Seminar Topics

• F#
• Windows 8 Programming - This topic may only be covered in Spring 2013 since it will be covered in GUI in Fall 2013
• Steganography
• NoSQL Database
• Hadoop
• map-reduce
  
  
• SPDY - A new protocol developed by Google that is beginning to replace HTTP. A great overview on the topic is in the article SPDYing up the web
  
  
• Detecting Software Plagiarism - Because programing code is easily found on the Web, software plagiarism (unauthorized copying of someone else's code) is frequently cited as a problem in many CS departments. There are many software systems designed to detect software plagiarism. Discuss the general problem and techniques used to detect plagiarism in software. Here is a recent article on the subject: PlagDetect: A Java Programming Plagiarism Detection Tool
  
  
• Personal Information Management (PIM) - PIM "refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person's various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.)." An excellent book on the topic is in the library: Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management by William Jones which also has a website. (McCown)
  
  
• Xax - "Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web." From Leveraging legacy code to deploy desktop applications on the Web by Howell, Douceur, Elson, and Lorch
  
  
• Digital Libraries - A DL is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and made accessible by computers. Discuss how DLs work, how content is digitized, and how metadata is created and harvested. (McCown)
  
  
• Crowdsourcing - Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving process where answers are solicited online to a set of simple, specific questions that computers can't solve. Example: "Is this a picture of a shoe?" A good article on this subject is Crowd Control by Leah Hoffman (CACM - 2009). (McCown)
  
  
• Recommender Systems - Many companies today use recommender systems to recommend books, movies, songs, etc. that are of likely interest to users. The Netflix Prize is a popular contest to see if anyone can build an algorithm to predict a user's rating for a film (based on previous ratings) that is 10% better than Netflix's current algorithm (prize: $1M). You could introduce the concept of recommender systems and choose one popular algorithm or technique and explain it in detail. (McCown)
  
  
• Focused Web Crawling - A focused crawler or topical crawler is a web crawler that attempts to download only web pages that are relevant to a pre-defined topic or set of topics. Discuss how these crawlers work and the strategies they use to avoid crawling pages that are not relevant. (McCown)
  
  
• New Sensor Technologies - With the reduction in size of CPU's and memory components, the field of sensor design is developing very small, low powered, wireless sensors that are capable of monitoring all types of data.  There are many applications of such versatile, yet small devices - including the tracking of animals, monitoring the environment, monitoring machines, and even monitoring people.  While searching for information be sure to use the keyword: motes.  (Baber)
  
  
• Mechatronics - The integration of mechanical systems with new electronic components and intelligient software control.  (Baber)
  
  

1. Look in current magazines such as Communications of the ACM, PC Magazine, Popular Science, or Technology Review.
2. Visit web pages of major research labs such as web.mit.edu/research/, www.lanl.gov, www.research.ibm.com, or www.sandia.gov.
3. Look in your textbooks for chapters that were not covered in class.
4. Talk to your professors.

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