Final Year Projects - 1999

Ageing, Competition and Mutation – A Computer Simulation Model - Ciarán O’Leary

The purpose of this computer simulation model is to provide an environment where a user can examine the evolution over time of a finite population of organisms. The user will be allowed to set various parameters to specify the size and number of starting populations as well as the manner in which they reproduce, compete and terminate. It is hoped that this environment will provide a useful manner to examine the findings of work, which has already taken place in this area, and to explore further the area of computer simulation in modelling the behaviour of real life. Ultimately it is hoped that we can examine the mutational meltdown of populations of organisms. In other words, given asexual reproduction (cloning) how long will it be, in terms of generations, before the population will become too unfit to survive to the age of reproduction, as a result of randomly introduced mutations in their genes, thus causing the death of the species. Cellular Automata will be used to simulate the environment i.e. the field.

 

Airport Announcement Translation System - Louise Connell , Dermot Lynott

This project is a tool for the translation of airport announcements (French to English, English to French etc.). The user enters the required announcement (flight details, passenger names etc.) in the source language text. This is then translated into the target language and output as both text and speech. It is a web-based system, where translation components are written in Prolog and then converted into a set of Java class files that the applet can call. This would be run on an airport Intranet, and could be accessed from any staff terminal with a browser. Our goal is to create a user-friendly application that can be used by airport staff with only limited familiarity with computers.

 

Applets to illustrate program translation  - Eamonn Murray, Eoin Byrne

The main objective of this project is to develop a platform that allows the user to input a sentence from a specified grammar. The user may then select from a list of options, which specify what may be done with this sentence. Once an option is selected, an applet is run which shows graphically the procedures on how the option is executed. Once we develop a platform that supports the applet options, the development of these options will be divided between us.

 

Avatar Behaviour Design - Oliver Sinnott , Fiacre McCullogh

Using Java, EAI and VRML to control our autonomous robot world, we hope to clear up existing ambiguities concerning Avatar behaviour. Problems exist in the interaction of avatars and objects within VRML worlds. For example, if an avatar bumps into an object, what happens? If our worlds are to be believable, we must simulate them with rules, which resemble real life. Our robots will roam their world using a Reinforcement Learning technique called Q-Learning. This gives each agent purpose and drive in a system based on rewards and punishments for the actions it takes. By trial-and-error the agent begins to sense its environment by learning to take the actions which maximise it’s rewards

 

Computer Assisted Learning : Irish Nouns and Verbs - Noreen Masterson

The purpose of the project is to develop an interactive on-line tutorial on the morphology and syntax of the Irish language. In Irish, attributive adjectives are modified to "agree in number, gender and case" with the noun they qualify. As well as case endings, there are also changes to the start of the word under certain circumstances (séimhiu, urú). The course will interactively teach conjugation of verbs in different tenses, show how nouns and adjectives change in different circumstances, and how to compose simple sentences in Irish. Interactive exercises are at the end of each chapter. A bookmark feature enables the user to proceed through the course at his/her own pace.

 

Computer Based Learning Tools - Patrick Callaghan

This computer-based tool will allow people with no experience in programming the chance to make dynamic HTML web pages. This also includes animation and playing audio files. The editor will be easy to use and the pages themselves will be easily updated or changed. I always find that hands on experience with programming can be very beneficial. The editor will write the code for the web page with comments to show people what was done to achieve the desired effects and also have applet code with parameters, which are read by a multimedia applet, which can produce animation, audio, mouse operations and many more. There will be an online help system, which will show users how to use each part of the editor.

 

Internet Go Server/Client system - Conan Dalton

"GO" is yet another ancient oriental board game, which has captured the imaginations of ambitious computer people around the world. Go is exciting because it embodies many problems, which are central to artificial intelligence – game theory, pattern matching, (distributed/co-operative)planning, autonomous reasoning. Played on a 19x19 board, it is a large game. In comparison to (say) chess, which emulates a battle, go is like a whole military campaign. Due to its complexity, problems which are trivial in other boardgames (e.g., who won) become tricky in go.This project will build a Java API for the development of board games in general, and use the said API to implement internetworked go. Client-players (humans or machines) will connect to a server which will record play and maintain scores. The system will make games available for human commentary/analysis. A higher ambition of this project is to provide a framework, which can be used as a tool for the development of go-playing software.

 

A Connectionless IIOP Protocol - Shane McGarry

CORBA applications currently communicate via Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) which is built on top of TCP/IP. TCP/IP is connection-oriented which means that every client application gets a virtual channel for communicating with the its server. These TCP channels are resource hungry - there is an upper limit on how many can exist at once and they take time to open and close. I intend to develop a connectionless transport protocol for inter-ORB communication. To the developer it will appear the same as IIOP but with some quality of service options. Instead of having a channel per client connection clients and servers will send data using UDP/IP. This is an unreliable protocol so part of the solution will be to implement out-of-order message handling, message fragmentation, lost messages etc. While this means re-inventing some of features of TCP/IP the aim is to reduce the overhead and resource requirements needed per connection.

