Final Project
[Note: this webpage last modified Friday, 11-Mar-2011 12:16:47 EST]
For the project, you will use the chapter(s) you have presented to the class as a springboard for further explorations. I will provide more details as we get into the semester. Here is the preliminary information.
Project rules and grading
You can work with a partner or alone (so a group of 2 or 1). If working with a partner, you will be graded accordingly, with the expectation that the project is more substantial than a single person project.
Proposal will be due to-be-determined, Midpoint due to-be-determined, Final presentation will be the last week of classes.
For the final presentation, you will turn in a writeup of your project that should be in the format of a research paper. The writeup should describe the background and major results relevant to your project, and should give complete proofs for one or more of the results. The writeup should also discuss applications of the results you present and potential future avenues of exploration (e.g., what are the major open questions). I would expect the project writeups to be about 10 pages, but there is no page minimum or maximum. You will have 20 minutes for the presentation.
Grade breakdown: 20% proposal, 30% midpoint, 50% final. For each of those, the grade will be 70% what you hand in and 30% the presentation to the class.
If working in pairs, you will grade each other and yourself as well. I will take that into consideration.
Some project ideas.
Investigate the potential of installing distributed computing software on department computers. This would entail learning about the possibilities, for example Condor and BOINC. The hope would to have a system running on at least some of the department computers by the end of the semester, together with some data on test runs of algorithms to measure the performance.
Investigate the potential of managing a "use volunteer computer cycles" program, like SETI@home. This would entail learning about what software would be needed to run such a system, for example BOINC, and then getting the system up and running. A main benefit of running such a system is that it would allow students and faculty at ISU to have access to "high throughput computing" for use in projects and research. We may be able to convince enough ISU students and others to install the software so that the system really does offer a lot of processing power.
Have discussions with faculty and staff across campus (e.g., in other science departments, OIT, CIRT, etc.) about what types of software and algorithms would be useful. For example, what algorithms do departments use in deciding when to schedule classes? Would some software for automatically identifying conflicts be useful? Or, you could write software to take data on student enrollment in all the departments and majors to identify trends over time.
What types of information is being leaked across public networks? Do a study in the literature about what is often sent "in the clear", and also study what software can be used to obtain this data (e.g., packet sniffers). It would be interesting to run these types of programs on campus (wired and wireless networks) and around town, but we may need to check that this does not violate any rules before doing so.
Do an audit of the security of various systems used at ISU. What are the protocols that are used for sending/receiving email? How secure are they? What about the wireless network? The systems used for signing up for classes (could someone sign you up for a class you don't want)? Other systems on campus? How about the security of Math and CS servers?
For whatever topic you are interested in, look for open source software related to it, obtain the open source software, and think about ways that you might make some changes to the software to improve it or modify it to what you are interested in.
Look at some recent research in networking, operating systems, etc. where a research group has documented their methods and results well. You could look through recent conference proceedings for ideas (list of CS conferences). Then as a first step, attempt to duplicate their results - run the systems they ran and see if you come up with the same performance numbers.
Make a game where the computer AI runs distributed on many computers, and see how that performs against a computer AI that just gets to use one computer's processing power.
For a project involving distributed/parallel computing, cloud computing, internet commerce, etc. it may be beneficial to run your project on one of the "cloud computing" platforms that are available. For exmaple, Amazon provides grants for free use of some of their service for a limited time. See http://aws.amazon.com/education/. You can also look at the list of cloud computing providers on wikipedia.