IS 301 Computers and Knowledge Fall 2009 Project Topics

This document provides more details on possible topics for team projects. You may also find useful information on the page for the CPE/CSC 480 projects, including links to 480, 481, and 580 projects from previous years.

Self-Motivated Projects

Ideally, I would like you to find a topic that is of interest or benefit to you, or somebody in your personal or professional environment. In this course, the core aspect is the utilization of computers to help humans deal with knowledge. So if you have personal or professional "knowledge domains" where it might be of interest for you to explore how computers can help you organize, store, retrieve, or present that knowledge, this could be an excellent starting point.

The following list contains a few ideas for such projects:

Domain expertise repository

If you have some interesting knowledge of a domain, or maybe know somebody who does, you could design a repository for this knowledge. This could be a data base, set of Web pages, Wiki, Blog, an account on a social networking site (e.g. Facebook), or something else.

Catalog of personal items

You may have a collection of books, music, movies, art work, or other items, or you may want to put together an inventory of your possessions. You can create a data base or spreadsheet to collect this information, but it is advisable to plan the layout of such a system in advance. As an alternative, you can evaluate existing solutions against your requirements, select the best suited one, and use it for your catalog.

Organization of a photo collection

With digital cameras and cell phones with built-in cameras, it is easy to accumulate thousands of photos in a very short time. While applications like iPhoto have made great strides in offering support for dealing with (moderately) large amounts of images, it is still a challenge for users to keep them organized. Two of the underlying principles are the use of folders to group pictures together into sets that have something in common, and the use of tags to label photos as having a certain property. iPhoto, for example, groups photos into "events" according to their creation date, and it lets users create their own tags. In addition, photos can be organized according to faces or places, and grouped into albums, slide shows, and other accumulations. If this is done in an ad-hoc manner, it is easy to create entries here and there, quickly resulting in a rather messy affair.
As a project in this class, you could devise a strategy for organizing photos, e.g. by creating a well-crafted set of labels, together with guidelines for the use of albums, slide shows, and other relevant features.

Organization of a recipe collection

similar to the photo collection above; this could also apply ot other types of collections where it is difficult to keep track of individual items (stamps, coins). It is probably less relevant for collections that consist of relatively few, high-value items (cars, vintage guitars).

Personal Knowledge Repository

Using myself as an example, the accumulation of documents (in a relatively broad sense) that contain relevant knowledge is very essential. Computers make it significantly easier to collect and organize such documents, but it is still a major challenge to do this. There are programs and systems available that offer support in this area, both for individuals as well as for organizations, but I have not been able to find one that satisfies all my major requirements. Many individuals still try to do this by "manually" maintaining a set of hierarchical directories, together with meaningful names for files. There are several fundamental and practical problems with this approach, but since practically all computers offer basic support for this method, it is still in wide use.

Collaboration with Others

I'm in contact with other people who are currently involved in projects related to our course topics.

• Dr. Kevin O'Gorman is working on the game of Hex. He has assembled a huge collection of Hex game logs in a data base, and is especially interested in ways to improve the evaluation and analysis of those games. This topic was also selected by a team in the CSC 480 Fall 2008 class.
  For this class, the implementation aspects of the Hex game itself are probably less relevant; for somebody who is interested in such a topic, it might be a challenge to explore various ways of organizing such a data base according to different aspects.

Further Project Ideas

And here are a few more ideas for project topics. I am listing more general areas first, with a list of specific topics, and then more specific applications.

Diagnostic Systems

Many knowledge-based systems use observations of symptoms measured directly or provided by the user to analyse the system for malfunctions, possibly combined with advise on how to overcome the problem. Examples are systems for computers, automobiles or other technical systems, or medical diagnostic systems.

• troubleshooting computers, cars, cell phones, etc.

Advisory Systems

Instead of troubleshooting malfunctions in systems, an advisory KBS is queried by the user about an issue, an responds with a recommendation. Such systems can be used for the maintenance of systems, recommendations for decisions to be made, or the ranking of tasks to be performed

• course selection by students
• nutrition and health advice
• project and task management
• planning and scheduling

Modeling and Simulation

Such systems try to capture the functional principles of systems, and simulate their behavior. They are usually considerably "deeper" than diagnostic systems, and have more advanced capabilities. One significant advantage is that they can generate possible explanations for the behavior of a system, not just a mapping from symptoms to cures. Depending on the complexity of the model, such systems may consist of a combination of different components, not all of them knowledge-based systems. Such systems are used in domains and for problems where actual physical implementations are impractical. Examples are models of drugs, buildings, expensive devices, or cognitive functions.

• simple models of computers, operating systems (e.g. instruction execution cycle, memory management, CPU scheduling)
• energy-efficient buildings
• PolySat
• Avila Pier

Real-time Control

For some application areas, the response time of a controller system is very critical. Some commercial expert systems (Gensym, RT) are used for the control of chemical plants, elevators, or business processes.

• robots
• process control
• model trains

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web adds additional information to Web pages in the form of meta-tags. This enables computers to perform more meaningful operations on Web pages. For example, it allows the search for concepts based on ontologies, rather than simple keywords.

Natural Language Processing

With building blocks such as Link Grammar or WordNet, it is possible to construct systems that extract meaningful information from text-based documents.

Fuzzy Logic

In contrast to standard logic with its binary values, fuzzy logic employs linguistic variables such as "very tall" to capture the essential aspects. This makes many tasks such as process control much easier, but requires different reasoning methods.