 

Delta ASN.1 programming language - Mark Brady

ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One) is a data description language used to define the syntax of communication protocols. It is used widely in both TCP/IP and OSI, and is very similar to BNF (Backus-Naur Form). ASN.1 (Abstract Standard Notation One) is purely a notation for describing data structures; it has no algorithmic component to allow programs that manipulate this data to be written. The aim of this project is to design and implement a suitable programmatic extension to a subset of ASN.1. The Virtual Machine will be able to read and write the ASN.1 data structures to and from files using the X.209 BER (basic encoding rules). My project will provide a compact simple interpreted language with which a programmer can directly create and manipulate ASN.1 data structures.

 

E-Commerce Applet to allow Argos to Trade over the Internet. - Darren Moen

The purpose of the project is to develop an E-Commerce Applet, which will allow Argos to trade over the Internet.
The system will compromise 2 Java applets, and can be split into 3 main areas :
1 Shop front, applet which allows the customer to enter the product code of the goods that they require, see information on the product (i.e. picture, description, price, availability....), and select to buy it. At the end the customer can review their order, see the total cost, and eventually make a purchase. To purchase they must enter the relevant credit card details. These credit card details must be sent securely.
2 Database administration, applet which allows the administrator of the database to add and remove items on the database and update existing information (i.e. price, description, stock levels etc.)
3 Database, used to contain the information on the available products.

 

E-Commerce Trader (M.J. Joyce & Sons Ltd.) - Kevin Tuohy

This project is an E-Commerce project and is a good example of the trend of businesses today deciding to utilise the Internet. M.J.Joyce & Sons is a book company which sells primary/secondary school books and stationary to most of Connaught. With the use of Java, JDBC and HTML, this project will allow schools and customers order their books over the Internet. It will allow the company to update their products database and keep records on their customers. E-Commerce is the future of business software development.

 

End user Report Generator   - Dáibhid Ó Cluaid

The purpose of the project is to develop a three-tier client server application using Java sevlets in the middle level. The end user generator is to allow a user on the Internet view reports and also create some custom reports from their web browser.

 

Extending SATAN - Tanya Reilly

With the ever-increasing dependence on the Internet, network security becomes essential. Threats to security for businesses come in many forms and among the most commonly discussed are the loopholes that make it possible to 'break into' a UNIX system. These can include poorly designed network applications, badly implemented software and misconfiguration of network services. Often these problems are easy to fix, once they are detected. SATAN, the Security Administrator's Tool for Analysing Networks, was developed in April 1995 by Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema. It provides a security audit, checking for common configuration errors and known insecure software, and gives advice and information on how detected vulnerabilities may be corrected. In my project, I will update and extend SATAN by adding information on problems found since the program was released. The project will mostly involve research into new vulnerabilities. Rules for detecting these will be added to SATAN using PERL, and fixes for the problems will be provided in HTML.

 

Facial Recognition and Alteration using Neural Networks  - Emma Corrigan,Yvonne Walshe

Face recognition has many applications such as security and visual telecommunications.We intend to produce a project, which recognises facial features using neural networks.Firstly the features of a number of people will be selected by the user through the GUI. We will use these selected features as the input for the network. Once the network has been fully trained it will then be tested with one of the selected faces to see if it can be recognised. The added difficulties with this project is that individual features must be recognised from a full facial shot i.e. nose, mouth and also that conducting the testing in real-time involves fast image processing and a fast algorithm to train the network. In addition we intend to graphically alter the image which has been recognized.

 

Fingerprint Recognition - David Kearns, Steven Meighan

The aim of the project is to provide a computerised fingerprint recognition system (CFRS) that will accept a set of data pertaining to some person. The system will then process this data and store it in a repository. At some later stage the system will be presented with an unknown fingerprint image and will then process and classify the new data. The result of this classification will be a list of the top 10 possible matches. The project will be written in Java and will utilise the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) library.

Forms analysis (CVs) - Paul Kelly

The purpose of the project is to enable managers to easily create a short-list of suitable candidates for a job, based on the information in their CVs. The system will take the text output from a scanner and add it to a database of CVs, firstly parsing it to index keywords, i.e.: job skills etc. This is to enable later keyword searching to be carried out. When this has been done, the user of the system can search through the "CV's" by specifying keywords and phrases. The application will return the closest matches to the necessary requirements. The user will then be able to save these results for later use.

