This page is mainly for prospective undergraduate students who are considering working with me.

I always look for opportunities to engage undergraduate and graduate students in my research or technology interests. Make sure you take a look at the "Research" and "Technology Interests" sections of this site to see what this generally entails.

I am available to supervise the following kind of projects in both the Computer Science & Information Technology programs;

• IT or CS Senior Project
• IT or CS Independent Studies on topics related to my expertise

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions

This page has a few things to keep in mind before we start working together. These apply to most projects but were written with mostly undergraduate students in mind.

Advice

• Select a project based on what you plan on doing after graduation.
  • If you want to do research, aim for research-focused projects early on, even at undergraduate level
  • If you want to be a Linux sysadmin, do not make a web-page as project or vice versa
• Let me know what you like so we make sure we design a project together that you will be motivated to work on. It is essential to do so.
• A project should be an opportunity for you to learn new things and extend your skills.
• However, do not sign up for a project which will focus on your weaknesses. E.g. if you had problems with databases throughout your degree, it would make little sense to take a project in DB. Most capstone projects are opportunities to demonstrate your proficiency, not remediate previous offerings.

Expectations

• I meet with my students every week & track progress. I supervise projects, I do not let you sort it out on your own.
• I do not supervise projects on topics I am not familiar with.
  • I do, or did at some point, hands-on development work on all the projects I offer. This guarantees that you will have someone able to introduce you to the existing code base & tutor you through the technologies you might be unfamiliar with.
  • If you ask me to supervise you while working on something I did not develop, I will do so only if I know about the technologies being used. Sometimes, we will be able to work out something if I know I will have time to learn them during the semester. The latter is unlikely if said technologies do not have a strong synergy with my other work.
• I do not supervise just-a-webpage projects or any other type of work which is equivalent to a 6 hours lab streched over a semester.
  • I want to involve my students with tools and technologies going beyond what they are exposed to in our curriculum. These projects are great to gain familiary with state-of-the art technologies you will have to handle in industry.
  • I want my students to work on meaningful projects. This means contributing to products which are actually used by my research team, industry, charities, or academic institutions. This involves a much more realistic development experience than the one found in projects where the student's deliverable just ends up sitting on a shelf, never used by anyone.
  • OA All projects should result in something you may show your future employers to help you be hired. I expect you to tackle something significant and do your best. Nothing more, nothing less.
• All my student projects are open source. Students' contributions are made to repositories and are therefore easy for the supervising faculty to review. This allows me to provide very fast and frequent feedback to further guide you. In addition, students end up with an archive of their work, alongside the end result, which they may show to future employers to illustrate their abilities.

For most projects, we end up using a subset of the following tools. I put here information to help you get started setting your development environment.

Scrum

We generally use a Scrum-inspired project management technique during development-oriented students projects. The following are introductory references on Scrum;

• Scrum Methodology has a cartoon-like tutorial worth sitting through if you are new to Scrum
• Ken Schwaber, Google TechTalk Scrum et al.. 9/5/2006.
• Scrum Reference Card useful as a summary of the whole Scrum process

We may either use xls sheets, e.g. Olivier Gerardin, to help us keep track of progress in an easy way, or the Kunagi software.

Subversion

Most projects, if not all, are hosted on Sourceforge.net or Unfuddle.com. We use subversion as a versionning system to commit regularly the source in small increments of improvement. This allows me to provide more detailed feedback as I monitor your commits. Often, this results in identifying misconceptions much earlier. It also helps ensuring of the quality of the source.

Before we start any project, make sure you have an account on Sourceforge.net. Use a user name which identifies you, e.g. John.Smith, not a pseudonym, e.g. GreenYonder. When you are ready, send me a request to add you to the project you are going to work on.

Since we will be using versioning, and most likely subversion, make sure to take a look at this freely available book on subversion. No need to be an expert but familiarize yourself with the rudiments. If you are working on Windows, Tortoise SVN is a neat subversion tool.

Java

If you are developing in Java in one of our projects, make sure to download the JDK. You will need a JDK and not just the JRE for your work.

Next step is to download the Eclipse IDE Standard Edition and its Subversive plugin to interact with the repository.

The installation instructions are available here along with a user guide to help you check out the repository and start working.

Virtual Box

Some projects will require you to work in a Linux environment. More often than not, students are using Windows on their personal systems. For this reason, I recommend to download and install Virtual Box and its Extension Pack.

