Ideas for a Final Project

Grading Criteria

1. Basic Requirement (see below) is satisfied (20%)

2. Clearly innovative work as compared to the seven programming assignments earlier in the semester (20%)

3. Discussion and comparison of related works; report is clear and well written. (20%)

4. Demo: runs smoothly, user interface well designed, work flow clear (40%)

Handin method: send URL to TA and Instructor. If demo is needed in person, book time for Monday (Apr 2) afternoon by sending email. About 5-10 minutes can be allocated for demo.

1. Proposal and Team

The project team should consist of two or three people. A single person team will be evaluated in the same manner as a two person team. A three-person team is expected to accomplish more than a two-person team. All projects are subject to the instructor's approval. The project can be hosted on a home computer or Gemini.

A proposal should be submitted on March 2. In the space of one page, the proposal should discuss the following issues. Think about allocating a paragraph for each item below.

• A topic for your project. Please see the subsequent suggestions for a project topic.
• A discussion of the innovative aspects of your project. By innovation, it is meant that your final project should clearly demonstrate more substance than the first series of programming assignments. For example, a user-preference learning or data-mining driven e-commerce web site, an intelligent XML extractor from HTML documents, or a meta-search engine that submits queries and extracts search results from multiple, well-known search engines are considered innovative.
• A discussion of related work. A list of papers in the area of your topic, and/or a list of working web sites that exhibit the desired behavior, should be collated and discussed in the proposal.
• A sentence telling the instructor where the project is to be hosted (a home computer or Gemini)
• A discussion of the division of labor among your team mates and a proposed milestone.

2. Deadline and Hand-In Items

The project is due on Monday, April 2 in HTML format. A brief report (2-3 pages) of the project should be produced, describing the various components of the system as well as a workflow of the user interface components. A discussion of how you have met your objectives set out in your proposal should be discussed. A discussion of comparison with related work should be presented. Similar to the proposal, a discussion of the division of labor of the team should be explained in the project report.

Every project must satisfy the following requirements:

• Web based system requirement. It must be a web based system to qualify a project.
• Java Servlet driven. The project must include at least one Java Servlet component.
• Database or XML driven backend. There must be either an XML and/or Database component in the project.

3. Graduate Students

Graduate students are expected to give a class presentation on the week of March 26. A 10 to 12 page term paper, in HTML format should be submitted on April 2 together with the rest of the class. The term project consists of selecting a new topic to explore, and an empirical or theoretical comparison of approaches to the topic should be conducted. Conference-paper review criteria will be applied to evaluate the term paper.

4. Suggestions for Final Project Ideas

The following are by no means an exhaustive list. New suggestions are welcome.

• A smart ecommerce web site that helps users in comparison shopping.
• A news web site that integrates news items from multiple web sites.
• A meta-search engine that integrates the search results from other search engines.
• A personalized job-hunting web site that hunts for jobs on behalf of a user.
• A query system that estimates the number of popularity of any given web page using smart crawlers.
• A topic-specific crawler based search engine.
• A wireless portal site that allows a PDA to access the Web using WML and personalization agents.
• A travel planning assistant that helps users make travel plans based on information from multiple information sources on the web.
• A B2B matchmaking web site that streamlines supply chain management between supply and demand.
• A interactive search engine that learns users' intentions through user feedback.

February 11, 2001