 

Automated Generation of Object Oriented Databases from Relational Databases - Iain Hull

The purpose of the project is to read a relational database and generate an appropriate object oriented database version. This will convert tables to classes and where possible make use of object oriented constructs like inheritance. Once the schema is generated the data is copied into the new database. The project reads any ODBC database and generates POET databases. Some user interaction is necessary to complete details in the relational schema; this is implemented as a wizard, which guides the user through the operations.

 

Generating Pronunciation -Monica McQuaid

This project will be integrated with Taiscealai, which is an operational online system to search RTE 1 (radio) News broadcasts. Taiscealai has a pronunciation dictionary of about 70,000 words, which appear in news items. However, it cannot cater for new words which are ‘new’ News and not in the existing dictionary, for example, Lewinski, Omagh, Dwight Yorke.The dictionary needs to be updated as new words appear in the News. Online versions of the Irish Times will be analysed, on a daily basis, by means of a web robot. These pages will then be searched individually for words occurring a certain number of times that do not already appear in the existing Taiscealai dictionary. In addition to detecting and retrieving these new words, the new word and its appropriate phoneme will be added to the pronunciation dictionary. This involves using an algorithm that will take a word and find its matching phoneme.

 

GCS-Generative Communication Service for Multidatabase Systems - Mark Fottrell , Barbara Hughes

The purpose of this project is to provide interoperability between autonomous, heterogeneous, object-oriented databases. The communication service serves to store and forward objects, without knowledge of the underlying data types. Thus all information is maintained at the server in a metamodel, describing all the elements registered in the system. A client of the system, is any object-oriented database wishing to exchange data with another. Pre-processing at the client must transfer the local schema into a canonical schema, the structure stored in the metadata repository. An agreed projection of objects is initially registered with the server, to store the new type, and an upload/download of actual data objects can then be performed. To retrieve data, a client transfers the data object structure required, the server performs an associative pattern matching operation, to forward the relevant data objects. Overall the GCS will be a completely generic, generative system, adaptable for all ODMG-93 compliant object-oriented databases.

 

XML/EDI Generic Mapper(GENMAP), as commission by the EDI Factory Ltd. - Graham Coleman, Gareth Young

The purpose of the project is to investigate the use of XML in conjunction with EDI, creating a system whereby documents can be viewed by a human reader or by a computer system. There is also a requirement to support the current widespread use of EDIFACT, with a robust, secure, easy-to-use tool to allow for the conversion of these documents.The system is especially aimed at those in the Small/Medium Enterprise Market, for which no software of this type currently exists. The system will allow the user to input a document directly into an XML created web page, or to submit the document (usually the output of one of the users Business Applications) manually. Once this has been done our Java- table-driven-mapping-tools will be used to convert these documents through the necessary steps into their EDIFACT format. The project has been commissioned by EDI Factory Ltd, and may be used as a test-module for the On-Line-Trader, the first value-added Network in Europe. We used Java, XML, EDI, and SQL Server

 

Guitar Music Analyser (FFT) - Niall Milton

The aim of my project is to produce an application, which will analyse music played through the PC’s multimedia devices and attempt to extract its estimation (through statistical analysis) of what guitar chords are being used in the music. I will also produce a real-time spectrographic representation of the wave patterns. A guitar tuner, wave player/recorder and a CD player will also be integrated into the application. The user should be able to play any piece of music they wish and get a time-based printed output so they may play all their favourite songs on the guitar.

 

Guitar Note Recogniser - David McEvoy

The purpose of this project is to create a Java application that will be able to read in Music track from a CD and output the guitar notes that were played on the CD. It is designed to be used by people who want to play songs by their favourite artists without the need for buying the sheet music. The program will also incorporate a Wav player that will play a filtered version of the music where only the guitar sound will be prominent. Implementation will be achieved with a combination of Fourier transform to determine specific notes and Neural Networks to recognise if the note is a guitar or not.

 

Human Computer Interaction in a Virtual Environment - David Long, Barry McCaul

The overall objective of this project is to implement a method for allowing a user to interact in a virtual environment using emerging technology synonymous with Virtual Reality (VR), sensored gloves. The system incorporates the following primary tasks, navigation, selection, interaction, and the issuing of commands via a data glove, whilst the user is immersed in a virtual environment. The system enables the virtual explorer to navigate to a particular point in space, to select objects or other entities, to interact with objects, and to issue commands controlling the simulation or the interaction solely by the use of a data glove worn by the explorer.

