Main Page

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 (21 confirmed)

Notes on: What makes a good project?

Confirmed projects in 2016 list

Pocket Brain Surgeon

Drive by Age

Dynamic Narrative

Citizen Science for Cancer

Architecture for a Video Facebook

Eye-Tests on Demand

Campy Bird

Equity Exchange

Pebble Jogging App

Listening to a million voices

The Busking Bus-Stop

Edible Lego

Put your phone to work

Reducing food waste with IoT

The Politics of Wikipedia

Simulated Stock Exchange

Sailing by sound

Intelligent Game Designer

Fly-past Finance

Surprise the Singularity

Digital Currency for Public Good

Confirmed clients for 2016

Obex

JPMorgan

Jagex

Illumina

Boeing

Addenbrookes

Morgan Stanley

Frontier

Bloomberg

Cambridge Infrastructure Investment

Dovetailed

G-Research

King Digital Entertainment

IMC

Bohemia Interactive Simulations

Metaswitch Networks

BAML

Amazon

University Information Services

Other potential project clients considered for 2016

BT (13 proposals, of which 3 or 4 seem suitable)

John Norman, UIS

UNEP-WCMC (we made a suggestion)

Fauna and Flora International (no idea yet)

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).