Projects will proceed in a number of phases a) project selection, b) presentation of initial requirements, c) occasional presentations of progress, d) final presentation and demonstration. Presentations should be made during the class periods using PowerPoint and be supported by a webpage updated to show the current state of the project. Webpages will be maintained by the individual groups and linked from here.
Parts
Identification Project:
{ Group: Gokhan Isik, Tolga Aydin, Emre Erdogan, Selim Erdogan. }
For use in the manufacturing and supply sectors, the idea is to provide quick and easy
access to parts information for suppliers and end-users alike. Before an item can be sold
or replaced, it must be identified. First, the particular machine and model must be
determined, and then the desired part must be located and its stock/code number found.
This process can be very complex, not least because customers rarely know the exact model
number of the faulty equipment. The objective is thus to provide a very simple yet
flexible system which will aid users in locating items that they need. I envisage it
functioning transparently from CDROM or over the web and incorporating 2D or even 3D-VRML
graphics, with expert systems-like access to databases. This project will aim to produce a
generic demonstration system which can be shown to manufacturers and hopefully adopted as
a standard. Challenging real-world task with a real customer!
Internet Research Aid:
{ Group: Berkant Barla Cambazoglu, Esma Turna, Baris Uz. }
Information abounds in books, journals and on the net. Automated search engines help us
find the information we need and wordprocessors enable us to produce nicely written
documents, but in between is chaos! There are currently no tools to help organise the
information we have found or to help decide what still needs to be found. An integrated
enviornment which pulled everything together, simulataneously maintaining links to the
original sources while allowing ideas to be shuffled around at will, would be an
invaluable aid to researchers of all ages.
EasyView:
{ Group: Murat Karakaya. }
The original EasyView program for the Macintosh was ported to Windows 3.1 in 1994 and has
been in use around the world since then. With the move to Windows 95 (and now 98) there
are increasing requests for updated versions. In fact, a prototype version 2.0 was begun
several years ago. I would now like to complete that program. This involves replicating
the functions available in the original version but missing in the prototype plus
experimenting with and completing the new automated clip indexing feature. Note: A thought
occurs! Maybe we should think about switching or incorporating html in this too. What new
opportunities does that open up?
Shared Bookmarks:
{ Group: Khaled Ben Fatma, Nabil Jmel, Rabi Zeibi. }
Finding information on the web is increasingly difficult. Automated search engines
typically return ten of thousands of hits for even reasonably well specified queries.
Manually indexed sites such as Yahoo simply cannot keep up with the speed of change. One
possible solution to this is to share bookmarks, the idea being that there are a number of
"experts" in each topic area who know the best places to look for answers to
certain sorts of question. If we can encode that knowledge and share it, but also keep it
up-to-date in a distributed fashion, then we may achieve better performance than at
present. This project should aim to investigate this idea and possible implement a
prototype system.
(c) 1998 David Davenport