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 department's
internship web pages 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:
- Continued Development of COMTOR (1 or 2 students) - a Java-based Java Source Code Comment Tutoring and Analysis System - During the Fall 2006 semeseter, the COMTOR project was started and a code base developed. I am looking for additional work to be performed that moves the project forward. This will include additional development of analysis doclets (based on the Javadoc doclet API) as well as support of deployment to the web. We hope to use this system informally during the fall 2007 semester in order to refine the web analysis platform. This project is being developed in conjunction with a doctoral student and former TCNJ CS alum - Michael Locasto.
This work has been funded for the Spring 2008 semester. Thus, some funds are available to compensate student efforts. 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 and proven performance in CS220/230/340 is required. For more information on working with me, please refer to my
web site.
Dr. Deborah Knox:
Contact the professor directly.
Dr. Jikai Li:
Dr. Li offers the following projects for mentored research. Positions are available for a total of two students.
- This research is a continued effort to investigate how a new transport layer protocol. 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.
- This work is intended to study how Optical Burst Switching network schedule periodic traffic. For detailed information, please contact with Dr. Li.
Dr. Miroslav Martinovic:
The focus of my current efforts is on the theory and practice of design, development, testing and evaluation of hybrid Question Answering systems that combine statistical and linguistic techniques in order to optimize their performance. The system being envisaged and developed (QASTIIR <
http://www.tcnj.edu/~mmmartin/QASTIIR.html>) is an integrated, on-demand, dynamic, modular and flexible system with portable linguistic components that can be moved within the system dynamically. These components can be included ("plugged-in") or excluded ("pulled-out") from processing based on the query and user characterizations obtained during a preprocessing phase.
Within the above framework, a future work on the following components of the Question Answering system are envisaged:
- Named Entity Recognition - design and development of a module that is capable of recognizing named entities within a text (i.e. person names, organization names, locations, monetary epxressions, etc., etc.). Such a system has an important role within the information extraction phase of QASTIIR.
- Reference Resolution - design and development of a module that is capable of resolving pronomial and definite referencing within a text. Within this framework, a research will be conducted into (ii-a) electronic lexicons and (ii-b) natural language parsers and part-of-speech taggers.
- Question Categorization - design and development of a module capable of categorizing questions and predicting possible answer classes for given questions.
Mentored research will include regular weekly meetings, directed readings and discussions, as well as development and iomplementation of various related software components for QASTIIR. Solid programming background is required, while familiarity with Natural Language Processing techniques and Artifical Intelligence is a plus. Spring semester enrollment for my mentored research is limited to three seats.
Dr. Norm Neff:
This spring, I will mentor one research project, which may have several team members. The general requirements include:
- scheduled meetings to discuss readings and to plan activities
- weekly written progress reports
Possible topics for the project:
- Garbage collection - Modify the MiniOO VM to support garbage collection. Requirements - CSC 434 (corequisite), C++ programming
- The two-dimensional (2D) rectangular strip packing problem - The input is a list of n rectangles with their dimensions and a target width W. The goal is to pack the rectangles without overlap into a single rectangle of width W and MINIMUM height H. Requirements - CSC 340, C++ or Java programming
Dr. Monisha Pulimood:
- Continued development of TGRID - TCNJ GRID computing framework (1 student) - 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. We are investigating various issues of cooperation, like how users can retain their ability to cooperate while not being in their home environment, the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out, how resources can be described semantically in a meaningful way to more efficiently exploit the limited resources by supporting better ways of providing data relevant to the user, etc. Our findings are being used to extend a grid computing framework that we have designed and implemented. This framework will eventually enable sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources across the TCNJ campus. (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 (CS1 and CS2). Knowledge of networks would be an advantage.
- Content Management System (2 students) - We are investigating the issues that impact management of interactive multimedia through investigations of security and data integrity in a highly networked, collaborative, media-rich environment, like the Internet. By applying findings to the design and implementation of a content management system, that includes a database, for 'Unbound', an online magazine created and managed by the magazine writing students at TCNJ, we are also exploring how users collaborate or compete when given the opportunity to customize media content, and the interactions between information security, storage of interactive multimedia data, and online collaborative journalism.
Prerequisite: CSC 230 / CSC 250
Database knowledge would be an advantage.
Both projects will entail regular weekly meetings, directed readings, discussions, design, implementation, and testing. A final report and a presentation are due at the end of the semester.
Dr. Andrea Salgian: (Updated 11/2/07: All open research positions with Dr. Salgian have been filled.)
This Spring I will mentor three students working on research projects in the field of 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.
Projects include:
- Making a robot see (2 students) - Be part of a team of engineering and computer science students building an interactive robot. Improve or develop new vision capabilities for the robot: face, gesture and object recognition, obstacle detection.
- Understanding music conductors from video (1 student) - Investigate ways to automatically extract the gestures of a conductor from video. The goal is twofold: look at how these gestures correlate with physiological measurements (heartbeat, muscle activation) and with the music itself, and eventually implement a system where users can conduct virtual orchestras. This project is co-advised by Dr. Teresa Nakra from the music department.
- Your ideas - If you have an idea about a possible project involving digital imagery, please contact me.
Solid C/C++ programming background is required. Familiarity with linear algebra and interest in Math is a plus.
Dr. Ursula Wolz:
No mentored research offered.
