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Computer Science projects
As part of your degree course you have the chance to do a project, which extends throughout your final year.
This is a great opportunity to put into practice all the skills you have developed on your course and to really show the world what you can do.
Projects also often form an important focus for discussion at interview with future employers as they provide a detailed example of what you can achieve.
Projects typically involve taking an engineering approach to the design and development of a software system that fulfils a practical need (including, for example, filling a perceived gap in the general software market). You can come up with your own ideas or choose your project topic from the lists supplied by members of staff. Projects can be related to funded research projects within the department and we encourage industry-related projects and novel applications within the sciences, education or government.
The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
These student projects were all done as the main project in the third year of their course. In all these cases none of the students could programme before they started studying at Queen Mary, but by the time they had finished the course they had turned their brilliant new ideas into reality.
- Flower power
- Sudoku on the go
- Autocartoon
- Robot fencing
- Sign language tutor
- Seesawing robots
- Emoticons in chat rooms
- Making faces
- Interactive Robot face
- Steganography
- Synthetic iris
Soduku on the go
Haider Jabbar enjoys a good puzzle, that's why he's a computer scientist. For his final year project he created a new range of soduku based puzzles for his mobile phone. Using a programming language called J2ME you can program your phone just like a desktop. The new soduku games involved creating traditional number puzzles, but also the option to make things more challenging by using letters instead or even symbols, or a mixture of all three. The system even allows you to enter a part played game to be solved step by, a useful little cheat for the puzzle perplexed. |
Flower power
If it were not for the bees we would be in trouble. Bees are the main way that flowers get pollinated, as the bees sup the nectar they carry pollen from flower to flower, allowing new generations of flowers to grow. But the way a flower looks to our eyes isn't the same way a bee sees it. For example, bee vision works into the ultra violet; under the correct lighting in a laboratory wonderful, normally invisible, patterns are revealed. Biologists all over the world have been collecting information about the sorts of patterns that particular flowers display. This display is called a spectral profile, and Samia Faruq has done her bit to help these scientists peer into the world of the bees. Her project involved creating a massive online database containing worldwide spectral profile information, so scientists can search this information easily. They can also combine information to help discover new facts using a method called clustering, where the computer pulls together all the data with similar properties. |
Autocartoon
This student project involved producing a software package that takes a picture of your face and turns it into a cartoon drawing. The system works like a human cartoonist, exaggerating the differences between the person's face that they are drawing and the average face. So for example if you have slightly larger than normal ears then a cartoonist will draw them even larger. The software also lets you turn your cartoon into a Sodaconstructor drawing. Sodaconstructor is part of the department's Sodarace project, and many students projects have been a part of Sodarace. You can try the software for yourself at www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/sodarace/. |
Robot fencing
This project involved the building of two robots who fenced with each other. One robot was controlled by a flexible exoskeleton that the student built to convert his arm movements into movements in the robot. The second robot was controlled by artificial intelligence: its skills in fencing were created by obtaining 'know how' from experts on the college Fencing team and building a set of rules for the robot to follow allowing it to react to the attacking robot in a human like way. |
Sign language tutor
The result of this project is an interactive tutor software that teaches deaf and non-deaf users Sign Language. The software, which includes games and quizzes as well as the learning sections (for beginners and advanced), is available on CD and DVD and is currently being commercialised by the company Microbooks. They believe it will do very well as it is the first interactive and substantial system aimed at children, both deaf and non deaf. Read more about the project in issue 14 of the Quad magazine [QM website]. |
Seesawing robots
In this project two robots were built from Lego Mindstorm kits and software was developed to allow the robots to communicate with one another to "play on a seesaw". (The project also involved some carpentry to build the seesaw!). The software to run on the robots was challenging, the code needs to be compact and allow the robots to react quickly. To finish it all off, the student wrote the Ringmaster program shown, which allowed him to control |
Emoticons (smilies) in a multiple users chat room application
Computer technologies mean that we live in a world where much of our communication is based on written rather than spoken words; phone texts, emails and chat rooms are popular examples. If we are speaking to someone face to face their expressions and tone of voice give us clues to what they are meaning. Text can be a problem though as often the meaning of phrases can be mistaken. In this project a multiple user chat room was built from scratch, where a face represented each of the users, the expression on that face was controlled by the users which we showed experimentally this helped better communication in the chat room group. |
Making faces
We can think of colour as made up of adding 'colour elements' (wavelengths). Similarly can we find the set of images to add together to make faces. Shown are these 'face elements', and in the red box a set of new faces made by mixing together the 'face elements'. Interesting fact: the face element at the top left is the "average" face from the large set of different faces used to build the system, to most people it looks particularly attractive, so do people prefer average faces? |
Interactive robot face
In this third year project the student built a robotic face (from Lego mindstorm) capable of expressing emotion, and software that allowed the robot to responded to the tone of the user voice. In the future many more devices around the home may have the ability to recognise and respond to emotion. [Watch the video] |
Steganography
This project was about steganography, (the word means hidden writing). The software package developed allows the user to hide information in pictures. By understanding the way information is stored in a digital picture and also how human brains work when looking at a picture, we can find ways of hiding the extra text information in the picture so that the human observer wont notice it is there. |
Synthetic Iris
In this project the student developed a computer model of the human iris, thats the coloured bit in your eye. This model used an understanding of the biology actually involved in the growth of your iris and turned this medical information into a computer simulation which gives the computer generated iris its realistic appearance. Application of this method could be in computer graphics for movies, or for testing iris scan security systems. |
