Fall 2013

During natural disasters, locating and acquiring needed goods (such as food, water and gasoline) can become a difficult task because of severed communications. This deficiency in communications can be caused by outages in power grids, land lines, cable, fiber, etc. The affected communities may be left uncommunicated for hours or days, leaving them with no means to pinpoint where to obtain the products that they require. Social media and social networks are often employed by government agencies, private companies and individuals to report information about natural disasters. However, this information is spread across many different websites and social networks, with no consolidated place where to find it. Mobile devices, social media and cloud computing could provide a solution to this problem. The Emergency Preparedness Against Natural Disasters (EMPANADA) system is designed to improve the preparedness of communities under the impact of a disaster by utilizing social media in such a way to extract information to keep the affected areas informed. The objective of EMPANADA is to not need direct user input but, instead, to use existing data from social media to gather information in real-time.

“Web-deployment of a Data Visualization Framework Using AJAX Technology” project, which consists of extending the Perspectives framework, with the ability to export web-visualizations that rely only on simple JavaScript and AJAX technologies.

Grading Senior Projects at the end of the semester can be very hectic and time consuming. Judges currently use score sheets to keep track of all the students evaluations. This method is prone to human errors and delays the announcement of the grades.

The Spoken Dialog System for Brief Alcohol Interventions is an application that created a flexible approach to identify the abuse of alcohol. The system uses well-validated questioners to capture target-behaviors specific aspects. We believe that making this type of behavior change system available to everyone can lead them to a better, healthier lifestyle.

The system in place at CFAS (Center for Academic Success) is not user-friendly and primitive. In order to make an appointment for a student, an admin must be involved in the process. Students must either go to the Center or call during office hours for an admin to make his/her appointment. This solution is outdated, as most systems today offer online autonomy to its users. Furthermore, this solution disallows CFAS from servicing the maximum number of students possible because it relies heavily on the availability of the admin staff, either by phone or in person. In other words, the business rhythms around appointments would suffer greatly if there were fewer admins working on the center.

There exists a need for a system which allows employers and potential employees to connect and conduct job interviews trough personal computers over the internet. Such system would make the restriction of interviewing only local candidates obsolete, therefore maximizing an employers ability to find a good match regardless of their physical location.

A company may show presentations to an audience for a multitude of reasons. Making a presentation is time consuming work, so multiple collaborators may want to work on the same presentation to speed up development. However, in collaborative projects it is difficult for managers to effectively control the changes made by other contributors and to keep track of multiple versions of the same presentation.

The Mobile Clinic Electronic Medical Records system was developed for Orant Charities to replace their paper based system of accessing patients in rural areas of Malawi, Africa. This system was required to account for the limited power and internet connection in these rural areas.

Before the semester starts, students enrolled in the Senior Project class need to find and join a Project of interest where they will be working along with other team members on the biggest assignment of their Computer Science career.

There are not many easy to use yet powerful game engines available to novice programmers. Even less are available that are also open source. The game engine we designed fills that space. It provides a broad set of features and an easy to use framework that is open to customization by the user.