CSC49X Projects Winter 2007

Week 9: time to start thinking about next term’s projects. Here’s what’s on the table:

• The Online Marking tool, which gives TAs the ability to mark up student code on the web. This is now being used in a couple of courses, and there was lots of interest at DemoCamp in modifying it to work as a general online code review tool. Lillian Angel will be heading up the team, under the direction of Jennifer Campbell; two more bodies are needed.
• Our Blackboard Plugin project, which displays stats on the grades being given in different sections of large courses. This plugin may be done by Christmas, but there are lots more to write—Java, anyone?
• The MailClouds project is using tag clouds to show the history of conversations between businesses and their customers.
• We're also visualizing generalogical data for REED, the Records of Early English Drama project, using Flash, asynchronous XML, and other sexy technologies. Rich web GUIs… mmm…
• Mylar is a tool that (among other things) allows Eclipse to connect directly to issue-tracking systems. There is apparently already a plugin for Trac;we'd like to adapt it for DrProject.
• One new project: improving the GUI of a tool for visualizing brain scan data. Prof. Stephen Strother's team at the Rotman-Baycrest is studying the effects of strokes and other impairments on elderly patients; they have lots of data, and need better ways to look at it.
• Another new project: an API (with implementations) for an abstract spreadsheet connection layer that does for Excel, Gnumeric, and OpenOffice what ODBC, JDBC, and Python's DB-API do for databases.

If you have at least two 300-level CS courses, and your GPA is 3.0 or higher, please give me a shout.