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PROJECT IDEAS

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Ender Özcan
Office: C86
T:+44(0) 115 95 15544

ender.ozcan At nottingham-ac-uk (replace all - with dot)


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I am interested in Artificial Intelligence, Operations Resarch and/or Computer Science projects. See my Research interests and Publications for more. Please find below specific ideas for: The difficulty level of a project can be adjusted depending on the background of a student. Hence, the MSc students can have a look at the third year project ideas, and similarly, third year students can have a look at the MSc project ideas while deciding on a project topic.

I am open to the other project ideas, such as:
  • optimal design of quantum experiments [click here for more information].
  • intelligent search methods (particularly hyper-heuristics and evolutionary algorithms) and their application to challenging (preferably real world) problems,
  • intelligent user interfaces
  • visualisation tools
  • intelligent agents for playing games (such as, backgammon, simino), and more.
You can also view the individual third year and group projects that I have offered previously at UoN for inspiration. These links are provided in the menu on the left. Additionally, here is a sample of the selected fourth year projects that I have supervised before:
  • Previously supervised fourth year projects [click here]

Third/Fourth Year Project Ideas

Please drop me an email, if you are interested interested in Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research and/or Computer Science projects.

  • Project coordination support tool (PESTO)
    This project involves in creating and interface and optimisation tools for maintanance and assignment of markers for Y3/Y4 dissertations as well as scheduling end of year project demonstrations without any clashes.
  • A metaheuristic for solving windfarm layout optimisation problem.
  • A hyper-heuristic for online bin packing
    The online bin packing problem is a well-known bin packing variant which requires immediate decisions to be made for the placement of a lengthy sequence of arriving items of various sizes one at a time into fixed capacity bins without any overflow. The overall goal is maximising the average bin fullness. Hyper-heuristics are high level search and optimisation methods which explore the space formed by low level heuristics or heuristic components for solving complex problems. This project involves implementation of selection hyper-heuristics and a set of low level heuristics based on a policy matrix representation for solving online bin packing problems. The project builds on a previous work which provides a Java framework. See the following paper for more: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszeo/docs/publications/chesc.pdf
  • A meta/hyper-heuristic for solving High School timetabling problem.
    This project involves in implementing a solver for high school timetabling and this will require joining a newly announced competition. The details can be reached from ITC2011. A meta/hyper-heuristic for solving a timetabling problem (The timetabling problem and the meta/hyper-heuristic to be used as a solver can be decided later. See the competition tracks at ITC2007 - you can pick one problem)
  • Any recent competition related to artificial intelligence can be used as a basis for a project. For example, ever year GECCO conference series organise mutliple competitions which would make a good project topic. [Click for the GECCO 2016 competitions]: These competitions are all very challenging and if chosen as a project topic, the results could potentially be published as a scientific paper.
  • An Intelligent Agent for Playing Game X. This project should involve implementation of AI techniques such as game trees, alpha beta pruning, Monte Carlo search, etc. AND a GUI relevant to the game X (please do name the game your self). I have previously supervised projects implementing intelligent players for Abalone, PacMan, Poker, Backgammon and more.
  • Desing your own topic:

    [Method X][Problem Y]
    for

    Proposals realted to the multiobjective search methods for solving multiobjective problems and continuous optimisation methods, such as evolutionary strategies, particle swarm optimisation and differential evolution are also welcome.
    Please feel free to name X and Y for your self and drop me an email providing me your proposal details.
  • A multimodal intelligent user interface for drawing trees.
  • A multimodal intelligent user interface for drawing graphs.
  • A visualisation tool for a Particle Swarm Optimisation System.
  • A visualisation tool for a hyper-heuristic.
  • A tool for comparing bottom left heuristics for 2D strip packing
  • A hyper-heuristic managing crossover
  • A tool for lanscape analysis of hyper-heuristics (based on HyFlex - a java hyper-heuristic library)

MSc Project Ideas

My project ideas provided below require implementation of intelligent search methodologies, such as, heuristics, meta-heuristics or hyper-heuristics for solving optimisation problems that belong to the NP hard set. A thorough experimentation over a set of well known problem instances and analysis of results are expected. I have no specific programming language preference.

Please send me an email if you are a MSc student and interested in Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research and/or Computer Science projects related to optimisationi to discuss a project idea. You can refer to my publications to see my research interests and see what else might be of interest to you. Please note that I am open to your own project ideas as well.

Here are some sample project topics in no specific order:
  • Hyper-heuristics for vehicle routing problem
  • Automated second marker allocation and demo scheduling
  • Genetic programming for vehicle routing problem
  • General video game AI competition
  • Lanscape analysis of hyper-heuristics
  • Hyper-heuristics for unit commitment problem
  • Evaluation of representations in genetic algorithms for strip packing