 

Integrating Internet Mail into CORBA - Enda Cahill

Internet Mail is one of the main applications used on the Internet. It uses SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send mail, POP3 and latterly IMAP4 (Interactive Messages Access Protocol) protocols to receive mail. This project will investigate how to incorporate such Internet mail functionality into a CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) environment. The approach will be to provide CORBA objects that encapsulate the functionality of the Internet mail protocols. This will allow CORBA-based applications to have access to Internet mail via these objects. The approach used to designing and building these objects will be to design CORBA objects in IDL to wrap Sun’s Javamail import library (using its SMTP and IMAP4 transports). The objects will then be compiled with an IDL compiler and implemented as part of a simple CORBA application to demonstrate their functionality

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Interactive VRML World Builder - Jennifer Daly, Ian Denver

The purpose of the project is to enable a user who has no prior knowledge of VRML to create VRML worlds with ease. The project is a VRML workbench, which enables the user to create a virtual scene from a library of objects using mouse input. This will enable the user to create a range of sophisticated worlds populated with various VRML objects, which are easily modified, and can be navigated with ease. The project is a stand-alone application, which is written using The Java 2 Platform, Java 3D and VRML.

 

Interface Builder for JDBC- compliant DB - Patrick Fox

The objective of this project is to create a tool, which will allow the user to build database interfaces. This tool will not create databases, instead use databases, which already exists. It will be written in Java and will generate the interfaces with Java. This tool will be used in conjunction with small to medium sized databases, which are JDBC compliant. It will also allow a user to create a Java interface to a database without necessarily having prior knowledge of either the Java language or the physical structure of the database they are working with.

 

Internet Bookmaking - Enda O' Boyle, Michael Roche

The growing relevance of the Internet in the modern world has guided continually increasing interest in the area of E-Commerce as is evident by the huge rise in on-line sales recently. It seems strange however that many other services are not available on the web, such as on line gambling (none of the Irish sites seemed to have such a function) The aim of this project is to meet this demand; a set of products which will provide all of the normal services available in a bookmakers office, accessible to all via an easily navigated web-page. Users will be able to place bets online – a secure mechanism for the transport of order information (inc. digitally signed receipts) is necessary. Secure persistence of data, real-time transactions, an admin panel + facilities to view coming events and customer profiles will also be supported

 

Internet Console Conferencing Tools  - Feng Tao, Paul Browne

The purpose for this project is to make a secure web based application that a phone conference chairperson can use to control a conference. During a conference a chairperson may wish to restrict the rights of one or more of the conference attendees. An example of restrictions would be to allow attendees only to speak and not to hear or vice-versa. At present the chairperson uses a touch-tone phone to control the conference. A telecommunications company would like to see a visual, GUI and secure web based application that could replace the touch tone phone.

 

Java Electronic Storefront Generator - Michelle Dowling, Dan Doyle

Due to the explosion of e-commerce onto the market front, the need to establish on-line retailing as part of the business plan has become more of a necessity. Although large companies may have a skill base at their disposal and the finance to couple it, smaller firms are unable to afford the high costs of such on-line shop-front development.Our project will provide a user-friendly "point & click" environment, which will allow any user with basic IT, skills to easily design and develop an electronic storefront from the ground up. The user will not require any technical knowledge that is normally associated with the development of an on-line store. Essentially out objective is to offer an economical and effective e-commerce solution to the small business sector.

JTrade - Sean Kinsella & Aidan Haran

The idea behind this project is to create a secure environment for financial trading to take place over the Internet, using client-server architecture. The server acts as a broker between clients; advertising deals and communicating the bidding process, until a deal is resolved. Each completed deal will have a deal ticket associated with it, which will indicate the particulars of the deal. The system can be used as a framework to eventually facilitate all types of Securities (foreign exchange, precious metals, equities etc). We will implement Foreign Exchange (FX) trading fully. Obviously, with such a system, the question of security is of utmost importance. We will be using J/Crypto libraries from Baltimore Technologies to ensure origin authentication, confidentiality and non-repudiation of deals. The system will consist of the client and server Java applications, which will communicate over TCP/I

 

Fractal landscape generator with animated flythroughs using OpenGL -  Daire Quinlan

This project will result in a fully-fledged landscape generator for Windows. An intuitive and powerful means of generating the heightfields by procedurally generating images and then combining them in a variety of ways is merged with procedural texture generation for the landscape and hardware accelerated rendering on capable systems using OpenGL. Various other 3D objects can be placed in the scene such as buildings, vegetation, vehicles and so on, and animated flythroughs can be generated of the entire scene, to be saved as Autodesk FLC files or Windows AVI files

 

Lung Cancer Diagnosis - Patricia Kelly

The aim of this project is to apply some of the ideas/techniques of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Pattern Matching to the world of Medical Imaging. Lung Cancer diagnosis is a highly specialised field of expertise requiring absolute accuracy and precision. Lung Cancer is the leading cause of cancer related deaths worldwide, it is currently impossible to detect if a patient has no symptoms and may it grow and spread for many years without detection. Therefore this is an area in which there is a real, continuing need for automated, accurate and robust diagnostic systems. This project aims to investigate the possibilities of creating such a system, by using the techniques and algorithms of Intelligent Pattern Matching to detect the presence and location of a cancer tumour from an X-ray/CT-Scan image. It will also apply some statistical techniques such as Bayesian Theory to calculate various probabilities given specific symptoms, contributory factors etc.

