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Design Briefs for Cambridge University Computer Laboratory Group Design Projects 2016

This page currently lists design briefs under development. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome, to group-project@cl.cam.ac.uk

All content on this site has draft status, subject to confirmation by both group project coordinators and project clients. There is no guarantee that these projects will be offered to students, either in the form described here, or at all.

We expect 104 students to participate this year. These will probably be arranged into 18 groups - 14 with 6 members, and 4 with 5 members. We plan to offer at least 20 design briefs - preferably 21 or 22 - to allow for some student choice, technical lossage or client withdrawal.

Intellectual property

Notes on Intellectual property

Client briefing

Information on Logistics for Clients

Information for students, and course history: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/group-projects

Management timetable for 2016

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/group-projects/timetable.html

Work in progress - design briefs for 2016 (looking for 21/22 projects)

Potential project clients for 2016

Boeing

BAML

Metaswitch Networks

Bloomberg

Frontier

Morgan Stanley

UNEP-WCMC

Illumina

BT (13 proposals at present)

IMC (2 proposals at present)

Bohemia Interactive Simulations

Amazon

Jagex (5 proposals at present)

Fauna and Flora International

Confirmed projects for 2016

Intelligent Game Designer

Confirmed clients for 2016

King Digital Entertainment

Further project ideas to consider

Message to the future

There are so many things that only happen once a year - birthdays, start of term, insurance renewals - if only your email system could remember what you did last year, and take care of it next time! Your job is to implement an email server @nextyear, that will interpret the content of any message it receives, work out which things will have to change next year, and then draft an automatic update. It would be safer if this went to the user for checking a few days in advance, and provided a web interface to review currently active processes, but everything should be achieved with the absolute minimum of mouse clicks or wasted user attention

High speed password bypass

Many companies ask users to create a unique user account and password for systems whose security the user couldn't care less about. Sometimes it can be faster to just click "forgot my password", and use the emailed reset link rather than the login page. Your task is to make a super-fast login bypass procedure by automating this process, with a custom web/email client that will automatically trigger the forgotten password facility in any URL it receives, then take care of the reset process (using the user's securely stored email account credentials) to navigate the login process without having to bother with inventing a real password.

Text-cavation

Most people now think of the Google model as the only way to search free text content (single word context, relevance metric and a weighted result list). Your task is to create an interface for navigating millions of pages of text data, where it is *all* relevant. Users should start by typing a word, with the system responding by showing frequency-weighted distributions of neighbouring words from all other documents. Users should be able to move left and right, filter out information they are not interested in, and “deep-dive” to check individual documents. The system should dynamically build a thesaurus, learning which words might have similar meanings from context, and offering a fuzzy (possibly slower) mode in which these are shown too. You’ll need to use a super-fast index algorithm such as the Symmetric Compacted Directed Acyclic Word Graph from Schulz & Mihov

Liker-bot

Modern teenagers have to spend hours every day pressing like buttons on Facebook and Instagram. Your task is to automate this drudge-work. Of course, these companies really want to trap eyeballs, so they won't make it easy for you. You will probably have to emulate a web browser, which at least pretends to be looking at the posts before automatically "clicking" on the like-link. It will also be embarrassing if it likes the wrong thing, so some machine learning will be involved to monitor, learn and then anticipate the user's real preferences (kittens = like, parents = dislike etc).

Digital Currency for Public Good

The digital currency Bitcoin uses a block chain distributed database to guarantee that any transaction can be traced to a unique original coin. The same technique could be used for anonymous authentication of other kinds of data. Your task in this project is to create a secure end-to-end system for authenticated reporting and verification of criminal activity, safety violations, human rights abuses etc. You need to think about how reports can get into the system, and how those receiving a report can use the block chain to confirm it is true without endangering the whistleblower. Perhaps charitable bodies or governments could even use the chain to make untraceable payments to those who take risks in public interest.