You will then need to download an ISO image of a Linux distribution. We generally use either Ubuntu or CentOS. For the latter, I recommend downloading the i386 NetInstall ISO file for CentOS 6 which works best as 32 bits guest under virtual box. You will find a tutorial on using the NetInstall image here & should specify the following URL for the mirror http://mirrors.sonic.net/centos/6/os/i386/. Make sure you remove the ISO image from the virtual CD when you reboot or you will get a INT18 error. This is apprently a old standing bug with virtual box...

When you are done installing either distribution, make sure that you install the guest additions which will allow your Linux guest OS to work alongside the virtual box hypervisor. For CentOS, you might want to do it as explained here

Resources

Last but not least, email me to discuss which references might be appropriate based on the languages & technologies you will be using. USF Library is your friend.

You might also find some references of interest in the "Technology Interests" section of this site

This tab will give you an idea of the topics I previously explored with different students.

Get in touch with me at least 2 months before the start of the semester during which you want to work on an undergraduate student project with me.

During the semester preceeding the one during which you want to do your project, we will prepare the letter of intent & the detailed work schedule. The former will be sent to your academic advisor in order for them to allow you to enroll. The latter is pretty much a detailed description of the work to be done. Every bit of paperwork needs to be out of the way before the previous semester ends so we hit the ground rolling in the project itself.

Topics depend on what technologies you want to gain experience with. I always recomend to students that they select topics aligned with what they want to focus their carreer on.

Here are examples of topics used in the past for this kind of projects;

• Java development - e.g. [Jade]
• Web development in PHP - e.g. [WebPT] [NED] [SUSHI]
• Web development in JavaScript - e.g. [Sherpa]
• Linux Technologies - see Linux Technologies website for details

To give you an idea of the types of undergraduate project I have supervised in the past, this tab gives a listing organized by topic;

Linux System Administration Projects

The following projects share a focus on Linux technologies from the perspective of system administration.

Year	Student	Title	Project
2016	James Cherven	Building and Automating Zettabyte File System (ZFS) Storage, Backup, and Recovery Services in Linux
2016	Dominick Rapacioli	Investigating Ubuntu Cloud Viability for Student Virtual Machine Setup
2016	Aaron Boshers	Backup for USF NREC
2011	Matt McDermott	CLUE Virtual Appliance	NSF CLUE
2008	Jarrod Chastain	CLUE Virtual Appliance for Peer Programming	NSF CLUE
2007	Alex Kranh	Developing a VMWare Educational Virtual Appliance	NSF CLUE
2006	Janet Offray	Linux System Administration Laboratories
2005	Mithun Sawant	Oracle Management on Fedora C4
2005	Clark Godwin	Linux Kernel Modules Development
2005	Eric Murray	Debian Packaging for the Warewulf Project	NSF SOFTICE
2005	Steve Lambropoulos	Remote Storage Technologies (AOE, iSCSI)
2005	Nestor Rentas	Linux Stealth Intrusion Detection & Logging
2005	Andrew Wong	Open SSI Clustering on Classroom PCs	NSF SOFTICE
2004	Gary Cohen	Debian Linux Installation of a Private LAN

Software Development Projects

The following are projects focused on Java, or web development technologies such as LAMP & MEAN stacks.

Year	Student	Title	Project
2014	Terrence Hughes	Web-based student project manager in AngularJS
2014	Charles Kittredge	Web-based student project manager in PHP
2014	Stephen Kozakoff	NED - Eclipse & Netbeans Plugins	NSF CLUE
2014	Nghiem Tran	NED - Novice Error Detection Web App	NSF CLUE
2013	Adam Feller	NED - Novice Error Detection Web App	NSF CLUE
2012	Joshua Maun	Surveying Undergrads Study Habits & Initiatives	SUSHI
2011	Duong, Aubertin, Ennaime, Metzer	Surveying Undergrads Study Habits & Initiatives	SUSHI
2007	Cecil Thornhill	Independent Study: Rapid Web Prototyping with Ruby

EA-related Development Projects

The following are projects focused on Evolutionary Algorithms, many of which have involved Java development.

Year	Student	Title	Project
2015	Paul Burton	Evolving Parsons Puzzles	NSF EvoTutoring
2003		Robocode: Evolving Intelligent Controllers in 2D games
2002	Philip Der Hovsepian	Co-Evolutionary Time Dependent Optimization	Swiss NSF ACOLITE
2002	Urs Forster	Cellular Genetic Algorithms	Swiss NSF ACOLITE
2001	Group of two students	Evolving Time Schedules for an Engineering School
2000	Five groups of five students	Netmazers: An Artificial Life ESSI Project