Potential Projects
OK guys, let me know what you think:
Mobile scrapbook
We now have camera-enabled phones and PDAs, we create lots of text wherever we go - there must be a decent way to dump all that back to your home and have it come up on the web for others to look at and share the experience..... This project is to build a clever mobile blogging system that builds a decent blog up from the different media resources you dump onto it, without you having to do much to create it.
Supervisor: Russel Beale
Virtual pinball: using a projected surface, the aim is to use video capture and processing to allow people to become active participants in a pinball game, where the pinball machine surface is projected onto the floor.
Supervisor: Russel Beale
Personalised Texts
Course Suitability: Any
Brief Description: Intelligent media can adapt their output to the needs of the consumers. On a mobile phone you wouldn't want to read a lengthy text message, on a computer terminal you may want. Some people want to have text mixed with pictures others not. On some terminals you can listen to sound on others not, and so on. AI techniques (like planning, search, or expert system techniques) can be used to adapt texts in different aspects (like level of abstraction, usage of features such as sound, personal preferences). In this project a concrete application area should be chosen and media should intelligently adapt to the circumstances
Languages and/or other Software: Any
Prerequisite: Knowledge in AI useful, but not necessary
Supervisor: Manfred Kerber
Chatbot for giving Prolog help
Students who are learning a new programming language experience many difficulties and a lot of frustration. Often it is not possible for them to get the help they need because there is no expert available, because they are too shy to ask or because they cannot think of a way to express themselves without a fear of being thought stupid. How much better if there was a 24/7 non-judgemental source of friendly help!
Write a chatbot that will attempt to help beginners with Prolog. An interesting element in this project is whether all queries have to be given in natural language or would it be possible to have queries including some or only Prolog code. The system should be accessible over the WWW (for obvious reasons).
Supervisor: Peter Hancox
Robust Parsing and Part of Speech Tagging
Parsing raw text is a difficult problem where the best approaches tend to use shallow and probabilistic techniques to handle most of the data most of the time at best. Part of speech tagging is a method of assigning any word its part of speech (noun/verb etc.) with reasonably high levels of performance. One current idea is to increase the size of the data tagged by a POS tagger from that of words to phrases to aid in partial parsing.
Supervisor: Mark Lee
Modelling plant growth with L-systems
L-systems are rather like "grammars" for specifying the rules of natural growth. They have been used to build realistic graphics of plants and trees and other natural phenomena. This project would investigate a range of applications of this representation scheme.
Supervisor: Jon Rowe
Gameplaying Testsuite
Brief Description: Specification and implementation of a generic testsuite for two player games such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Backgammon, etc. The idea is to have a generic tool with which two implementations or two different strategies of the same implementation can be tested against each other.
Languages and/or other Software: Lisp, ML or Haskell
Supervisor: Volker Sorge
A robot programming language for children
Programming robots is hard if you are ten years old. How can we make it simple enough for children to be able to put together successful robot programs? There have been a number of attempts (The Lego Mindstorms language, SmallTalk, graphical programming, Logo, evoluionary approaches). In this project you would design and implement a programming method for our lego robots suitable for use by children. You would have to test its efficacy with real robots and real children (if we can find some).
Further information:
Equipment: Linux Workstation, Lego Robot Kit
Languages: Java, C or C , and IC
Supervisor: Jeremy Wyatt
There's still a few lecturers who haven't put their projects up yet. I've narrowed it down to those eight at the moment. I need help deciding :) I might make this post public so those who don't have LJs can see. This post is also a note to myself as well, but I'd really appreciate feedback/advice. Oh and if I make this post public and you want to leave a comment (for those who don't have LJs) please sign your name underneath the anonymous comments.
Mobile scrapbook
We now have camera-enabled phones and PDAs, we create lots of text wherever we go - there must be a decent way to dump all that back to your home and have it come up on the web for others to look at and share the experience..... This project is to build a clever mobile blogging system that builds a decent blog up from the different media resources you dump onto it, without you having to do much to create it.
Supervisor: Russel Beale
Virtual pinball: using a projected surface, the aim is to use video capture and processing to allow people to become active participants in a pinball game, where the pinball machine surface is projected onto the floor.
Supervisor: Russel Beale
Personalised Texts
Course Suitability: Any
Brief Description: Intelligent media can adapt their output to the needs of the consumers. On a mobile phone you wouldn't want to read a lengthy text message, on a computer terminal you may want. Some people want to have text mixed with pictures others not. On some terminals you can listen to sound on others not, and so on. AI techniques (like planning, search, or expert system techniques) can be used to adapt texts in different aspects (like level of abstraction, usage of features such as sound, personal preferences). In this project a concrete application area should be chosen and media should intelligently adapt to the circumstances
Languages and/or other Software: Any
Prerequisite: Knowledge in AI useful, but not necessary
Supervisor: Manfred Kerber
Chatbot for giving Prolog help
Students who are learning a new programming language experience many difficulties and a lot of frustration. Often it is not possible for them to get the help they need because there is no expert available, because they are too shy to ask or because they cannot think of a way to express themselves without a fear of being thought stupid. How much better if there was a 24/7 non-judgemental source of friendly help!
Write a chatbot that will attempt to help beginners with Prolog. An interesting element in this project is whether all queries have to be given in natural language or would it be possible to have queries including some or only Prolog code. The system should be accessible over the WWW (for obvious reasons).
Supervisor: Peter Hancox
Robust Parsing and Part of Speech Tagging
Parsing raw text is a difficult problem where the best approaches tend to use shallow and probabilistic techniques to handle most of the data most of the time at best. Part of speech tagging is a method of assigning any word its part of speech (noun/verb etc.) with reasonably high levels of performance. One current idea is to increase the size of the data tagged by a POS tagger from that of words to phrases to aid in partial parsing.
Supervisor: Mark Lee
Modelling plant growth with L-systems
L-systems are rather like "grammars" for specifying the rules of natural growth. They have been used to build realistic graphics of plants and trees and other natural phenomena. This project would investigate a range of applications of this representation scheme.
Supervisor: Jon Rowe
Gameplaying Testsuite
Brief Description: Specification and implementation of a generic testsuite for two player games such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Backgammon, etc. The idea is to have a generic tool with which two implementations or two different strategies of the same implementation can be tested against each other.
Languages and/or other Software: Lisp, ML or Haskell
Supervisor: Volker Sorge
A robot programming language for children
Programming robots is hard if you are ten years old. How can we make it simple enough for children to be able to put together successful robot programs? There have been a number of attempts (The Lego Mindstorms language, SmallTalk, graphical programming, Logo, evoluionary approaches). In this project you would design and implement a programming method for our lego robots suitable for use by children. You would have to test its efficacy with real robots and real children (if we can find some).
Further information:
Equipment: Linux Workstation, Lego Robot Kit
Languages: Java, C or C , and IC
Supervisor: Jeremy Wyatt
There's still a few lecturers who haven't put their projects up yet. I've narrowed it down to those eight at the moment. I need help deciding :) I might make this post public so those who don't have LJs can see. This post is also a note to myself as well, but I'd really appreciate feedback/advice. Oh and if I make this post public and you want to leave a comment (for those who don't have LJs) please sign your name underneath the anonymous comments.