| Group ID | Supervisor | Project title |
|---|---|---|
| gp07-nhn | Dr. Henrik Nilsson | Audio DSP Lab |
| gp07-nza | Dr. Natasha Alechina | UFO Invasion |
| gp07-txa | Dr. Thorsten Altenkirch | Settlers of Catan - Online |
| gp07-rcb | Prof. Roland Backhouse | Othello |
| gp07-dfb-srb | Prof. David Brailsford and Dr. Steve Bagley | Rich-Media Documents In AIR |
| gp07-tjb | Dr. Tim Brailsford | Virtual Molecular Biology Lab |
| gp07-jmg | Dr. Jonathan Garibaldi | Robot Football Team Strategy Development |
| gp07-nxg | Dr. Neil Ghani | Game Theory |
| gp07-cmg | Prof. Chris Greenhalgh | A Document Annotation Tool |
| gp07-gtr | Dr. Gail Hopkins | A Mind Map Tool |
| gp07-gmh | Dr. Graham Hutton | Video Poker |
| gp07-bnk | Dr. Boriana Koleva | Development of an Adaptive Public Display |
| gp07-bai | Dr. Bai Li | Content-Based Retrieval of Face Images |
| gp07-bsl | Dr. Brian Logan | Herding Sheep |
| gp07-jav | Antonio Vazques | Production Scheduling System |
| gp07-tpp1 | Dr. Tony Pridmore | Interactive Segmentation of Microscope Images |
| gp07-tpp2 | Dr. Tony Pridmore | Arabidopsis Root Atlas |
Group ID: gp07-nhn
Supervisor: Henrik Nilsson (nhn)
Group mailing list: gp07-nhn@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Audio effects, such as reverb and chorus, can significantly enhance the sound of live or recorded music. As anyone who has ever attempted to sing in a tiled bathroom can confirm! Other sound processing techniques, such as equalization and compression, are very important for making professional sounding recordings, or for compensating for a less than ideal sonic environment. Yet other effects, like the character imparted by an overdriven tube amplifier, is an integral part of certain genres of music. Today, such effects are often implemented using Digital Signal Processing (DSP). After all, a simulated bathroom is rather more lightweight and flexible than the real deal. As anyone who has ever attempted to record a symphony orchestra in a bathroom can testify to!
The aim of this project is to implement an easy-to-use Audio DSP laboratory that can be used to teach basic DSP techniques and to implement various kinds of audio effects. Many DSP effects can be realised by interconnecting a few basic kinds of processing blocks in various configurations, notably digital delay blocks that delay an audio signal by either a fixed or a dynamically variable amount of time. E.g. delaying a signal by a second or so and then adding it back to the original signal creates a simple echo effect. What is envisioned is thus an application that through a graphical user interface allows a user to interconnect various Audio DSP blocks such as delays in various ways, thereby allowing the realisation of a range of audio effects such as reverbs, echo, chorus, and more.
As a base line, the application should support delay blocks with fixed and variable delays, amplifiers with fixed and variable gain, summing nodes, feedback, and the means to generate simple cyclic control signals (to control the variable delays and gains). The application need not process audio in real time, but could read recorded audio from a file and the resulting processed audio to another file.
The project can then be extended in many ways, including:
Group ID: gp06-nza
Supervisor: Natasha Alechina (nza)
Group mailing list: gp07-nza@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
The project involves implementing a one person
game called Rocket
Mania. The player has to connect a row of lighted matches on one side
of a grid to a row of firework rockets on the other side, by rotating
tiles with bits of fuse on them, to produce a single connected fuse
between a match and a rocket. You will design your own look and feel of
the game (I don't mind if it has realistic flames and fireworks or is very
abstract, but it has to look good and be pleasant to play), implement an
"autoplay" feature (the program should rotate the tiles itself
to show how to solve the game), and various other extensions to the game
which will be discussed in the first meeting.
Group ID: gp07-txa
Supervisor: Thorsten Altenkirch (txa)
Group mailing list: gp07-txa@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
The goal of the project is to develop an interactive, multi-user, networked implementation of the popular board game "Settlers of Catan". The development should be based on a client-server architecture where the server stores the state of the game, communicates with the client and acts as a referee. The clients are graphical and provide a convenient interface to execute moves but also supports trading and communication between players. There are a number of interesting extensions of the basic functionality, one may implement an alternative client running on a mobile device or one may implement AI players. The implementation language is JAVA, but I won't object if you want to use a proper programming language like Haskell instead.
