Agilent
ATI
Avaya
Bureau of Land Management #1
Bureau of Land Management #2
Colorado Performance Academy
CSM #1 Calc III Challenge
CSM #2 Tech Camp
CSM #3 CDE I and II
ESE Today
Medtronic
Quantum PM
Rhythm and Hues #1
Rhythm and Hues #3
Thomas White Photography
ToBee
Toilers
USGS

Agilent

Agilent Technologies’ SP50 high-speed solder paste inspection system currently performs process characterization and defect prevention of the solder paste process. A need has been identified to calculate, record, and output important process statistics in an organized and efficient manner. Our group has been tasked with the mission of developing a GUI application, using the C# language, which will display important process flow data. The program will collect information from the operator and computer generated rep files to perform desired operations. There will be both a real time operational mode, which will record and display important statistics while the machine is running, and an offline operational mode that will allow the user to gather important statistics for past sets of processes. The operator will also be able to input a set of alarm parameters that provide a warning when the current data represents an error type situation. This program will be easy to use along with presenting data in a clean and organized fashion.

ATI

ATI is looking to create its own graphical performance framework for both the Linux and Windows environments. This performance benchmarking software will add and subtract benchmark applications (such as SPECviewperf) to a queue, use a scheduler to run those benchmarks, locate and use the outputs created by those applications to display a basic set of graphs, and display that data to allow the user to configure the graphics card for optimum performance. The group's task is to create the framework within the Red Hat Linux environment, using the Ant tool to allow easy porting between operating systems. This should include use of Tcl/Tk (or a similar tool) and use the HP Performance Suite as an example of the end product. If there is time remaining, the group will also create a sample Viewset for SPECviewperf to demonstrate what the framework does.

Avaya

Usability Assets Repository (UAR)

Avaya has a significant number of desktop, client-server, and web-based application development projects underway. This poses a challenge for developers to provide a consistent look and feel to the end users. The Usability Assets Repository (UAR) will serve as a user-friendly web-based repository for uploading and downloading icons that Avaya application developers use for common functions. Icons will be collected from a number of existing Avaya sites and posted onto the repository. The icons will be indexed
so that they can be categorized and searched with ease. UAR provides developers with a centralized process to find icons.

The core functionality of UAR will consists of the following:
If time persists, we will implement the following desirable features:

BLM #1

The CSMM (CASHE and Safety Management Module) website used by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) will provide employees with the ability to see information based on the standards set by CASHE (Comprehensive Assessment for Society, Health, and the Environment). CASHE is a government program used to inspect government land sites, rather than public land sites.

The website created will be used internally by the BLM employees to view violations that have yet to be fixed, in order to insure fast and appropriate corrective action. Also, this website will be used for storing documents on training information, application and user documentation, and executive summaries. When an employee has finished viewing the website, a feedback form will be available to that employee, for the purpose of grading the BLM website as a whole, the CSMM website specifically, and management of websites connected directly to the CSMM website. The website will be designed using HTML, XHTML, Adobe Photoshop, and possibly JavaScript. It will implement the writing to a database, potentially using the PERL or PHP languages.

BLM #2

The Lands and Realty Group is responsible for the development, implementation and monitoring of legislation, regulation, policy and technical guidance for many Bureau programs.  Some of these programs include the Alaska Land Transfer, Appraisal, Hydropower issues, and Military Coordination.  These programs deal mostly with the disposal and acquisition of land.  The website for The Lands and Realty Group is currently an intranet site that must be redesigned.

Project Abstract

The redesigned website must meet certain criteria. It must be simple to use with a consistent look and feel. It must meet federal requirements for 508 compliance and be accessible to people with disabilities. It must also contain the standard DOI/BLM disclaimers, privacy statements, etc. Finally, the website must contain all information from the original website with modifications made by the Washington Office.


Colorado Performance Academy

Colorado Performance Academy is developing a website to assist personal trainers with managing all aspects of trainees' regiments. The current prototype site has minimum functionality and needs major graphical modifications as well as a new database schema before release. The site must be capable of tracking an individual's workout components and status, and adjusting workouts according to trainees' performance. Administrative functionality must be built in to allow trainers to manage exercise lists, exercise areas, and other attributes.

