See http://impro-visor.com and REU web site. Directed by Prof. Keller.

Better Garbage Collection (Funded, 3-4 students)

If you like programming languages and operating systems, you'll probably be interested in garbage collection. See the REU web site for details. Directed by Prof. O'Neill.

Computer Vision (Funded, 3-4 students)

This project will add machine-learning components to the vision-based work begun in the summer of 2007. Our goal is to create 3d models of an environment using a single-camera's video of that environment. Ideally we will feedback our results so that a robot uses those 3d models to navigate more effectively. See the REU web site for details. Directed by Prof. Dodds.

Baker-Funded Projects for Women

The Baker Foundation has provided financial support for women doing summer research in computer science at HMC. All of the above HMC projects are open to women and the following projects are devoted to women, in particular, lower-division women.

XO Development (Funded, 3 students)

The XO is a $200 laptop developed by the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) foundation. The long- term goal is to flood the developing world's education system with laptops. When the XO was released in January 08, the software was less than perfect. This project is devoted to developing classroom applications for the XO, which is programmed in Python. Directed by Prof. Erlinger.

Computer-vision (Funded, 2-3 students

The project will be to create a camera-based display facing the Hallway of Olin: a system that allows tour groups and other passers-by to (1) access videos about HMC via gestures, and (2) play an interactive game (of the students' design). Students may join this project ~after~ summer math for only a part of the summer, if they wish. Directed by Prof. Dodds.

Sketching Styles (Funded, 2 students)

This project is in the same general area as the Software for Sketch Recognition Project (detailed earlier), but is geared toward first-year (women) students. The goal of this project is to critically analyze different people's sketching styles under different conditions. This is important and exciting research that will have a big impact on how sketch recognition systems are built. You do not need much experience with computer science (you should be able to get by just fine with CS5), but a working knowledge of probability and statistics will help a lot. See web site. Directed by Prof. Alvarado.

Pomona CS Projects

The deadline for the Pomona projects is MONDAY, February 25^th. Please send your application to: Lori Keala lmk04747@pomona.edu by 2/25. You may e-mail her your application which includes the following:

Name
E-mail Address
Year
CS and other relevant courses completed (please include grades and instructors for each course)
Preferred research advisor(s)
Research topics of interest
Names of at least 2 faculty references.
Any related job experience
Any summer vacation plans (include dates)

Solving Ax=b (Funded, 3-4 students)

Many scientific codes depend on being able to solve large, sparse linear systems quickly and accurately. We are working on understanding the behavior of different solvers using a variety of techniques. Potential projects include: 1) Developing fast(er) algorithms, studying heuristics, and/or determining NP-completeness for a variety of graph problems; and 2) Evaluating machine learning techniques for selecting solvers. Directed by Prof. Chen.

Understanding the Structure of a Story (Funded, 3 students)

We will analyze the structure of multiple genres of stories using several methods. The end result will be a system that is able to seek out stories of various types (such as Aesop's fables) from large corpora. This project will involve techniques from Information Retrieval and Text Classification. Directed by Prof. Sood.