Group ID: gp07-rcb
Supervisor: Roland Backhouse (rcb)
Group mailing list: gp07-rcb@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Othello is a 2-person board game like chess but with much simpler rules. The project is to develop software that can play the game at a level at least sufficient to beat novice players. In addition, the group should set itself other goals such as teaching novices good strategies, or constructing a distributed implementation of the game.
Group ID: gp07-dfb-srb
Supervisors: David Brailsford (dfb) & Steve Bagley (srb)
Group mailing list: gp07-dfb-srb@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Typically, the general view of a document is as a written piece of text that flows from beginning to end. Indeed, the OED describes a document as "Something written, inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or information upon any subject, as a manuscript, title-deed, tomb-stone, coin, picture, etc." Thus, many documents on computers are little more than electronic representations of their paper representations and created using packages such as Microsoft Word, or Adobe InDesign.
But this need not be the case. Modern computer systems are as happy handling high-quality video, images, and audio as they are text and so it is possible to create greatly enhanced documents which mix and match text, images, audio and video into a single multimedia experience. The typical homework assignment of "What I did during my High School vacation" need no longer be limited to a textual account but can also contain photographs and video clips, which are synchronized alongside the text. Readers can then choose to navigate through the document as they wish, perhaps by reading the text (with the images and audio playing as they reach certain parts) or by choosing to browse the photographs, with the computer automatically updating the textual account to contain the correct data.
Unfortunately, the high level of knowledge and expertise required to create such rich-documents puts the whole experience out of reach for the average document author. It is the intention of this project to put together a simple system, that Creative Professionals can use, for creating rich-media documents using Adobe's AIR framework.
The problem is to develop tools and techniques which enable disparate, but thematically related, material to be creatively linked together in AIR. The underlying supported formats in AIR will support advanced capabilities (e.g. Flash) but exploiting them, at the moment, needs a high degree of expertise. We want to develop a user-friendly AIR application to help the process of creating rich, interactive multi-media experiences.
Group ID: gp07-tjb
Supervisor: Tim Brailsford (tjb)
Group mailing list: gp07-tjb@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
This project involves the creation of a simulator of apparatus that is
widely used in the molecular biosciences, which will constitute a
"Virtual Laboratory" for use in training undergraduate
biologists. This laboratory will allow students to design and carry out
investigations in a way that is not possible with the constraints on time
and equipment of most undergraduate courses. Each of these simulations
should allow the user to carry out a simulated experiment using their own
"samples" (i.e. data files representing biological material such
as a protein, DNA, or human tissue). The results of these experiments will
be further files which may in turn be used in other virtual experiments.
In addition, the experiment will often generate some visual result which
the user may store and include in their notebook in the same way as they
would for a conventional experiment. The main techniques that will need to
be simulated are those of the gel electrophoresis of proteins and DNA (see
Wikipedia
for some details about this), and immunoblotting (see Wikipedia for
details). No knowledge of biological techniques will be required, and a
detailed description of the equipment and experiments will be provided.
This work will be done in conjunction with a member of the School of
Biosciences, who will provide details of the real-life experiments and
help develop the specification of the simulator. The group will also have
an opportunity to observe real experiments and apparatus -- either set up
in research labs, and/or (timetable permitting) in an actual undergraduate
practical.
Group ID: gp07-jmg
Supervisor: Jonathan Garibaldi (jmg)
Group mailing list: gp06-jmg@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
The Federation of Robot-Soccer Association
(FIRA) has a robot football simulator and runs associated
competitions. Five-a-side teams of robots compete against each other
within this simulation environment, according to a specified set of rules.
National and international level competitions are run each year in the
FIRA world cup competition. In this project, the group will develop a
robot-team strategy capable of playing a competitive game. A team strategy
will be implemented in a simplified version of C++ (which is quite close
to Java). Individual robots may be programmed with different behaviours
(or roles) using a variety of techniques, ranging from very simple
algorithms to complex "intelligent" behaviours. It is envisaged
that the group will begin by developing one or more simple strategies and
then gradually increase the complexity and sophistication of the team, as
time allows. At the end of the project, the strategy may be tested on the
real robots and may, if of sufficient standard, be entered into the UK
championships.
Group ID: gp07-nxg
Supervisor: Neil Ghani (nxg)
Group mailing list: gp07-nxg@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
This project concerns the development of an implementation of a board game
such as Connect4 or Scrabble. The ultimate goal is to produce a piece of
software which is both fun to play and which can beat a human opponenent.