 

Meta Information Extraction – VRML - Ivan Mc Goldrick, Sheila O’Donnell

The majority of VRML worlds contain little Meta information - data describing the objects in the world itself. This project will provide an automated system for the generation of such information by extracting 2-D projections of the 3-D world. The categorisations of such projections will be achieved through the application of both connectionist and symbolic statistical machine learning algorithms. The eventual goal is to provide VRML worlds, which are rich in Meta-data, so that more sophisticated natural language user interfaces may be implemented.

 

Minerva Case Tool - David Heffernan, Micheal O’Brien

The purpose of this project is to develop a Case Tool for the new Minerva methodology. Minerva is an Object-Orientated methodology similar to UML. This will involve developing a user-friendly Graphic User Interface to allow the user to construct/design a Minerva model. This will be achieved through for example, the use of class, activity, and use-case diagrams as in the UML. There will be an underlying grammar, which will verify that the model is well formed. If the model is such then the program will use a parser (ANTLR) to generate Java code corresponding to the model. This project will be developed as an application running on the Windows platform.

 

Mosaic Image Generator  - Áine Twomey, Ciara Wong

This project is a system to generate a ‘ Mosaic ‘ from an archive of images. It consists of a collection of small thumbnails of digital images arranged in such a way as to present, from a distance, a mosaic of a larger image. These images are indexed according to their overall colour content. The technique implemented by "Mosaicing" the original image into, for example, 50 X 50 regions is to find for each region an image from the archive which is most similar to its colour index, then compositing all of these 50 x 50 images into the mosaic. In doing so, no image is used more than once. This project is coded in Java and is a web-based application.

 

Multi-Database Browser  - Donal Connolly

The purpose of my project is to allow businesses or small companies with one or more servers to have a searching mechanism, which allows them to search different databases in a single virtual database. This project will allow the user/s to enter queries to the system using a standard web browser allowing them to search for key data in all or some of the database systems. The results sets of the search will be combined into one single view in HTML form. The project is web-based, with Internet Information Server (IIS) running on an NT Server. Database applications being used will be SQL Server, POET and Microsoft Access.

 

Music in an instant - Jack Wright, Barbara Garrehy

Working in collaboration with Dublin band Jubilee Allstars we aim to produce a comprehensive web site including electronic commerce. Upon entering the e-commerce area the user will be asked to pick which songs, EP, or album they wish to purchase. Upon validation of their credit card details they will proceed to download and print out the artwork for their desired choice. They will then download the songs in mp3 format and burn them onto a CD. Inserting the printed out artwork into the CD case shall give the user a CD, as they would purchase in the shops at a fraction of the price. We intend to implement this using Java servlets with a JDBC connection to a SQL server database

 

OnLine CD Store - Brian McDermott, Kieran Mc Donald

The purpose of this project is to create an Internet shop specialising in the sale of CDs using the Oracle 8.0 Database and the Oracle Web Application Server. The web site will allow customers to browse and search CDs by name, category, artist, record company, and to order CDs online. Customers will also have access to the current status of their orders. The administration area of the web site will provide a secure and managed method of updating the web site. Information on CDs, artists, record companies, charts, and special offers will be easily updated without any knowledge of HTML or the Web. The administration area will also provide support for stock handling, order processing and sales & customer analysis.

 

OO Metrics Environment Tool - Justin Morley & Paul Meally

The purpose of our project is to examine syntactically correct Java code and evaluate it against a set of Object Oriented metrics. These metrics will give an indication of how the code conforms to the theory of Object Orientation, on which Java is based. This will inform the user of the strengths and weaknesses of his/her coding structure. The main strength of our project will be the flexibility it offers to the user. Unlike conventional metrics tools, it will place the figures corresponding to the metrics in the context of which they were developed. The role of the GUI will deal exclusively with outputting the results of the parser. The data from the parser will be displayed pictorially in the GUI. It will allow the user to compare the relative merits of the different metrics.

