If you want to discuss MQP ideas please stop by my office (238 Fuller Labs) or email me at rundenst@cs.wpi.edu for an appointment.
UMass Memorial Health Care:
Clinic Locator Application for iPhone & iPad (2011-2012)
This is a project sponsored by UMASS Medical Center, and to be co-advised by Prof. Emmanuel Agu and Prof. Prof. Sonia Chernova. The project period is negotiatable in 2011, and the project scope can be scaled from team sizes of 1 student to 4 or even more.
UMass Memorial Health Care is the largest health care system in Central and Western Massachusetts, and the clinical partner of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Our health care system includes five hospitals, home health and hospice programs, behavioral health programs and community-based physician practices. In 2010, we treated 58,937 inpatients, and counted more than 1.4 million outpatients visits. Many of these outpatient visits occur in clinics located at one of our three Worcester-based campuses: University, Memorial, and Hahnemann.
For many of our campus visitors, finding the appropriate clinic can be a confusing and time consuming experience. Our buildings are large and complex. The clinics are scattered in multiple locations. The purpose of this project would be to develop and deploy a way-finding application for the iPhone and/or iPad. The project would consist of multiple phases:
. The first phase would be to develop a simple application that would give in-building directions from the front lobby. The patient would select the clinic or physicians they are visiting and step-by-step directions along with a floor plan map would be provided to them. This would be similar to the directions using the iPhone map application.
. The second phase would be to explore the use of our wireless infrastructure to provide in-building locator services. The app would then be able to provide directions from .current location. and provide patients with real time directions to their destination.
. There are three Worcester campuses as well as our member hospitals located throughout Central Massachusetts. The initial project would be to develop the app for our University campus with the idea of expanding to our other campuses in the future.
. Finally, the app could include both .wide area. (driving) directions as well as in building directions, helping our patients drive to our campuses and find parking as well as to find their way within the appropriate building
There are two existing example applications that could be used for ideas: The first is an app developed for the iPhone for the Northeastern University campus. It is available for free in the iTunes App Store, called .Discover Northeastern.. The second is a more sophisticated app for the American Museum of Natural History called .Explore: The American Museum of Natural History., also available in the App Store for free. This app uses in building locator services and more sophisticated graphics.
Other projects I'm particularly interested in relate to the emerging area of "stream and event monitoring systems". I've several active research projects with HP Labs and supported by NSF government funds; and we could carve out smaller MQP projects based on your interests and skill sets. In general, continuous high-volumne data streams can be found everywhere, including vehicle navigation tracking systems, sensors for health applications, earth observation systems, stock market, and more. The goal of our larger project effort here at WPI is to develop generic technology to support such stream monitoring applications. We have a core engine in place. Several challenging new MQP projects can now be undertaken within that platform. Examples of possible projects include :
One example project could be to explore strategies for spilling (and unspilling) data of different query operators temporarily to disk under heavy duress (high input arrival rates of some streams and/or reduction in CPU or memory resources in the system). Techniques need to be proposed, data structures and algorithms implemented, and policies for synchronization between operators need to be realized for improved performance even under spill.
Heterogenous streams of events, such as from RFID readers, may need to be quickly scanned for detecting patterns of interest, such as an item leaving the store without having been paid for, etc. Query operators utilizing automaton/stacks would be developed, and advanced methods to handle such pattern matching services even under out-of-order input streams are targeted.
RFID technology has now become a reality due to its inexpensive
costs, and it is been increasingly employed in a large variety
of environments, from airports to warehouse supply chains.
This project would target to install such technology on campus,
and to develop a simple data collection and tracking application
to support one function, such as misplacement of books, or
counting of number of people using a facility, etc.
Accuracy in data processing and reasoning under uncertainty,
such as missed readings or duplicate readings, as well as exploitation
of domain knowledge, such as sizes of rooms and typical speed
in traversing a given space, could be considered to make the
application smart.
Modern Compute PC-Cluster Utilization for Distributed Stream Processing
We have acquired a new 20-node PC cluster for 100k by NSF for developing stream processing software and applying this technology to a variety of applications. Thus, MQP projects surrounding this technology could be conducted, including :
Explore, implement and test algorithms for allocating heavy query operators in a query plan across the compute network. That is,to explore strategies for distributing computations across clusters of machines pushing the query filters closer to the remote data stream generators. Further, design different strategies and software protocols for relocating at run-time operators across machines, or possibly even reoptimize a query plan and then migrate to new plan shape at run-time. Java and software engineering skills are desired. DB courses a plus.
DCAPE assumes that all servers are up and the network is always reliable. This project would look at graceful methods for recovering or preparing for failures of the different components of the stream engine, be it a machine, a query engine, a connection, or an end application. Implementation and testing are needed to validate the proposed ideas for achieving recovery under failure.
Right now, the system contains some initial light-weight yet brittle solution for monitoring the performance of each of the query engines distributed across the cluster. The project would aim to develop an infrastructure to simplify installation of the ECAPE system on the cluster, run-time experimentation, smooth shut-down, and collection of results into automatically generated result charts for analysis by the students working with the different enhancements of the stream engine.
Look at on-going larger research projects of the WPI Database Systems Research Lab at the " following location", any of which you can get involved in, if you are interested.
If you have questions and/or are interested in any of these projects, please contact Prof. Rundensteiner at rundenst@cs.wpi.edu to find out more.