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Student Research Opportunities
in the Department of Computer Science
J. Daniel Bourland
Jennifer Burg
Daniel Cañas
Jacquelyn Fetrow
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Errin Fulp
David John
Robert Plemmons
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William Turkett
Yue-Ling Wong
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- Some examples of graduate student research can be seen at the:
- Listings of past undergraduate research projects can be found at the Research Fellowship Program Site.
Project Title: Firewall Architectures
Faculty Director: Fulp
Subject Area: Network Security
Level: Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Project Description: A firewall is a system or group of systems that enforces a security policy between networks. Inspecting traffic sent between the networks, the firewall provides access control, auditing, and traffic control based on a security policy. It is important that the firewall acts transparently to legitimate users, with little or no effect on the perceived network performance. This is especially true if traffic requires specific network Quality of Service (QoS). The firewall should process the legitimate traffic quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, the firewall can quickly become a bottleneck given increasing traffic loads and network speeds. This project will investigate new firewall architectures that is suitable for high speed networks and scalable for large traffic loads, maintain QoS requirements across the network boundary, and greatly lessen, if not eliminate, DoS attacks.
Project Title: QoS and Resource Management for Computer Networks
Faculty Director: Fulp
Subject Area: Network Management/Traffic Engineering
Level: Graduate Students
Project Description: Many network applications require minimum guarantees of network performance for their proper operation, such as bounds on the packet loss, delay, and jitter (varying packet interarrival time). These Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees can be provided with the proper allocation of network resources, such as link bandwidth, processor time, and buffer space. Unfortunately, users frequently contend for the finite resources that are available. As a result, most network QoS problems are caused by improper Resource Management (RM). There are several interesting RM problems associated with computer networks, consider the following list of topics:
- Intranet QoS and RM - Network are increasingly heterogeneous in nature making end-to-end QoS a more difficult problem. This project concerns defining methods that allow multiple networks to interconnect and negotiate QoS in a scalable fashion.
- Peer-to-Peer Networking - Peer-to-peer networking provides a new way of distributing information (or computing resources) across the network. Files and resources are distributed among nodes instead of a single server. This project will investigate methods that fairly and efficiently share resources between nodes.
- Link layer QoS - Historically QoS issues have been dealt with at network layers 3 and above. However if the lower layers cannot provide guarantees, QoS is not possible. This project will investigate new methods of RM at the lower layers.
- Mobile Computing RM - An important issue with mobile computing is power management. Given a fixed amount of energy, how does the computer know which devices should receive more power than others, is there a power aware method for scheduling processes? This project will investigate power management strategies that optimize the utility computer and the life time of a finite power supply.
- Wireless and Mobile Computing - There is a growing need for efficient multimedia communication in mobile wireless networks. However, supporting these applications with limited bandwidth is more challenging than traditional wired networks. This research project is interested in developing bandwidth allocation methods that are adaptable to wireless conditions.
Project Title: Wireless Network Testbed
Faculty Director: Fulp
Subject Area: Networks
Level: Undergraduate Students
Project Description: The Computer Science Department at Wake Forest University currently has a computer network laboratory, where research ideas can be implemented and tested under varying conditions. Currently the laboratory consists of configurable Linux-based routers and commercial wired network components; however, it relies on "wired connections" (Ethernet). This project will investigate the integration of wireless network elements and the development of future wireless networking course. Other laboratory projects include network security, and network simulators.
Project Title: Genetic Algorithms for Computationally Intractable Problems
Faculty Director: John
Subject Area: Genetic Algorithms
Level: Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Project Description: A genetic algorithm is a heuristic for searching motivated by natural evolution. This method is applied to problems that are at least NP-hard. There is no guarantee that an optimal member of the search space will be found; but, the overall goal is to find very good members in polynomial time. I am interested in finding useful genetic algorithms for discrete problems, e.g. scheduling, language recognition, program generation, graph identification. My focus is on finding adaptive schemes that will be effective on a wide variety of discrete problems. Opportunities abound for graduate and undergraduate students interested in programming, analyzing or conducting experiments.
Project Title: Neural network analysis of images and other data
Faculty Director: J. Daniel Bourland, PhD (bourland@wfubmc.edu)
Associate Professor and Head, Physics Section; Department of Radiation Oncology,
Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157.
Tel: 336-716-2987 Fax: 336-716-7837
Subject Area: Medical applications
Level: Graduate Students
Project Description: We have the need for computer science graduate students for a couple of projects. One that we expect will be funded in August (Whitaker grant proposal by one of my new faculty physicists, Mike Munley, PhD) is for neural network analysis of images and other data for prediction of tissue injury. Similar projects at the
MS level, and perhaps the PhD, exist as well.
Project Title: Processor scheduling based on multiple resource needs
Faculty Director: Daniel Cañas
Subject Area: Operating Systems
Level: Graduate Students / Senior level undergraduate.
Project Description: Operating Systems assign the most sought resource, the CPU, mainly, by computing CPU time of a process. Processes require other resources which are generally ignored by the OS scheduler, like memory, I/O, network requests, etc. A metric for computing the resource needs of a process should be part of the scheduler.
This project requires the analysis the following:
- The importance of each resource for the particular configuration the OS is running in
- Obtain a dynamic metric for each resource
- Design an algorithm for the scheduler considering the above points
- Program and prove that the proposed CPU scheduler is efficient and robust.
