Topic Restrictions

Considerations when choosing a topic:

• Not too broad. The topic needs to be narrow enough so you can focus on specifics. For example, Computer Graphics is too general. But Bump Mapping Techniques is a more narrow topic in computer graphics that would allow you to drill down into details.
• Cannot be covered in a CS course. Example: jQuery is not an acceptable topic because jQuery is often taught in our Web Development 2 course. But a JavaScript framework that is not covered would be acceptable.
• Not too new. If the topic is too new, finding enough resources that can be cited from your paper and talk will be difficult.
• Cannot be recently presented in seminar. Viewing the archive of previous computing seminars is a good way to find a topic, but the topic should not have been presented in the previous 4 semesters.
• Sufficiently technical. The topic should be something that you would not have been able to easily investigate your freshman year. Example: Open Source Software Licenses is not sufficiently technical, but investigating how a large open source software system like Atom works would be fine.

Suggested Seminar Topics

• REX data structure for protecting networks from malicious threats
• Veritesting
  • Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting
  • Technical Perspective: Veritesting tackles path-explosion problem
• Process Profiling
  • The Flame Graph
  • An initial performance review of software components for a heterogeneous computing platform
  • MSDN Process Profiling
• Template Metaprogramming
• Undefined Behavior
  • A Differential Approach to Undefined Behavior Detection
  • Towards Optimization-Safe Systems: Analyzing the Impact of Undefined Behavior
• 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
• Microsoft Cognitive Services
• How do VPN's work (under the hood)?

Other Ideas

1. Look in current magazines such as: Communications of the ACM, CODE Magazine, MIT Technology Review.
2. Search for scholarly papers in: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Google Scholar
3. Find technologies mentioned in StackOverflow Developer Survey Results
4. Visit web pages of major research labs such as web.mit.edu/research/, www.lanl.gov, www.research.ibm.com, or www.sandia.gov.
5. Look in your textbooks for chapters that were not covered in class.
6. Look at seminar topics from previous semesters (your topic must not have been covered in the last 2 years)
7. Talk to your professors.
8. Look in confrence prceedings such as:
   1. Google IO
   2. Apple WWDC
   3. //build conference
   4. Java One
   5. Code Conference
   6. JSConf US
   7. Computer Science Conference Rankings

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