Browse Senior Projects

The vocabulary program is a tool for teachers to teach advanced vocabulary skills to deaf students whose hearing loss has significantly reduced their access to auditory English learning. ASL and other sign based communication modalities in some instances do not mark all English word forms and word roots. The vocabulary program provides a platform for teachers to strengthen student skills through repetition and various forms of enforcements. Teachers would be able to construct and share lessons that focus on specific sets of words. These lessons would include information such as context sentences, definitions, roots, synonyms, and antonyms. The lessons will be populated with existing corpus references, but will allow for editing by teachers for further customization. Teachers will then be able to assign lessons to students for completion and the program will provide metrics of success after the completion of a lesson. These metrics will encompass grading as well as give information about certain aspects of the lesson such as completion time and completion percentage. The program will be accessed through a web portal. The focus of the project will be to create one model lesson that is thoroughly vetted and will systematically produce a stable and simple workflow for both teachers and students alike.

Phoenix Bioinformatics is a nonprofit organization established in 2013 that created a web portal called Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR). This system maintains a database of genetic and molecular biology data for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. A good portion of the data is extracted from primary research literature. Functionalities include providing data for gene structure, gene product information, gene expression, etc. The current TAIR has an existing portal called TOAST where only the data entry functionality exists. The key goal is to provide the application with submission, curation review, and public viewing functionality in an intuitive interface. After determining the schema database and having the 3 core functionalities, the team will attempt to extend the system beyond data entry that was previously only for Arabidopsis thaliana. Potentially the data entry can be extend to include any other species gene. Additional time after the production will include tweaking of the correlation between the submission and curation pages to ease the curator’s time in reviewing a submission. Phoenix Bioinformatics wants Blue Genes to revamp the current web portal - TOAST - with a system that allows registered users to submit genetic data based from literature resources for Arabidopsis thaliana; allows curators to disapprove/approve data submissions; and allows public users to view genetic data. The system should be efficient and provide improved usability compared to the old system.

Knowledge of a software project’s relative size is helpful for any number of reasons. Software size is firstly critical for gauging, by analogy or statistical means, the time and effort required for future software or other development projects. Software size also is helpful for developing defect prediction models, understanding trends over time, and for a variety of other studies. There are two primary measures of software size, lines of code and an assortment of functional measures, chiefly COSMIC and Function Points. In most domains, however, lines of code is an increasingly unreliable measure. Functional metrics are meanwhile difficult to obtain because they largely are counted manually; attempts have been made to automate functional counting but only one method has been commercialized, and its efficacy and training requirements are uncertain. The goal of this project is to explore and hopefully automate the sizing process, increasingly obtaining a more accurate reading of size with each release. Source code will be parsed into abstract syntax trees, and those trees will be analyzed based on a set of rules that will ultimately produce a size estimate of functional size.

The Adventure Cycling Association inspires and empowers people to travel by bicycle. Last year a software team started work on the Bicycle Touring Digital Companion (BTDC) focused on providing crowdsourced service information that is created by and dedicated to the traveling cyclist. They also worked on growing the United States Bicycle Route System (USBRS) by allowing users to build up a service directory along the routes for future riders. While this was a great start, it is now time to grow and expand the application into a polished cross-platform piece of software. This year our users will be able to use the Android app to view USBRS routes while also adding and filtering services and alerts. In order to reach a larger market, an iOS version will also be implemented. This will allow cyclists to perform all of the same actions regardless of what cell phone they have. Lastly, our users will be able to use the new desktop version of the software to research routes and add services via a web browser. This site will also contain an admin portal where the Adventure Cycling Association can view, edit and remove flagged data. These tools will come together into one platform, designed to inspire more people to travel by bicycle.

Developed for Lockheed Martin, the Business Action Tracking system is a highly-integrated, user-friendly task management tool to be used across teams in a corporate setting. The system can be used to create, update, and monitor actions to their completion. Actions can be hierarchical, associated with a project, and/or interdepartmental. An action is assigned to an actor and contains basic fields, including name, description, due date, and status. Additional notes or custom fields can be included.

Seamless integration with existing workflows and tools (e.g. Outlook, iPhone, and possibly others) is a core part of the tool. Users can enter and update actions without leaving their existing workflows. The tool will add value without impeding on existing business processes. Because of this, the system is designed to be intuitively usable with little instruction or training.

To encourage adoption and use, users may manage and update tasks with the tool from a number of devices, including laptops, desktops, and iPhones. All supported devices must have access to useful functionality, and feature intuitive interfaces to ensure that users can easily manage tasks.

The system also includes a management interface, allowing administrators to view overall statistics and concerns in a dashboard view. This is especially useful when estimating time to completion for similar tasks, seeing where teams are falling behind, and for managing risks. To encourage user engagement, the system will reward users for completing actions.

As more network traffic moves to mobile devices, cellular network carriers are scrambling to retain customers and capture new ones. Carriers are making claims that their network performance is better than competitors, but using non-specific qualitative terms rather than quantitative ones. One need only look at the commercials of Verizon, T-Mobile and other operators to see that this is the case.

The problem is that it is very hard for consumers to get the real facts on voice quality and data throughput performance of cellular networks. The goal of this project is to create a system to obtain real-time, crowdsourced network performance data that can be used to inform the public and telecommunication researchers. For consumers, such data could lead to more honesty in claims, improvements in coverage, and lower consumer costs through competition. For researchers, the data could lead to new technological and operational innovations, improving service quality.

 Many products already exist for collecting performance data from mobile phones, but they are mainly focused around testing an individual’s connection speed and they don’t collect the data for analysis by third parties. This app will anonymously collect fine-grained data throughout the day for analysis by third-party researchers.

Securely transmitting data is crucial for protecting patient health information in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and FDA guidelines for mobile medical devices. The project goal is to research and prototype a security solution and architecture for Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) devices. First, the implementation of this architecture will provide a confidential data connection between a BLE medical device and an Android application. Finally, the application will communicate with an electronic health record database for persistent storage.

Ortho Clinical Diagnostics is a global provider of chemistry analyzers for use in hospitals and medical laboratories. These chemistry analyzers run a variety of tests on patient fluid samples, providing physicians with accurate and detailed reports on patient well-being. Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) send test orders to connected analyzers and receive completed results in return.

This project extends an existing analyzer’s capability to communicate with the LIS using new industry communication standards. These communication standards define the structure of messages between the analyzers and the LIS. One such commonly used standard is known as Health Level 7 (HL7). Unfortunately, HL7 is not explicitly defined; there exist differing implementations among vendors, which have led to interoperability concerns. Laboratory Analytical Workflow (LAW) is a newly adopted standard, which defines Laboratory Device Automation (LDA), a specific profile providing vendors a model to which they can conform, thus preventing such concerns.

Team Reactive Healthcare will greatly increase Ortho’s chemistry analyzer’s effective interoperability by adding support for the LDA profile. The team will further improve the system by updating the exchange of orders and results between the LIS and analyzer to work simultaneously over a network connection.

As a stretch goal, Team Reactive Healthcare will demonstrate an implementation of a new use of HL7 known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). FHIR uses modern RESTful web API techniques to exchange HL7 messages. The team’s improvements will enable analyzers to be better integrated into hospitals and laboratories worldwide where they will contribute to positive health outcomes.