University of Oxford Department of Computer Science

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Computer Science project

All second year students carry out a group programming project in the third term. This is Computer Science underg…
underg…
an opportunity to experience working collaboratively in a team to produce a working
software prototype. Participation is compulsory but the projects are not assessed in a way
that contributes to the final degree classification. Our students enjoy presenting their
results at the end of the project and have the chance to win one of several industry-
sponsored prizes.

Students in the third year of the Computer Science degree can spend 25% of their time on
a project, usually involving the creation of a more substantial computer program that they
have worked with in laboratory exercises. In the fourth year, students undertake a larger
project (38% of their time), often more oriented towards the research interests of a member of staff

Mathematics and Computer Science students who elect to stay on for a fourth year undertake either a Computer Science project (37% of
their time) or a Maths dissertation (25%).

Each year, the Department publishes a list of projects that members of staff have agreed to supervise, but students are also encouraged
to propose their own projects.

Some examples of recent projects on offer include:

Contents
A Steganography App for Facebook
wBody Language
Building an Animation or Simulation System
Computational Linguistics: Ellipsis Interpretation
Electronic Pet
Friend Finding by Phone
GeomLab and Mindstorms
Mine4Nuggets. Searching for Objects into Images
Parallel Linear Algebra
Robot Path Planning
Sell Computer Science
Resilient and Rapid Raspberries
Computer Science Visualisation
Some Other Projects

A Steganography App for Facebook

Steganography means hiding a hidden payload within an apparently-innocent cover, usually an item of digital media. Facebook is the
ideal platform for the transmission of payload-carrying images, since images are so commonly uploaded and shared. And Facebook does
not permit encrypted communications between users, who might seek an alternative way to preserve their privacy. This project is to
develop a steganography app for Facebook, which allows messages to be sent and received inside pictures.
Body Language
The Microsoft Kinect is a device with a depth camera that measures the distance out into a scene. It
has software to detect the "skeleton" of people standing in front of it and to extract their "gestures".
The idea of this project is to use a Kinect to build a gesture-based control system for some electro-
mechanical device. This might be a robot, or some other device, like a toy or an iPod player. The
challenge is to devise and implement an easy to use interface to control the device by movement.

Project - Body Language

Building an Animation or Simulation System
The simulation of objects and beings within a computer has become a hot topic over the last few years, with applications to virtual
reality, the design of safe stadia, synthetic actors and environments for films, and computer games, amongst others. This project would
look at the design and construction of a relatively simple animation or simulation system, that would probably sacrifice ease of
animation in order to focus on the modelling of interactions between the actors and their environments.

Computational Linguistics: Ellipsis Interpretation

Sentences like: 'John likes Chopin, but Mary doesn't', or 'John likes films, but not plays' contain ellipsis - 'missing' components that have to
be filled in from earlier parts of the sentence: John likes Chopin, but Mary doesn't like Chopin', 'John likes films, but John doesn't like
plays'. If you run the first pair of sentences through a parser like the Stanford parser: you will see that it gets the constituent structure
right, but doesn't attempt to capture the interpretation. This project will attempt to develop and test a post-processing module for the
Stanford parser which will interpret some common cases of ellipsis.

Electronic Pet
Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices. We have a whole bunch of electronic bits and
pieces from this toolkit in a box - your challenge is to bring them to life, and make an electronic pet. The CS Department doesn't have a
cat, but by the end of this project it could have a mouse, or a beetle, or a furby - can you create one? Will it make blood-curdling noises?
Scuttle into a dark corner? Demand to be stroked? React to your mood? Or chase off burglars?

Friend Finding by Phone

There are smartphone apps to help you find friends (foursquare, blendr, grindr) but they only
find people who have already signed up. How can you use a phone to find interesting people
nearby who haven't signed up to your app? By their tweets? Any other ideas? We have Windows
and Bada smartphone handsets available - can you design and build an app to find interesting
people around you by whatever signals they send out?

