Readings in ECE Prof. D. Lyon, (203) ECE The last required course!

What is this about? Readings! –3 or 4 papers a week –45 papers per term, minimum Writing –You will finish a thesis proposal –You will survey the literature –You will provide a structured Problem Statement

Oral Presentations PAINFUL presentations (every week!) –Assessment forms for presentations –Powerpoint slides (everybody gets to go!) Homework –Weekly homework assignments –Midterm is a preliminary thesis proposal –Final is the thesis proposal –Each element is 1/3 of grade.

How do I select a topic? It has to be tuff enough! It has to be easy enough! It has to be JUST RIGHT! It has to be something interesting to you! It requires a thesis advisor to supervise. It can be work related.

Sample work… We will see sample work from other students. There are several projects on the web. We will review some of them

What are some of your ideas? What do you need? Wouldn’t it be nice if?.... How could …. Be improved. Why doesn’t this work like…. What is the market for…. What is the next killer application? Brainstorm!! No idea is too dumb!

Ideas p1 We have two students who are working on grid computing. One has finished. The goal is to perform homogeneous computing in Java, by using screen savers to volunteer computers into a grid. We are in need of help with this one.

Ideas 1a Distributed computing in the mercury computing system is a very interesting example of cluster computing. But systems like these are hard to program, particularly, the altivec processor. It would be great to work on developing tools that help with this. One student is working on the vectorization of Java... but he is only interested in MMX/SE/SE2/Intel, not altivec.

Ideas 1.b Stegonography - hidden writing. We seek a program that works to create messages that can be embedded in images. For example, take the Hartley transform of an image, add your message, then take the inverse transform. Is the message hidden? How does this compare with other methods?

Ideas P2 Java as an HDL - many programmers are skilled at stating algorithms in Java. Is there a way to convert a subset of these algorithms into VHDL? We have a prototype that does this already. We are working on a new rangefinder that is based in diffraction. It would be really interesting to do something in the case of the ambient illumination. Nothing has been done in the area, as far as I know. We are working on Project Initium, the automatic deployment of java programs. Several articles have been written about this already, and they contain several open problems.

Ideas p3 We are looking for a method for the secure, open- source, signing of Jar files, for deployment of applications on the web. Presently, we make use of Sun's closed-source algorithms. Presently, we have an integer wavelet transform that implements the Haar transform. The use of this for multi- resolution streaming of video is of great interest. We have several algorithms for color quantization. We continue to do research in this field. Areas of work include the creation of better perceptual coding objective functions, more optimized clustering algorithms and image sequence coding algorithms.

Ideas p4 There is a teaching tool, called video point. The project statement of work, from industry, is available from herehere We have been working in the area of autonomous land vehicle design. We are interested in programming Lego mindstorm do implement some maneuvers, with control. For example, a car that can dock with a charging station...Like the roomba robot. There is an on-going improvement effort on an image processing program. It would be really nice if we could create a visual programming language for it. I have a prototype already.

Ideas p5 There is an on-going improvement effort on an Voice and Signal Processing program. It would be really nice if we could create a visual programming language for it. I have a prototype already. We have started a new effort on multi- player network games, using 3D graphics.

Ideas p6 We are looking for help with embedded face recognition. I have a student working on this already. We are working on new textbooks in the areas of voice and signal processing, image processing and computer graphics. If you are interested in co-authoring, please let me know.

Ideas p7 JBits + JHDL = JHDLBits = a new way to program VHDL cards. Radar De-cluttering Scientific visualization of inter-object associations in 3D.

How can I get my own ideas? Get help from the professor! Refine the ideas by talking about them. Let others help you get in touch with your ideas problems.

Take out some paper Write down a problem you have had Write down why this problem is important Write down a possible solution