The prototype site is currently using PHP and MySQL, and we will continue development using these technologies. In order to avoid excessive difficulty, the project's scope will be limited to a single platform rather than trying to construct a universal cross-platform solution. The final project will be a fully functional and installable website, and will be delivered in six weeks.

CSM #1 Calc III Challenge

CSM #2

Our goal for the Tech Camp 101 is to educate primarily minority and female middle school students in various areas of computer technology. We will deliver lesson plans that create fun interactive ways to learn new skills in computer science. We will also implement a creative way to assess the students' progress during the week long camp.

The camp focuses on teaching students three different interactive programs that enhance computer learning in the areas of robotics, movie making, and video game development. We will be monitoring and teaching the students the basics of Alice, Games Factory, and Lego Mindstorm.

CSM #3 CDE I and II

The Colorado Department of Education and the National Science Foundation has set up with Colorado School of Mines a continuing education program for middle school education and the proliferation of mathematics and science. One of the key components of the continuing education program is a group of workshops designed for middle school teachers to advance and enrich mathematics and science in a classroom environment. These workshops are called Colorado Department of Education (CDE) I and CDE II. CDE I is an initial course of instruction for middle school teachers. CDE II is being taught for the first time this summer as a continuation course to CDE I. The workshops are developed and taught by graduate students, the graduate fellows. This project will help the graduate fellows with the construction and instruction of CDE I and CDE II. Current lesson plans will be modified for CDE I to improve accuracy and presentation of content. New lesson plans will be created for CDE II. The primary goals for instruction are to assist the teachers in passing the Colorado Department of Education standardization test and to give the teachers new and exciting ways to teach mathematics and science.

ESE Today

MattSoft Publishing Incorporated (MPI) produces, publishes, and distributes the journal Explosives Science and Engineering Today (ESEToday). MPI offers short courses for training workers who use explosives. Currently all the course material must be printed and distributed in class. MPI would like to provide the course materials online. MPI would like to develop an online-course environment similar to eCollege or Blackboard.

We will program a course-creation wizard that helps instructors setup courses (upload course materials, generate quizzes, and create certification vouchers). The wizard will take the information entered by the instructor and create the course. It will format courses into a pre-determined structure. The wizard is only the first step towards the online-course environment, if time permits, we will program:

Medtronic

Medtronic is looking for help for its managers with project scheduling. We would accept user-defined tasks, precedence of those tasks, and various times associated with the tasks (optimistic, estimated, pessimistic, etc.). Then, using a network structure, find the critical path of the network (that is, the longest path through the network). This will allow the managers to know which projects are important to work on now, and which (due to the constraints of the system) allow for time delays without delaying the project itself.

We would implement this using a graphical user interface, probably employing Visual C++ or Java. It would also allow for changing the parameters to analyze the system for any of the various task times.

Quantum PM

QuantumPM (QPM) is a project management professional services company. QPM provides both software products and consulting services in the field of project management. As part of the continuous company growth, QPM would like to provide their employees with a mechanism for improvement and feedback. 

As part of the Field Session at CSM, QPM has requested Field Session team to design a Professional Growth Assessment (PGA) System. The goal of the system is to provide all QPM employees with a system that supports anonymous feedback about how they work that is specific, constructive, and actionable. The purpose of the system is not to validate job retention or salary decisions in any way, and is meant to be a non-threatening way to provide input by one’s peers that can be used for personal and professional growth.

QPM has also provided the Field Session team with a measure of success statement: “Build a system that facilitates all QPM personnel to evaluate their peers in constructive manner.” A number of actionable items have been composed to identify the definition of done for the PGA System:

The technology requested by QuantumPM is to use InfoPath for user interface and evaluation forms. InfoPath is an XML-based application that allows easy development and deployment of rich forms. InfoPath will also be integrated with an encrypted MS SQL Server database that will provide central storage and access to the evaluations.  The ACI will review the evaluations to remove any non-constructive feedback.  The ACI will then forward the evaluations to the evaluee and will also send comments to the evaluator on the quality of the feedback they provided.