Thus, in addition to producing a good interface, students will also have
to understand the algorithms which allows a computer to decide which move
to make and how to efficiently store and search a data structure.
Extensions could involve a distributed version allowing the game to be
played over the internet.
Group ID: gp07-cmg
Supervisor: Chris Greenhalgh (cmg)
Group mailing list: gp07-cmg@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Documents and images of various forms are important resources in many analysis activities. Examples of such documents include responses from questionnaires, completed forms, notes made "in the field", photographs, scans of hardcopy documents, web pages, word processed documents and diagrams. Such documents can be approached in many different ways, employing many different kinds of analysis. However in most cases it is necessary to identify or extract salient features of those images or documents which can then be quoted, counted or discussed (see, for example, ATLAS.ti).
The aim of this project is to develop a standalone application which allows the user to load, view and persistently annotate one or more forms of document and/or image. The application must be written in Java (any version). It must support at least one document or image format, but may support several (e.g. JPEG, GIF or PNG images, plain text, HTML, PDF or Word documents). It must allow annotations to be created which are directly and visibly related to the document. These annotations must be persistent, i.e. they must be able to be saved and re-loaded, and this must be independent of the original document or image. Possible forms of annotation might include (but are not limited to): drawing directly over the document or image; selecting and labeling regions of the document or image; inserting additional notes (such as footnotes) within the document or image; linking between related parts of different documents or images; identifying and marking uses of keywords or concepts. The application may allow information from the annotations (or relevant parts of the annotated document or image) to be exported for subsequent analysis, for example in a statistics package such as SPSS. Ideally the tool should be evaluated through its application to a real-world analysis problem.
Optionally, the document annotation tool can also be integrated into the Digital Replay System (DRS) (developed within the Mixed Reality Lab), which currently supports time-based annotation of audio, video and system logs and simple viewing of static documents and images but does not support annotation of documents and images. If the tool is not integrated with DRS during the project then suitable documentation and guidance should be provided so that this integration can be attempted subsequently.
Group ID: gp07-gtr
Supervisor: Gail Hopkins (gtr)
Group mailing list: gp07-gtr@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
This project will involve developing a tool which enables users to rapidly put together mind maps using provided symbols and shapes. Mind maps are well known tools for brainstorming and learning. They involve arranging thoughts and ideas visually onto a page with interconnections between them. They can be used as a "brain dump" or as a way of representing data in a way that is more meaningful and memorable to the human mind. Mind maps make use of images, words, colour, links and anything else that the user wishes to include. The aim of this project is to not only develop a tool for creating these but also to allow users to tailor the tool so that they can have their own particular meaningful symbols and images. Further to this, the project can be extended to allow users to attach hyperlinks to parts of their mind map and incorporate relevant documents as they choose.
Group ID: gp07-gmh
Supervisor: Graham Hutton (gmh)
Group mailing list: gp07-gmh@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
The aim of this project is to implement a "Video Poker" system
that allows a human player to play Texas hold 'em poker against
a computer player. This will require learning some statistics
concerning poker odds, and attempting to build a computer player
that is interesting to play against, in the sense that it does
not simply play based upon the raw odds, but adapts its play
based upon the behaviour of the human opponent (for example,
taking more risks if the player seems to be risk averse.)
Group ID: gp07-bnk
Supervisor: Boriana Koleva (bnk)
Group mailing list: gp07-bnk@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
With the spread of computing technologies beyond
the traditional desktop environment, we are seeing an increasing number of
public displays in a range of settings including shopping centres,
museums, foyers and classrooms.
The aim of this group project is to explore ways to support more effective interaction with such public displays by detecting and responding to surrounding activities. For example, you may use vision techniques to detect the number of visitors around the display and dynamically scale the presented content (e.g. use larger font and higher volume sound when a large group of people is detected). Alternatively you may use Bluetooth to detect the number of nearby mobile devices and thus infer the size of the audience. You may also consider identifying the interests of visitors (for example through RFID tags that they carry) and adapting the displayed content to reflect this. You should also support some basic form of interaction with the display for groups of users. For example, the audience could vote on an issue by holding up coloured cards or by moving to designated yes and no areas in front of the display.
At the start of the project a specific setting and application will be chosen for the display to ground the work (e.g. information display in a museum). Your task then will be to select a number of aspects of context, devise appropriate techniques to monitor them and implement an application that adapts the display of content accordingly.
