Top Image Banner
Friday, May 9th, 2008  
Fall 2006 Mentored Research Opportunities
The following projects will partially fulfill the practicum experiences that your program of study requires. Two practicum experiences are required to fulfill graduation requirements. We recommend one experience during the junior year and one during the senior year. You may choose any combination of mentored research or internship. Course numbers have changed. Mentored research is either CSC 498 or 499, depending on level of experience. CSC 499 is reserved for when you are continuing work on a project. Internship is now CSC 399. (If you are interested in internship opportunities, please logon to LionsPro through Career Services and contact Dr. Li, our internship coordinator. Check the internship listing for more information.)

Please read through the following project descriptions. If you are interested in some of them, schedule an appointment with the faculty member indicated to discuss your interest, qualifications, and schedule. When you are invited to join the project by the faculty member, please fill out the mentored research contract, including course numbering, section numbering, gpa, earned hours, and the signature. The contract is to be turned in for review by the Department Chair, and then after final approval, you will need to bring a copy of the contract to Records & Registration for in-person registration for that one course.

Research projects are listed in alphabetical order by faculty member’s last name. As new proposals arrive, this list will be updated. If you have a great idea for a project that you don’t see listed, please visit with the faculty member most closely interested in that area and propose a discussion!

Dr. Peter DePasquale:

  1. Web security and PHP enhancements to the department web site - Explore PHP in-depth by building additional functionality to our department web site. Also, help secure the site further by researching about HTML injection and SQL injection and apply what you have learned to our site.

  2. Web Filtering – Continue the design, development, and deployment (hopefully) of a community-based web filtering technology. The technology uses Bayesian Statistical Filtering (similar to that used in junk email filtering) to filter web content. Prior experience with PHP, C++ and databases are a must.

Mentored research will include regular weekly meetings, directed readings and discussions, as well as development and implementation of various related software components. Solid programming background is required, while familiarity with PHP/JSPs/Java is a plus. For more information on working with me, please refer to my web site.

Dr. Jikai Li:

  1. This research is a continued effort to investigate how a new transport layer protocol can work efficiently and fairly with emerging high-speed wired and wireless network. Last several years have seen the bandwidth of wired network and wireless network increased dramatically. This bandwidth boom has already displayed a significant effect on our daily life and the world. However, due to the limitation of current transport layer protocols, the potential of these high-speed networks is not fully exploited yet. In the last several years, researchers have intensively investigated the new protocols that can transmit data efficiently and fairly. In this work, we will continue our research to develop new transport layer protocol for high-speed wired and wireless network. This work will use NS-2 to study the performance of network. Although programming is not focus of this research, moderate programming is a must-be. In the last several semesters, we have studied extensively on this topic. For this coming semester research, we will focus on how the different senders can split bandwidth fairly within a reasonable time.

    The student interested in this research should have C/C++ programming experience, have Networking experience (took networking course) before. At the end of the semester, student is expected to turn in a research report.

  2. This work is intended to study how sensor network can be used for the construction site safety. Dramatic advances in wireless communications, optics, and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have made it possible that our future life will be pervaded small, low-power, cost-effective, autonomous devices, called sensor nodes, which will redefine the society how we live and work. In this research, we will study how sensor network can be applied to construction site safety research. Student is expected to develop new system, do some programming with C/C++.
Dr. Andrea Salgian:

Computer Vision and Image Understanding

Computer vision is a subfield of artificial intelligence that aims to replicate human vision using computer hardware and software. The big challenge is understanding images, bridging the gap between the nature of images (essentially arrays of numbers) and their descriptions. State of the art computer vision technologies have made possible achievements such as vehicles that are able to steer themselves along highways, and computers that can recognize and interpret facial expressions. Computer vision makes possible the enhancement, interpretation, recognition, identification and other processing of images.

Research projects will be in the subfields of object and face recognition and will be related to the development of the following systems:

  1. Office surveillance: install a camera in an office and analyze the images that it acquires. Trigger alarms and/or deliver statistics about objects and people that pass through the field of view.
  2. Image search: Google image search analyzes text on the page adjacent to the image. Use a search engine and implement a true image search, that analyzes image content, using image retrieval algorithms.
  3. Face recognition: find yourself or people that resemble you in a set of face images.
Mentored research will include regular weekly meetings, directed readings, design, implementation, and testing of algorithms. Solid programming background is required, familiarity with Matlab is a plus.

Dr. Monisha Pulimood:

  1. Implementation of a grid computing framework (2-3 students) - The College of New Jersey has several computer labs across the campus equipped with state-of-the-art computers for use by students and faculty. There are periods, for example during the night or during the summer months, when a significant number of these computers are underutilized. In this project we will design and implement a grid computing framework that will eventually allow the TCNJ community to harness idle computational resources across campus for research purposes. (A grid computing system is a distributed collection of computers that enables Internet Programming, i.e. the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources across a large network like the Internet. This sharing is made possible based on the resource availability, capability, performance, cost, and ability to meet quality-of-service requirements.) Java programming experience required. Knowledge of networks would be an advantage.

  2. Optimization of program that implements math algorithm (1 student) - In this project the student will examine an existing program, understand the algorithms used, and apply optimization techniques to improve the performance. The resulting program will be analyzed for performance gains. C / C++ programming experience required. Knowledge of algorithms preferred.

Projects will include regular weekly meetings, directed readings, and discussions, design, implementation, and testing.

Dr. Ursula Wolz:

Ursula Wolz is offering opportunities in Fall 2006 for research on three projects: WHAT, rMusic and Hopewell. More detailed information about the background of these projects can be found at her website: http://www.tcnj.edu/~wolz. Each project has its own site, and there is a summary of research page under construction. Please note that working with Dr. Wolz entails identifying a research interest and finding a "good fit" within her research agenda. You will not be given a detailed assignment, but rather will be expected to take the initiative to develop a research goal and implementation plan in collaboration with Dr. Wolz and possibly other students.