Class Feedback

Please use the Web form at https://spreadsheets1.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGR4NTJ0bl92TnF2bUJmWU5zdzdtdnc6MA for feedback on course content, lectures, tools like Blackboard and TRAC Wiki, and a few more aspects.
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Team Member Feedback

Similar to what we did a few weeks ago, I’m using a Web form at https://spreadsheets1.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGtVSkZMUXZfWnRldTZ0UVBkakZlNVE6MA to collect feedback on the collaboration and work distribution in your team. This time, however, the feedback will be taken into account for the grade on the project part of the class; it contributes 20% of the project grade. I normally take the average of the scores submitted by the team members (including your self-evaluation), although I reserve the right to adjust this if I have evidence that the score does not reflect the actual performance of the team member.
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Final Project Presentations Feedback

Please use the Web form at https://spreadsheets0.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHNiTDhfZHczTHowRklfQmJXX2p4R2c6MA for feedback on the final project presentations
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581-W11 - Project Theme, Permission Numbers

If you're interested in taking 581 next quarter, and don't have the prerequisite listed in PASS, send me an email. I'll forward it to Christy Zolla from our department office, and she'll send you a permission number. 
For a preview of the format and content, check out last year's 581 class
The class again incorporates elements of 486 (Human-Computer Interaction) since I'm on a reduced teaching schedule for next quarter.
There's also a good chance that we will use a common theme for the class projects, based on an idea by Anna Gold from Cal Poly's library to extend the Science Cafe towards an online marketplace for events, ideas, projects, etc. I'm also in contact with several people from industry (mostly Cal Poly alums) to get involved with this. Individual teams would still be able to select their own projects, but the projects would have to fit into the overall theme. 
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Mid-quarter Team Member Feedback

Please give me some feedback on how the work on your team is going, including the performance of the team members. We’ll do the same thing again at the end, and then your answers will contribute to the score for the project. The main purpose of this one is to alert me about discrepancies within teams, such as imbalanced work loads, or members not contributing their share.
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Mid-quarter Project Presentation Feedback

The feedback form for the mid-quarter project presentations is here.
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Mid-Quarter Project Review

The mid-quarter project review is scheduled for this week, and the target date for the beta prototype is next week. Next week Thursday is also the deadline for the second assignment (ontology).
For the project review, we can do conventional presentations, or displays with storyboards; either is fine with me. We can do the review on Thu, Feb. 3, or Tue, Feb. 8 during the lab time.
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Project Description and TRAC Wikis Available

You can find the project description on the class Web page now. We also have a number of TRAC Wikis available; if your team already has decided on a topic, let me know and I’ll give you access to the Wiki.
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Additional Project Topic Proposals

If you have additional project ideas, please post them here as comments. If possible, they should
- involve outside customers
- incorporate knowledge-centric activities.
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Project Topic Proposal: Knowledge management system for operator's understanding of robot movements

The goal of this project will be to produce a knowledge management system to support the operator's understanding of the movement of a team of robots through a building layout. This system will account for the ability of (1) the robot team to make decisions about the level of control it exhibits; and (2) decisions the team of robots make about when and what needs to be communicated to the human operator of the team.
- multi-robot coordination
- phase 2 of a research project
- visualization of the status of the robots
- tradeoff between autonomy and
- very open
- open source environment ROS, Willow garage; http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/07/22/urbi-open-source-now-integrated-ros
- possibly involve 484 students, Tracy Davies
- Xbox Kinect
- also Brown University, iRobot
Contact persons
- Jeanine Ayers, Nathan Schurr; Aptima
Background required
- basic robotics
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Project Topic Proposal: Decision Maker Modeling

The goal of this project will be to more accurately model decision makers and the allocation of their tasks across the domain of air traffic control. The decision makers have a profile (current task load, task of focus, capability matrix) and the system must make decisions to meet merging and changing goals within the environment such as optimizing humans, systems, safety, etc.
- general resource allocation problem
- modeling of decision makers, e.g. situational awareness, task switching
- data gathering to populate the model (more flexible, but possibly more challenging)
- ontology (possibly integration with existing agent code)
Contact persons
- Nathan Schurr; Aptima
Background required

- ontology, JADE
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Project Topic Proposal: Knowledge management system for topic analysis in office environments

The goal of this project will be to produce a knowledge management system to support the mining of data in typical office communication environments to answer questions about what people are working on and what deliverables they are producing. For example, who worked on robot coordination algorithms in a given month?
- social networking
- latent semantical indexing
- query communications analysis data
- Python script to generate test dat from Wikpedia
- plugin architecture for visualization
- framework of entities and relations
- fits into several projects
- emphasis could be on visualization or analysis
Contact persons
- Jeanine Ayers, Nathan Schurr; Aptima
Background required

- statistics, model checking, machine learning
- at least one of {Flex, REST/SOAP, Web-based development}
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Project Topic Proposal: iFixit Recommender System

The ifixit Web site offers instructions for repairs of all kinds of devices, and has recently been expanded to allow the submission of user-generated instructions. The company, co-funded by a CSC alumnus, is interested in adding a recommendation facility that would offer user suggestions such as other devices or repairs they may be interested in, or parts and tools that are suitable for the repair. They currently have recommendations for the latter, but they are not very sophisticated.
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Project Topic Proposal: Computers and Knowledge Educational Resources

The goal of this project is to provide educational resources for a course similar to this one, but intended for participants without a strong computer background.
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Project Topic Proposal: Visualization of Ontologies and RDF Graphs

The underlying data structures for ontologies and RDF (Resource Data Framework) structures are graphs. While graphs in principle are well suited for visualization purposes, there are several challenges for these particular structures. Ontologies frequently have a multitude of relationships (links in the graph), and it is impractical to display all of them simultaneously. RDF graphs frequently are huge, and can’t be displayed in their entirety. In both cases, however, there are underlying principles that humans intuitively utilize to arrange the nodes in both a visually pleasing and easy to comprehend manner (although it may be very difficult or impossible to achieve both). The objective of this project is to examine existing visualization methods for ontologies and RDF graph, and identify their advantages and shortcomings. On the other side, there are packages available for displaying generic graphs. Our hope is that a combination of insights from the existing visualization tools with advanced graph display packages, together with heuristics that reflect organizational principles for ontologies and RDF graphs will result in better visualization tools. Ideally, a prototype of such an ontology visualization tool would be integrated with the Protégé ontology development environment.
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Project Topic Discussions

I just realized that we could use the Comments feature of these pages for additional project proposals and discussions of the topic I mentioned yesterday. So I’m going to create a new entry for each topic. Please add a comment if the topic sounds interesting to you (this does not constitute a commitment to actually select it), or if you have questions.
I’ll also create another entry for additional project ideas. If you have one, add it there as a comment.
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