Group ID: gp07-bai
Supervisor: Bai Li (bai)
Group mailing list: gp07-bai@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
This project will develop a solution for quick search of a large face
database for images similar to the query image. The project will develop a
user interface, where the query image can be selected, and the search
process initiated. Skills required are image processing methods, search
methods, image similarity metric, and user interface design etc.
Group ID: gp07-bsl
Supervisor: Brian Logan (bsl)
Group mailing list: gp07-bsl@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
The aim of the project is to design an implement a sheep herding game
(e.g., similar to
www.sheepgame.co.uk and many
others). Using the keyboard, mouse, or gamepad, the user controls a
"sheepdog" to herd sheep into a pen. Left to their own devices
the sheep move about looking for grass, but without getting too far from
each other. The sheep don't like the dog, and will move away from it as it
approaches. However if the dog gets too close, the normal flocking
behaviour of the sheep is overcome and the sheep scatter. A modified
version of
Reynold's boids algorithm
could serve as a starting point for the flocking behaviour, but this would
have to be modified to take into account the effect of the dog.
A minimal implementation would include a 2D plan view of the virtual environment, together with suitable animations of sheep and dog. The level of difficulty should be controllable, e.g, by varying the number of sheep, the number of obstacles such as trees, and the width of the gate. The user's score is inversely proportional to the time taken to get the sheep into the pen. Possible extensions include herding other animals (e.g., cats), which could be achieved by changing the graphical representation and the flocking behaviour, and a multi-player version in which the players control more than one dog.
Group ID: gp07-jav
Supervisor: Antonio Vazques (jav)
Group mailing list: gp07-jav@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Description:
The aim is to develop a professional GUI and algorithms to aid the
production planning process. The requirements are the following:
Group ID: gp07-tpp1
Supervisor: Tony Pridmore (tpp)
Group mailing list: gp07-tpp1@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Image segmentation is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Its goal is to divide an input image into a number of distinct regions, each of which depicts a single object, surface or other feature of interest in the viewed scene. Manual segmentation is tedious, time-consuming and prone to error. As a result, many attempts have been made to produce fully automated solutions. these have met with with only partial success.
Recently, attention has turned towards interactive, semi-automatic solutions in which a user provides information and guidance to an otherwise automatic segmentation algorithm. The nature of the interaction varies. Users may provide completely segmented sample images upon which the automatic component can be trained. Alternatively, they may scribble over the desired region, providing data about its colour and texture that the automatic component can the use to locate the region boundaries. They may mark points on the boundary, which the algorithm connects. The techniques involved also vary, and include statistical modelling, graph partitioning and dynamic programming.
The aim of this project is to select an appropriate technique and implement an interactive segmentation system capable of supporting the analysis of microscope images of plant roots. The system should allow a biologist, unfamiliar with image analysis techniques, to identify individual cells in an input colour image. Prototype systems will be tested by biologists in the University's Centre for Plant Integrative Biology.
Group ID: gp07-tpp2
Supervisor: Tony Pridmore (tpp)
Group mailing list: gp07-tpp2@cs.nott.ac.uk
Group members:
Integrative systems biology is an emerging field of biology research which relies on the integration of data from multiple sources, generation of computational models and the testing of those models in the laboratory. One of the many challenging computational aspects is the integration and visualisation of data generated by multiple laboratory technologies, in different tissues and at different scales, which allow users to understand and appreciate how different aspects of systems are behaving under changing conditions.
Tools to effectively integrate this information across multiple scales, such as the molecular, the cellular an the tissue level are few and far between. The tool must be able to integrate the information across multiple levels, allow users to focus on subsets of the data with a visually simple and highly responsive interface which can be deployed with a minimal amount of complexity on the client side. The tool must also be able to gather information from external sources to annotate the data it presents, allowing users to easily understand what they are viewing. We have many different types of data which can be leveraged including those relating to gene expression, protein function, metabolic reactions, and hormonal signalling, as well as microscopic images of cells and tissues and diagramatic representations of the same cells and tissues. Although we primarily study the roots of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, ideally the tool should be easily deployable to other plant tissues as well as tissues of any species.
We have produced a tool for viewing and integrating information about genes on a representation of a biological network with Google Maps, which could be considered as an approach for the front end of the tool. Further information on this interface can be found at http://econym.googlepages.com/index.htm and http://mapki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page.