GeomLab and Mindstorms

Geomlab ([Link] has a turtle graphics feature, but the pictures are
drawn only on the screen. It should be possible to make a turtle out of Lego Mindstorms, then
control it with an instance of Geomlab running on a host computer, with communication over
Bluetooth. Project - Friend Finding By Phone

Mine4Nuggets. Searching for Objects into Images

Most of the information on commercial websites (e.g., Amazon, Rightmove, and Autotrader) is represented by (semi-)structured pages
where the interesting data is structured into structured or visual patterns. However, some critical information is often represented with
an image or a chart. As an example, on many estate agents' websites, data about the energy efficiency of the property is represented by
an EPC Chart, while the actual size of the rooms is represented through a floor-plan Have you ever tried to search for an energy-efficient
property or one with a large bedroom? The answer is: you can't. This project is concerned with the study of semantic image analysis
techniques that can be used to locate and extract interesting objects from pictures and charts on the web. The goal is to enhance
current search technology with object-search capabilities for images, a field that offers challenging research and potential commercial
opportunities.

Parallel Linear Algebra

The most common large-scale parallel architecture for scientific computing is a distributed memory computer. When using this
architecture each processor has access to data stored in its own memory, while data stored by memory associated with other processors
may only be accessed by communication across a network. For reasons of computational efficiency, many parallel scientific computing
algorithms are implemented by partitioning the data stored so that communication across the network between processors is
minimized. This project will investigate the most appropriate partitioning for linear algebra calculations.

Robot Path Planning

A robot cannot find its way by looking at a map designed for humans; rather, it
must make a complex series of geometric calculations. Many algorithms have
been developed for robot path planning, and the purpose of this project is to
investigate (and improve upon) some of these. The 'robot' might be an arbitrary
convex polygon that can slide in a world composed of polygonal obstacles; an
industrial robot arm; or a human trying to find their way across a strange city.
Which algorithm(s) you investigate is largely up to you: they range from
pragmatic, 'suck-it-and-see' methods to mathematically-complicated methods
that are guaranteed to succeed (after a lot of CPU time!). There is also
considerable scope to think of novel robots. For example, previous groups have
considered: a planetary exploration vehicle; a smart torpedo; and a model
railway track.
Project - Robot Path Planning

Resilient and Rapid Raspberries

In today's world of high frequency trading, understanding the rapidly changing quotes from a myriad of trading algorithms is a colossal
data processing problem. With tens of thousands of updates per second in a single market, and limited space and power constraints, it is
important to be able to maximise throughput and resiliency with the hardware available. Given a day of actual stock exchange data, your
challenge is to create a cluster to process and aggregate the data. Doing this with real hardware is more fun - we cannot give you our
data centre, but we can supply you with a Raspberry Pi cluster.

Sell Computer Science

Apparently "Computer Science is boring. It's all about Microsoft Word, and is only
for geeks and boys." No, we don't think so either. Create something, aimed at 14-
17year olds, that introduces one or more important CS concepts. (For inspiration
see Manufactoria, cs4fn, yousrc, Maze or GeomLab.) Your game/tool/app should
inspire young people to want to get into computing. We want something that will
attract attention on the Department's prospective students website (a game? a
downloadable app?) - ideally something that we can also use with groups on
open days. Let your imagination run wild!

Computer Security Visualisation Project - Sell Computer Science

Many techniques exist to detect and analyse potential cyber-attacks from network traffic data. Using computer graphics and
visualisation, people can detect patterns and attacks faster than many automated analytical approaches. The purpose of this group
project is to develop a number of visualisations (on a single group code-base) to improve situational awareness in an intuitive and
meaningful way to a user. The core task is to address is how to make an attack distinct from standard and benign network traffic. We
encourage the students to develop their own ideas.

Some Other Projects

Other projects on offer have included:

Creating Patient-Specific Models of the Lung to Investigate Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Docu-Research. Object Annotation and Visualization for PDF Documents
Medical Image Analysis
Model Checking for DNA Computation
Modelling and Reasoning about Pervasive Computing Systems
Querying Blogs or Wikis
Robot Sheepdog
Robot Soccer Simulation
Smartphone Security

Further examples are available here (/teaching/studentprojects/[Link]).

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