 

PGP for the Palm Pilot - Paul Gargan

The aim of this project is to port the functionality of PGP to the Palm Pilot. PGP is a well-established package on the PC, Macintosh and various Unix platforms. It uses public key technology to allow users to communicate securely and provides easy to use authentication. I plan to implement PGP on the Palm Pilot, allowing authentication of device and of user, and secure exchange of files. I will be using PGP 2.6.3i as the "baseline" for the project, as it is compatible with all 2.x releases of PGP, is still very popular and will work with later versions that produce DH keys. I will be using Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior on Windows NT to develop the code, and Palm Computing’s POSE (Palm OS Emulator) to test the code. The "Palm III" will be my target model of Palm Pilot.

 

PostOffice: Multi-User Mail Client - Val Hayes

The aim of this project is to produce an e-mail client for Windows 9x. It is aimed specifically at an environment where several people share the same P.C., thus PostOffice is multi-user, with each individual user being assigned an information profile and his/her personal mailboxes. Users will be able to retrieve mail from as many accounts as they wish. The application will support PGP for the transfer of mail and the encryption of mailboxes, to secure them from unauthorised access by other users.

 

Prepositions in VRML - Laurence Canny, John B. Conneely

Establishing correlations between the type of preposition a person uses to describe a scene and the view using a VRML workbench. The objective of this project is to create a VRML workbench to investigate issues like if there is any correlation between the type of preposition that a person uses to describe a scene and the view (deictic, intrinsic, extrinsic) that they are using. A study will then be made to see how people describe scenes in relation to objects (i.e. what they see as the most dominant object and what and how objects are described in relation to each other). We will then present the same world to the user with some small changes. By changing and moving the objects in the worlds which have been presented to the user and asking them for a new description of the scene, we will see how and in what way a person's perspective and description of a scene changes when the objects in the world have been changed, moved or rotated.

 

Relational to Object-oriented Database Converter - Ciaran O Cleirigh, Derek Reynolds

This project is aimed at creating a tool that converts a relational database to an object-oriented database. The bases for such a tool are the existence of so many relational databases and the broader use of object-oriented concepts. We propose to connect to any source relational database using the Open Database Connectivity and to convert to a target ODMG compliant object-oriented database – namely ‘Versant’. The user would have knowledge of both Relational and Object-oriented databases and would be prompted for particular input information to enhance the complexity of the OODB. This information will be required for inheritance decisions in the OODB.

 

Rug Warrior Robot Simulator - Brian Mac Einri, Colm Quinn

The essence of the project is to simulate, as accurately as possible, the real behaviour of the Rug Warrior robot and how it would react to various elements in its environment. The Rug Warrior robot has various components installed. It moves around through the use of two motors. It can detect objects in front with infra-red sensors. It can detect the light level with its photocells. If it has hit an object, its bump-detectors are activated. It also has a set of LEDS and a beeper. The operation of the robot and its components can be programmed with a C/C++ program using the IC Library.   Our project will simulate the components described above. The simulator will roam, just as the real Rug Warrior would, around its environment, dodging objects, using its sensors and avoiding collisions by rotating and driving its motors.

 

Secure E-Commerce - Richard Mangan & Mark McSherry

Our project is to create a fully functional E-Commerce project. Users will be able to go to an Internet site where they will be able to query/order products using a Java applet. These products will be stored in an Oracle 8 database along with all our customer details and all sales transactions. All communications between the server and the sales applet will be encrypted. This is done to protect the user’s details and to stop eavesdroppers from getting our client’s customer information. Payment for all products will be made by credit card.  It will also be possible to dynamically create web pages using VB scripts and active database objects. This will make the transition to web sales for our client’s much easier. Throughout the project one of our aims is to make the implementation as generic as possible to suit any client’s needs.

 

Secure Telephony - Simon Bolster

The purpose of this project is to enable users to conduct spoken conversations (either short- or long-distance) with each other, using IP and the Internet as a transport medium rather than the standard telephone system. The advantage of this is the circumvention of telephone charges, with the user only paying for standard Internet access. In addition, users will have the option of encrypting their conversations using established strong encryption algorithms, resulting in cryptographically secure communication. An Investigation of Light and Shadow in a Three Dimensional World - Lee Cash Shadowlay is an application that allows a user to study and understand the presence and effect of light and shadow in three-dimensional world. The world will be represented using Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML). The added quality is that the user can actually create his or her own world in which to see the shadows become a reality. The interface will be Java based. The movement of day and night can be viewed as the shadows can be animated to perform as if the scene was affected by time. The user can create the four major VRML shapes (cylinder, cone, sphere and cube) and place them in the scene. Also, the feature of independent light sources will be addressed as the user can add light sources (street lamps for example) and see how the objects are effected.