Rhythm and Hues 1

We will be writing a program that will be used to simulate muscle and skin. This is accomplished by taking a three dimensional solid and building a tetrahedral mesh of the interior. Specifically the program will read in points that represent a three dimensional, closed surface, containing no holes and will produce the tetrahedral mesh inside. The code will be able to read in model input file formats and translate them into format we need. We will use the Delaunay triangulation algorithm and its mesh refinement algorithms to build the tetrahedral mesh with tetrahedrons that will have good angles. By good angles we mean that the ratio of the edges will be close to prevent having tetrahedrons with sharp angles or that form small slivers.

The program will be written in C++ and will ultimately be used on Linux platform. The program will be written so that you can visualize the final tetrahedral mesh using GLUT. We will integrate the Tetgen environment into our own program’s environment to accomplish this task. The final product will take a model input and output a tetrahedral structure that would fit inside of the model. If the program is simple and effective it may be used in the movie Garfield or Superman, and ultimately the next step in the graphics world.

Rhythm and Hues 3

Thomas White Photography

Before digital cameras came into play, photographers would take the pictures that they liked and scan them onto their computers as a digital format of some kind. As a result, a photographer may take a thousand pictures, but only scan fifty of them. As the digital camera becomes more popular, we see a drastic increase in pictures stored on the computer. Those thousand pictures that a photographer may take might now be easily stored on the computer. With this influx of digital images stored on machines, it is necessary to organize these pictures using metadata, which is data about an object, such as a picture.

With the use of metadata and digital cameras, it is now more convenient for a photographer to use templates to fill in the information contained in a picture. In many cases, a photographer will want to prepare these templates before a shoot. For instance, a photographer knows that he will be shooting a basketball game between team A and team B on a certain date. He can fill in that information ahead of time, and apply it to all pictures when he downloads them to his machine.

Our job is to provide the client with tools that will help photographers to manage custom templates. Our first goal is to make it easier for photographers to apply specific parts of a template to pictures. Other optional goals include template management and easier custom metadata creation.


ToBee

Toilers

The Toilers research group does wireless networking research and simulations, particularly using the NS2 protocol, which is designed specifically for wireless connectivity between mobile devices. Toilers has developed a tool called iNSpect to assist with visualizing wireless network simulation data. The program iNSpect takes the output data from an existing simulation and creates a graphical representation of the ad- hoc network that is easy to understand and analyze visually.

While functional in its current form for one time analysis, iNSpect does not currently have the capability to save screen captures or movies of the wireless network simulation. We have been assigned the task of adding this functionality to the program so that simulations can be more easily demonstrated on platforms that are incompatible with iNSpect or where the program itself is not available to run the simulation (i.e. the Toilers webpage). Our specific guidance on this task is to provide a user interface in the form of an additional tab on the main window that will allow a user to specify what kind of captured output to create. The options for this output will include whether to output to still frame or movie and what the frame rate of the capture will be. Toilers lists these two features as high-priority for iNSpect, and so it is this group's goal to design and implement both needed features into iNSpect, while maintaining both the quality and effectiveness that iNSpect has already achieved.

Coincident with this task is the secondary objective that we develop documentation for iNspect in the absence of any standardized or organized documentation on the program. Since we will need an intimate knowledge of iNSpect to add the functionality that has been requested, we will be able to develop the user manual as we go. The program Doxygen has been recommended for this task and will assist us greatly in generating the necessary pieces for the complete documentation of the program.

USGS

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has implemented a system called Earthquake Notification System (ENS). This system informs the registrants when their selected area of the world has experienced an earthquake. The USGS's current system allows a user to specify the portion of the globe either by using a predefined zone, or by selecting their own zone by one of several tools. The user can choose between a rectangle/square, circle, or an n-sided polygon to encompass their area of interest. For this project, we have been tasked with improving the region selection tools, to allow an easier and more efficient method of choosing regions.

As secondary objectives (i.e., not critical to project success), we are allowed to modify the user interface, along with other functionality of the program, to better the user's experience and improve underlying system operation. In regards to functionality, the current ENS contains several bugs (like incorrectly representing/ storing a selected region), that should be fixed to make the ENS more robust.