1. Assessment Criteria Course Project: 50%
Either individual or a group of two students (a group of >2 students needs approval from me)
Students may choose to do one of the following:
develop an application, a library package, or a sub-system based on some existing system (e.g., Spark, Husky, Hadoop, Storm, etc.)
improve an existing system (by either improving its performance in some aspects, or adding new functionalities)
develop a new system (prototype) for large scale data processing
High flexibility for students to explore different things, but students must first get our approval of their project proposal (must be finalized on Sept 29 1p.m., so talk to us earlier)

2. Some potential project topics
Husky connectors
Build a connection between a general-purpose big data platform (we will choose Husky for this course because we are more familiar with Husky) and some existing systems
Study existing systems, e.g., Redis, MemCached, Parquet, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, CouchDB, etc., and choose a system to implement a connector between the system and Husky
Implement a use case to demonstrate the performance and benefits of such a connector
Objective: learn how to use the systems involved, read their code, and have really good understanding of these systems

3. Some potential project topics
Library package development
Build a non-trivial library package for some general-purpose big data platforms, and design the performance-test benchmark to show the performance of your package
Some potential software packages: recommendation, text mining, sentiment analysis, machine learning, or any other packages for scientific data analysis
The type of software package to be built should depend on the big data platform you choose, you need to talk to us and get our approval on which software and platform you propose to work on
Objective: learn how to use the big data platform you choose, and become really familiar with the design and implementation of the platform so that you understand very well its performance strengths and limitations

4. Some potential project topics
Application development
Build a non-trivial application using one or a combination of systems
Some potential applications: hotel recommendation (something like trivago), flight recommendation (a flight recommendation of trivago), financial data analysis
You must first show us that your proposed application can enable you to learn a lot about the systems involved, and MUST first get our approval for the application you propose to build
Objective: learn to use different systems really well, and show great understanding of these systems