This year I am required to restrict my supervision (mostly) to MScISS students. Therefore I will take on Web Application project supervision for MScISS students. However, I will take on 1 to 3 final year undergraduate students to do projects that particularly interest me: namely in the Document Image Analysis, Formula Recognition and OCaml programming language areas. Otherwise I will ONLY take on MScISS students and those ONLY in the area of Web Application projects using the kinds of technologies taught in the ISS Workshop.
Final year students: Under "Projects by Keyword" below, see the "Final Year Undergraduate Students Only" for projects this year
MScISS students: Under "Projects by Keyword" below, see the "MScISS Students Only" for projects this year
For other students, if you are interested in one of my project proposals here, please feel free to look for an alternative supervisor to do the project with.
Overall I tend to like the more technically demanding types of project where there are interesting implementation issues or serious problems of design, analysis or mathematics to deal with.
For final year undergraduate students: My current main interest is in software for Document Image Analysis (DIA), i.e. analysing images of documents of various types and turning them into semantically meaningful knowledge. There are many potential projects in this area, from the deeply image analysis (e.g. image cleaning, deskewing etc.) to optical character recognition (glyph identification, glyph segmentation), to domain specific (analysis of music sheets, mathematical formulae, technical diagrams, maps etc.) to sophisticated algorithms (e.g graph grammar parsing) to AI-like knowledge construction (e.g. term and graph rewriting, mathematical knowledge base). While these projects can be developed in Java, I have recently switched to OCaml for developing code in this area for the improved speed of development, speed of execution and because I find it easier to write complex algorithms in this language.
The general subject of Document Image Analysis covers everything from low level image analsis up to high level sophisticated algorithms for turning components identified in an image into usable information. I am particularly interested in developing a centre of expertise in Document Image Analysis here at the University of Birmingham. There are many related projects available here and I will generally give preference to DIA projects over other projects. There is plenty of scope for interested students to pursue this topic further at the MSc level (via our MSc in Advanced Computer Science) and at PhD level. A previous final year project (1998/1999) in this area led to a paper being published. The results were subsequently commercialised and it is now a live font search engine run by a major font foundry in the USA. See Identifont on http://www.myfonts.com
OCaml is a strongly typed, high performance programming language with functional imperative and object oriented features as well as a type inference system (so although strongly typed, you often need not explicitly declare the types you are using). Its features (such as pattern matching, and type inferencing) makes much simpler the process of constructing and manipulating complicated structures of data than is the case in languages such as Java, C, C++ or many other languages. I am interested in supervising some projects to explore the use of this language on some complex problems.
The following is a list of projects intended to explore a number of aspects of Web Application Technologies. These project proposals are intended for MScISS students
This topic is closely related to that of indexing in general. The problem is to find and retrieve the correct object(s) from a collection of objects when querying in a "natural" way for the type of objects. This may sound dry but think of searching for a picture or a clip-art image or an icon from a very large collection of such images by quickly sketching a few major lines in the image. Or, starting with a picture of a face, try to find similar faces in a database of faces even though the exact picture you have does not occur in the database: such a system could be part of a security system or a police face identification system. The objects do not have to be pictures: music search by content is possible, or even a smell identification system.
I am interested in the possible connections between music, sound and computers. From analysing music from sound files to extract the more abstract music information (e.g. producing a music sheet from the sound file - an open research problem) to doing the same from MIDI data (much easier but still not simple), to optical recognition of sheet music to produce MIDI data (i.e., teaching your computer to read music) etc.
The following projects are to do with the relational SQL language.
I am interested in developing software that can assist students in learning, and assist lecturers in helping students to learn.
The following projects are to do with tools that assist developers to design and build software systems in general and database applications in particular. I am also interested in other projects of this type if you have any ideas for something related.
A database assistant or wizard is a tool that automates some part of a database application development or interactively assists the user in a database task. There are a number of areas which could lead to projects.
Maintained by A.P.Sexton@cs.bham.ac.uk
Home Page: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps
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