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The 490 and 790 projects that
I supervise generally involve a mix of reading research
papers, design and implementation work, and a final writeup of about 5000
words. Students should have solid programming experience; taking a prior
400-level project course is a good idea. CS412/413 is an especially good
background for many of these projects.
The following are some projects that may be available for undergraduates
to get involved with via a CS 490 project, or for M.Eng. students to work
on as a 790 project. Students seeking
a project should think about what they would like to work on before
talking to me.
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Civitas
is our new, secure voting system. Civitas is the first
voting system implementation that allows voters to vote securely from the
remote client of their choice. But we need to build a voter client to allow
Civitas to be deployed. Experience with JavaScript will help.
There are also deep research problems to be pursued
in distributing trust and handling application-level DoS.
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Fabric
is a secure wide-area distributed object store and perhaps the most
substantial system-building project we have underway now. Fabric objects
look like Java objects but are transparently persistent. The Fabric system
will automatically move computation and data storage to distributed locations
to make programs secure and efficient.
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Polyglot: an extensible compiler for building extensions
to the Java programming language. There are several interesting projects,
such as:
- Javadoc support for extended languages.
This can be built using Polyglot itself.
- Integration with the Eclipse IDE, probably in collaboration
with researchers at IBM TJ Watson.
- Course Management System.
The course management system used by the Computer Science Department
and now also hosted at CIT and used by other departments
was developed by students. There are many interesting projects, such
redesigning the system architecture for
high performance, adding new scheduling and calendaring features,
and porting it to Fabric. New team members are welcome.
[ CMS web site
| CMS system ]
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Swift: A system for building secure web applications in
the Jif language. Client-side
JavaScript code is automatically generated from Jif code where it is
secure and efficient to do so. We are looking at improving
client-side security and at making client-server data synchronization
more efficient.
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Hierarchical partitioned searching: The classic single-player game
of Sokoban requires hundreds of moves of searching; fortunately, it has some
properties that makes it amenable to a new kind of hierarchical searching
algorithm. Other games like Go are encouragingly similar. Experience
in search algorithms and ML programming is important.
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DVS: a flexible, lightweight revision control system for
large software projects, intended to support versioned directory
hierarchies and branched development, yet implemented as a lightweight
client running the standard CVS protocol
(unlike, say, Subversion).
A lot remains to be designed and implemented, but the result should
support large, complex development projects better than Subversion or
other related tools.
- netview: an intuitive distributed graphical network monitoring tool
- Adding reference counting support to Java. This would be done as
a Polyglot extension language, possibly implemented in J&.
Challenges include reducing reference counting overhead using
dataflow analysis.
- codewriter: a web markup language for high-quality
pretty-printing of program code on web pages, so program code
fills the available horizontal width while remaining readable.
- jshell: a shell interface with integrated Java and Windows support,
smoothly combining a language-based (console prompt) interface with a
icon-based graphical interface.
- JMatch: pattern matching and logic programming for Java.
Possible projects include writing an Eclipse plugin,
adding support for checking pattern exhaustiveness,
adding support for predicate dispatch,
adding more powerful predicate solving
(such as a general numerical solver),
and finishing the C++ back end that exploits low-level control over the stack.
Some papers on JMatch: [ Iterable Abstract Pattern Matching for Java (PADL'03), Interruptible Iterators (POPL'06) ]
- ngdiff:
The ultimate graphical diff-merge tool, supporting N-way merging, RCS/CVS support, and
editing. Related to other tools like
rcsview,
a viewer and editor for version-controlled files
under RCS and CVS. Rcsview helps the user to figure out a source file
evolved and to identify who's responsible for any given code segment.
- Distributed Post-Its: instantly create short
notes, memos, and reminders that can be created and viewed from anywhere, with
multiple open sessions possible at once. Probably sits on top of IMAP. Similar
tools do exist now, but are not transparently distributed. Good sorting,
filtering, and filing features also a must.
- Auto-sorter extension for Thunderbird. Filing mail into many
folders is too hard. An auto-sorter based on Bayesian principles could set
default folders for all incoming mail, greatly simplifying filing of email.
- Juno-2: this is both a powerful editor for drawings and animations,
and a constraint-based programming language.
Juno displays a view of the picture as it would appear if printed, and simultaneously displays a program in the Juno-2 programming language
that draws the picture. It also allows users to create their own
drawing tools. The project is to improve the UI to better support
the creation of user-defined tools.
This would involve programming in
Modula-3,
one of the best languages ever designed.
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