 

SimUniversity - Mark Cunningham

Taking inspiration from the collection of "SimGames" (such as SimCity), this project hopes to provide a simulation of a working University/College. The user will able to setup a University and he/she will then be able to manage it and help it develop. The user will then compete for "students" or "income" against other Universities controlled by other users or the computer itself. Hopefully users will come away with a better understanding of the complexity of running a University and the balancing of many factors (students, lecturers, space, administration, grants etc. etc.) involved.

 

Smart Money - Barbara Hamill

The purpose of this project is to implement a ‘cash-less’ environment. This is achieved through the creation of digital Euros, which will be held on smart cards. This digital cash will have all the functionality of real cash as well as the added bonus of usability over the Internet. The simulation will allow a user to load cash on to the card at banks or over the Internet, purchase items both in shops and over the Internet and exchange cash with another person. All of these operations will be undertaken in a secure environment.

 

Smartship - Thomas Hogan

The purpose of the project is to develop a multi-user Visual FoxPro database system which can be queried over the Internet via a JDBC driver. The project is to be used by the courier company Nightline to deal with order-taking, allocating jobs to drivers, tracing shipments and invoicing customers. It is a fully professional commercial package, which can be distributed and used by similar companies. The system also caters for importing data from other company’s remote machines such as FedEx, TNT, DHL and Citylink to name a few. The web page is designed separately and caters for customer queries and order taking.

 

S/MIME Plug-in for Lotus Notes - James Cooper

Secure MIME (Multi Purpose Mail Extensions) is a proposed Internet Standard for secure email exchange, developed by RSA. It was initiated back in December 1995, but it is not yet an official standard accepted by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Key vendors including (Netscape/Microsoft) already support S/MIME so it will more than likely become the defacto standard for secure email as the interoperability and availability of strong international versions are addressed. Lotus Notes 4.6 is the world's leading 'Net client software solution on the market today. Thousands of companies worldwide are using Lotus Notes to boost the productivity of their people and the profitability of their organisations. My primary objective is to integrate S/MIME compatibility into Lotus Notes using its C and VIM (Vendor Independent Messaging) API's.

 

Sound Editor - Joseph McKay

"SoundzPerfect" is a windows based Sound Editing application using a user-friendly front end. It implements various ‘Digital Signal Processing’ techniques on various recorded samples. The user is able to play and record from audio CD’s and a microphone. The user is able to view a representation of the waveform on screen and is able to navigate through the sound file quickly and accurately. A cutting and paste tool allows the user to edit the waveform on screen. Once the user has completed their changes on the sample they will have the option of saving their sample so they can open and save their sound files to and from a number of different computer platforms, sound cards, and external samplers.

 

UML CASE Tool In Visual C++ - Laith Hammadi

The aim of this project is to create an application for constructing a UML model using a set of graphical tools. The tools will allow a designer to create the views and add constraints to each one. Some of the views include the static structure diagram and the statechart view. The user interface will include a tree structure to allow for easy navigation between the views and the objects in each view. A right click menu will allow the user to add details each object, and the menu commands will provide more complex functionality. The application will verify that the views are consistent with each other as well as with UML semantics. After model construction and verification, the application can generate C++ class headers.

 

Using Fusion2 for Short Queries - Cathal Gallagher

The Fusion2 Meta search engine, as is stands, takes a query and generates a list of URLs as a result. It also supports analysis of the text of "relevant" web pages from which it generates candidate additional search terms. The current system is totally reliant on the user when it comes to selection of "relevant pages" and query expansion and this fact is the basis for my project. This project involves building a search tool applet on top of Fusion which takes a user's search, fetches the top X URLs (X=O(00's)) and analyses these by stemming and term ranking and presenting an expansion term list to users instead of presenting a list of URLs. It is effectively an exploration into query expansion based on short queries. The real question to be addressed is whether the expansion terms can then be grouped together based on their co-occurrences within the top X URLs into semantically-related cliques or groups? There is a system called WebSumm from Mitre, which does something, similar but not identical to this.

 

Voice Analysis - Adrian O’Sullivan, Vincent Smyth

Our project objective is to investigate the possibility of training a computer system to estimate how an individual person would pronounce a certain word, given samples of the individual's speech patterns. That is, the individual pronounces several syllables into a microphone and the system analyses these before attempting to pronounce another pre-defined word as the individual would. It remains to be seen if we can reach a point where the system can accurately estimate how an individual would pronounce a certain word. If we fail in this objective, then we aim to at least have reasons why the

system fails, backed up with various statistics and test runs.

 

VRML Chess Builder - Matthew McCaul, Brendan Maguire

The purpose of the project is to create a platform/environment for building VRML worlds. In our case we will take a chess game as the world the users may want to build. Although we will mainly be using the example of a chess world the application can be easily modified to create other worlds. By selecting options from the GUI, the users of the system will be able to create new chess games or reload saved games. On successful completion of this a two-player game of chess can be played. This game will take place across the network. To move the pieces we hope to incorporate a partial NLP system using drop down menus to start. Time permitting a full NLP system will be implemented.

