News

Compsci 600 Students Pursue Independent Projects in Group Setting

This year, students of the Computer Science Research and Development (CSC-600) Course individually designed and created their own projects based on programming skills and platforms. Students were required to apply with a proposal on a project they would pursue throughout the term. Here are this year’s CSC-600 projects:

Varun Roy ’19

“I am really interested in virtual reality and I wanted to do something with that so I created this virtual reality application…[my project] is a virtual reality application to visualize, eventually, live weather data in a globe format [that is] interactable, using virtual shells and data panels to help weathermen and meteorologists analyze the huge world of weather and make correlations. Essentially [to] use virtual reality to expand upon two dimensional visualizations”

Jeffery Shen ’19

My particular project is helping the library develop a platform to transcribe documents using machine lettering and crowdsourcing. Andover has a huge collection of documents, but students really can’t access them because they’re not transcribed, and by digitilizating them in this format, it really helps researchers and students.

Miles McCain ’19

My project was called equal, spelled “IEQL”, which was a project where I wanted to scan the internet. So I’ve built a system that allowed anyone to scan more than three billion web pages quite cheaply. I’ve been wanting to really scan the internet in a very long time, and I always was dissatisfied with google alerts. And I thought well, we could do it better.

Igor Barakaiev ’20

My project was using computer vision and machine learning to convert images and redraw them with another style, like emojis. I like computer science and I like machinery. It was a pretty hard course, but it was worth it.

Nakul Iyer ’20

My project was about music transcription using machine learning and artificial intelligence, taking music files and trying to make sheet music. [The assignment] was very open. You’re supposed to research something for a couple of weeks, and read a lot of research papers and build a bibliography and develop something of your own code based on your research.

 

Nicholas Miklaucic ’19

My project is basically taking a board game called Hex and trying to develop an AI for it and trying to see if I can achieve world class performance. It’s really appealing to be able to run algorithms that don’t require any previous knowledge, so my thought was I wanted to try and learn more about how it worked, and I thought the most reasonable way to do that was to implement it myself.

Anjalie Kini ’19

The goal of my project is to visualize light paths around the black hole. It’s kind of a project that I wanted to work on, [an] interdisciplinary way between astronomy and computer science. The goal is to create what would be either a research or educational tool that helps people think about the motion of light around black holes, which can help us learn more about the ways a black hole works. It was something that I had thought about for a long time that I wanted to do and hadn’t really had the opportunity

Bill Qin ’19

My project was studying how implementing a certain degree of randomness can make our algorithms more efficient. I wanted to stick with something I’m good at, making algorithms but I also wanted a developmental aspect where I had to do some sort of interface. I had a really fun time. It’s been hard — it gets pretty hectic sometimes — but I really enjoy this project and [it] has allowed me to broaden my mind and open up possibilities for future projects.

Liv Martens ’19

My project is, how do computers understand programs and how do they execute programs, especially the language of the computer. It’s not something you learn in schools. I thought it could help me understand the things I’m actually coding. It was more for me to understand but I think it’s important to know because you can then help other people understand it.

Isaac Hershenson ’20

It’s an independent project class, so every student is doing some computer science research or project. I’m projecting the salaries of NFL wide receivers. I’m really interested in sports statistics and I took the 630 class last term and I thought it was an interesting segue. The project’s really fun, it’s been a great process and I’m really happy with how it’s gone.

Kaitlin Lim ’20

The purpose of my project can be divided into two parts: first, us[e] MRI scans of brains with tumors [and] use a neural network to detect the shape of the tumor and extract it from the image of the brain. The second part would be to calculate the different features of that tumor, for instance, surface volume and area, and feed those values into different machine learning models to see if they can differentiate between a high-grade tumor and a low-grade tumor.

Nalu Concepcion ’19

My project was about writing a different method of coding for deaf-blind students. So my project has been been more of actual programming, to researching and reaching out to people who are blind and work[ing] with blind students or deaf students. I decided to do this simply because I was curious about it. So a couple of years ago, Harvard Law School’s first deaf blind graduate came here to speak at ASM, and she talked about accessible technology and how disability was an opportunity to innovate. I was really inspired by that and decided to pursue a project of which would help compliment her message.