Project Title: Biological Modeling using Artificial Intelligence Approaches
Faculty Director: Turkett
Subject Area: Computational Biology
Level: Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Project Description: One of the seminal questions in computational systems biology is how to reconstruct the protein signaling pathways that control cellular responses. A number of biochemical and biological experiments provide mechanisms for measuring genes and proteins within the cell and how those genes and proteins respond to a perturbance. Given these observations, algorithms can be developed to hypothesize networks that are likely to have generated such data. This work is interested in exploring those ‘reverse engineering’ algorithms which are motivated by AI techniques, primarily Bayesian network modeling and Support Vector Machine modeling. There are open questions concerning both the modeling (learning) algorithms themselves, as well as how to accurately pre-pre-process the biological data to prepare for modeling and how to analyze the results of modeling.
Project Title: Improving Run-Time Reasoning Under Uncertainty
Faculty Director: Turkett
Subject Area: Artificial Intelligence
Level: Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Project Description: Reasoning under uncertainty involves decision making when one is faced with both uncertainty in the outcome of actions and one’s own state in the world. For many robotic and software agent domains, uncertainty is an inescapable component of the domain. A number of algorithms have been developed to off-line find optimal policies on how to act in these domains, but these algorithms are extremely computationally expensive. Approximate reactive run-time planning is also difficult because of the extensive look ahead required to develop high quality plans. This work is to extend and develop new algorithms that examine how additional run-time information, such as reachability, new data-structures for searching, and information sharing between reasoners can be used to reduce the costs of high quality run-time planning under uncertainty.
Project Title: Electronic Publishing with XML
Faculty Director: Wong
Subject Area: Electronic Publishing and Web Programming
Level: Undergraduate Students
Project Description: This project is to explore using XML in the electronic publishing process of electronic academic journals that involve wide ranges of disciplinary areas. The project involves designing appropriate structured tags, defining schema, and also programming XSLT for various output format of the publication. The results will be piloted on an WFU electronic journal, IMEJ (Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal).
Students involved in this project will learn and apply XML, schema, DTD, and program XSLT. They will also have opportunities to learn ASP (Active Server Page) and to expose to the on-going electronic publishing process.
Project Title: Software Development for Visually Impaired to Experience Visual Arts
Faculty Director: Wong
Subject Area: software development for visually impaired, digital media, human computer interaction
Level: Undergraduate Students
Project Description: This project is to design and develop prototypes of software tools for converting two-dimensional paintings, drawings and prints into artistically-analogous music, sounds, or sensations so that those who are visually impaired can experience the art works. The "audio paintings" will also become a new art medium and experience for the sighted.
There is also a possibility in the development of tools to interface a haptic device, such as the 3D Touch technology from SensAble Technologies to provide tactile feedback which could include a vibration of the mouse or different levels of resistant force generated responding to the shades and hues of the two-dimensional art works.
Project Title: 3-D Computer Animation and Scripting in Computer Animation
Faculty Director: Wong
Subject Area: 3-D Computer Animation and Scripting
Level: Undergraduate Students
Prerequisite: Have completed CSC 191A Intro 3D Computer Modeling & Animation course.
Project Description: Five different project categories related to 3-D computer animation, each has several different projects as follows:
- Use of MEL script or MAXScript
- Investigate the rhythms and patterns in human motions such as different walk cycles, climbing,...etc. and express them in mathematical expressions, and then generate the animation of human motions by scripting with these expressions, instead of traditional keyframing, with user-adjustable parameters.
- Create interesting dynamics effects to simulate natural phenomena that are not built-in with the program
- Create artistic and creative shaders that render non-traditional look for 3-D models
- Facial Expression or Gestures:
Can we quantify such attributes of humanity in terms of computing attributes?This project investigates using cluster & blend shape, may be also in combination with MEL scripting, to create controls (named using human terms, such as happy, sad) that combine different attributes to control expressions or gestures. For example, to define sadness, you create a slider, called sadness, that control different parameters of "things" on the 3-D surface of the face. What are these attributes you need to define? And, how would you decide the different parts of the face as the clusters for a particular expression?
- Motion Capture
- Investigate techniques for real-time regenerate
- Investigate techniques for non-real-time techniques that generate or simulate the real-time motion, for example, from a pool of pre-captured data
- 3-D Games in Macromedia Director
Export 3-D models built in Maya or 3ds max, or create 3-D models and animation using Lingo, then program in Lingo to add interactivity for these 3-D objects in their 3-D environment.
- Group animation project-Emphasize Teamwork Skills
Work in a team--each student play a different role such as modelers, animators, technical directors, story writers, visual effects animators, texture designers... to produce a short computer animation.
A quote from the textbook, Isaac Victor Kerlow, The Art of 3-D Computer Animation and Imaging, 2nd Ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2000, pp. 66-67:
"Teamwork is not always what we are taught in art and animation schools. The emphasis there still tends to be on developing our own artistic voice as we master a few techniques. Perhaps we will soon see ... teachers who are devising new approaches to teaching art and animation that allow students to develop their artistic vision in parallel with their teamwork skills."
You have completed term projects for the course and have found the area(s) that you are most interested in. Now this group project is to provide you an opportunity to develop your teamwork skills.
For information on the research projects of Reynolds Professor Dr. Robert Plemmons, please see http://www.wfu.edu/~plemmons/. His research area covers image reconstruction, adaptive optics, and related fields.
For information on the research projects of Reynolds Professor Jacquelyn S. Fetrow, please see http://www.wfu.edu/~fetrowjs/. Her research areas include protein structure/function relationships; relationship between protein motion, protein function, and drug or inhibitor binding; structure-based drug discovery.
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