 

VRML Shop - Gerard Byrne, David O’Flaherty

The aim of our project is to allow the user to navigate around a VRML shop world and enable them to select products they wish to purchase over the Internet. The project is going to be done using VRML and Java. The VRML is going to be used to create a virtual shop world, for this we will be using some software that was developed last year. The Java will be used to create the user interface and to obtain the users relevant information upon their buying a product from the shop.

 

Web Accessible Email Client - Mark Greene & Daire McKenna

The objective of this project is to have a system that will allow a user to read their new mail and send mail, using a Java capable web browser. It will consist of two parts, an Applet, and a Web Server running a Java-Servlet. It will appear to the user as a web page, which they will access. After supplying a valid combination of username and password for the mail server, their new mail will be presented to them. They shall also have the opportunity to send new mail.  The communication between the server and the browser will be encrypted.

 

Web Generator - Conor Lynch

The project that I shall be developing will be a web page generating multi-platform application that shall develop and put up web pages for a small to medium company. The application will require no prior knowledge of HTML or any programming language. The idea is that any company can purchase the application, run it, input the basic details of the company and products on offer, and the application shall do all of the work. This work will range from designing basic company pages, putting the company on the web, providing links, and incorporating a shopping basket like applet amongst others incorporated into the page. The page shall have all security etc. in-built and emphasise ease of use for those unfamiliar with computers or the web. The project will be written through Java.

 

Web page analysis - Aideen Lohan

The purpose of the project is to take existing web pages and test them to see if they are compliant with the Web Accessibility Initiative Standards. If the Web page being analysed does not comply with the standards, then alternative suggestions will be made for the page, which do comply. The owners of the pages can choose to update their pages themselves or have the package do it for them. Standards headings include: Graceful Transformation Orientation, Navigation, and Comprehension Testing

 

Web Reservation using Active Server Pages - Elizabeth Dunne

This project is based around the growing technology of Active Server Pages and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS).SQL Server is the database which is used as it is closely related to Active Server Pages and Windows NT which is the platform that the project runs on. It is a web application based on the storage and retrieval of data to a RDBMS, SQL Server, and the manipulation of this data. The application is a room reservation system for the labs in the Computer Applications Building in DCU. The results of the data manipulation is posted back out to a web page with the results of the queries been generated "on the fly" .The whole procedure is dynamic, in comparison to the static pages of the past which were written pre dominantly in HTML.

 

Web-Based Storage Using an Object Oriented Database - Susan O’Donnell

The advantages of using an object-oriented database model (compared to a relational database model) include closer representation of real world objects, greater productivity in developing applications and the ability to model complex data types such as images, text, voice or video. Given the multimedia capabilities of the Web an object-oriented database is the ideal storage mechanism for such an environment. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to design a web-based application, which will allow the end-user to store and retrieve objects in the underlying OO database. As student projects/assignments can often be composed of files of non-traditional datatypes (image, graphics, text, audio, video...) a website which allows students to submit assignments and lecturers to retrieve these assignments will demonstrate the high performance which OODBs provide to complex data/multimedia

 

Windows CE Application - Conor Devlin

The purpose of the project is to produce an application which is designed to run on a Handheld PC running the Windows CE operating system. The application will allow easy mobile access to Unitron Controllers. These Controllers are typically placed at strategic points around a building and they act as part of an integrated building management system. The Handheld PC will use a serial connection to communicate with the given controller and once this connection is established it will provide the functions required to reconfigure the Controller. The controllers have communication protocols, which must be adhered to at all times. The Development will mainly be done using Visual C++ / MFC under Windows NT 4.0 and a cross compiler to do windows CE specific builds. The application can then be run under an emulator in NT 4.0 or downloaded to the handheld PC and executed from there.

 

Wrapper Classes for A.S.P. Applications - Joe O’Toole, Kevin Brady

We aim to develop an application, which will allow users develop an Active Server Page application. Active Server Pages is a new technology developed by Microsoft, which runs in conjunction with Microsoft's Internet Information Server. A.S.P. enables the development of dynamic and interactive web-sites. A.S.P. appears to be replacing CGI due to its more robust and reliable structure. Our application will enable the user develop the front-end HTML for the application, set the appropriate environment for the application(i.e. connection of web-site to Web Server and connection between the database and the Web-Server)as well as creating the appropriate Active Server Page scripts(written in VB script) dynamically.In summary this application will allow a non-technical minded individual put to get a sophisticated dynamic and interactive web-site.

Page last updated: 31 July, 2000 by web@computing.dcu.ie