2007-2008 Projects

• Bluebeam Software, Inc. — A Web-Based PDF Management and Organization Solution
  
  The Clinic team researched and developed a system to organize and manage large sets of PDFs (Portable Document File documents). The proposed system enables users to find the document they need quickly and efficiently by searching through data within the file and user supplied data about the file. The team measured the system's success by how much it simplifies the process of finding a particular file.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christine Alvarado
  Student Team: Jay Markello (Project Manager), Eduardo Ruvalcaba, Joe Simmons, Scott Triglia.
  
  
• D4 Networks, LLC — A Web-Based Implementation of a Reservation and Scheduling System for Efficient Per-Seat Pricing for Air Taxi Service
  
  The goal of this project was to develop a web application highlighting the flexibility and convenience of charter air travel. This application enables passengers and charter operators to pool their resources in order to keep travel competitive with commercial airlines. The team's efforts enable an optimization algorithm from a 2006/2007 HMC Math Clinic to act as an engine for a charter-booking and delivery business.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Andrew La Motte-Mitchell (Project Manager), Chris Alvino, Corey Hebert, Steven Sloss
  
  
• Fair Isaac Corporation — Visualizing Proof Search
  
  Fair Isaac deals with large knowledge bases in a variety of their lines of business. They are developing an automated theorem prover in the natural deduction framework to build on these data sets. The scale of the proofs and their attendant search spaces make textual proof display and analysis of the prover's operation unreasonable. Thus, the Clinic team has developed a visualization system which greatly eases development efforts. It provides a structured display of the theorem prover's search space and a programmable command-line interface which gives the developer significantly more flexibility than a conventional debugger would allow.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Mike Buchanan (Project Manager-Fall), Michael Ernst, Phil Miller (Project Manager-Spring), Chris Roberts
  
  
• Microsoft Corporation — CPU and GPU Based Image Processing for Digital Photographers
  
  Through over a century of research and practice, professional film photographers developed visual aesthetics for compelling images, with "looks" pleasing for the human eye. These techniques are often at odds with the non-perceptual, analytical image processing algorithms applied to digital photographs today. This project examines how these worlds can be united by developing aesthetically-inspired algorithms and prototypes (on the CPU and GPU) for perceptual saturation enhancement, soft focus simulation, and locally-modified high-dynamic range image processing.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Lucy Abramyan (Project Manager), Morgan Conbere, Ellen Kephart, Lilia Markham, Matt McKnett
  
  
• QUALCOMM, Inc.— FLO Analysis Tool (FLOAT)
  
  MediaFLO is a mobile television technology that has been developed by QUALCOMM. Since FLO (Forward Link Only) signals behave unpredictably when subjected to real-world conditions, it can be very challenging for engineers to diagnose issues with MediaFLO transmissions. Our project expedited this process by developing a series of applications that will aid in the collection and analysis of MediaFLO signal data while enabling communication between engineers in the field and in a central location.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: T. Andrew Glass (Project Manager), Andrew Pienkos, Michael Roberts, Kris Karr (Fall).
  
  
• RealNetworks, Inc. — Development and Characterization of a Real-Time Video Streaming System
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christopher Stone
  Student Team: Thomas Barr (Project Manager), Sameer Sontakey, Peter Mawhorter, Daniel Rozeboom.

The team developed a live video delivery system that utilizes the upload capacity of clients in a peer-to-peer (p2p) system. While p2p systems have become popular for on-demand content delivery in recent yers, no successful live streaming system has ever been deployed commercially. The team developed a novel system, and will fully test its behavior in a simulated network.

2006-2007 Projects

• The Aerospace Corporation— A Grid-Enabled Version of SOAP for the Aerospace Cluster and CDC Communities
  
  The Clinic team created a platform-independent portal that enables a highly-parallel version of SOAP (Satellite Orbit Analysis Program) to be accessible to a wide community of users for the first time. Heretofore, a user of the parallel version of SOAP would need to be conversant with UNIX commands and other technical aspects of grid computing. Using the team's portal, the power of grid- enabled SOAP is accessible through a simple web interface.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Thomas Barr, Chris Byron (Project Manager, spring), Ben Lickly, Carl Nygaard (Project Manager, fall), Kyle Roberts.
  
  
• Fair Isaac Corporation — Soft Co-Occurrence Clustering for Natural Language Understanding
  
  Co-clustering is a statistical technique that groups objects that share similar features. It has applications in many fields, including natural language processing. Current co-clustering algorithms limit each item to one cluster, but in many cases items fall naturally into more than one cluster (e.g, the word "may" in natural language processing). The team used a Dirichlet mixture model to implement "soft" co-clustering, assigning each item a probability of being in each cluster.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christine Alvarado
  Student Team: Stephen Jones (Project Manager), Christopher Kain, George Tucker, Craig Weidert.
  
  
• Laserfiche — Improved Photo-Document Segmentation
  
  This project seeks to replace a document scanner with a hand-held digital camera as a front-end to Laserfiche's document-management solutions. Conditions such as shadows, indistinct backgrounds, multiple documents, and occlusions make it difficult to determine the document's location within the camera's image: this is the segmentation problem. The team has integrated pixel-level, edge-level, and structural-level image processing routines within a probabilistic framework to find appropriate document segmentation in a variety of business cases.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Adam Field, Stephen Smith, Benjamin Tribelhorn (Project Manager), Aaron Wolin.
  
  
• Los Alamos National Laboratory— Animated Physics Simulation of the LANSCE 800 MeV Proton Accelerator
  
  The Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico provides exhibits of both the history of and the current science and technology efforts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.  The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) is a signature facility that attracts scientists from around the world to conduct experiments, yet the LANSCE Museum exhibit is outdated and does not represent its extant scientific capabilities.  The Clinic team developed a state-of-the-art fly-through interactive of the LANSCE facilities that will become the principle educational and demonstrative media piece for the Bradbury Science Museum exhibit with alternate versions available via the LANSCE website, embedded in presentations and available in DVD products.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Faith Dang, Joe Ishikura (Project Manager, fall), Pyry Matikainen, Michael Tauraso (Project Manager, spring), Steve Wyckoff.
  
  
• NC4 — Exploiting 3-D Geobrowser Technology to Provide Situational Awareness During Incidents
  
  Given a summary report about an "incident" (fire, traffic accident, etc.), the clinic team's system automatically finds nearby news outlets likely to publish Internet articles about the incident. The system also searches these outlets to find specific articles covering the incident. Key elements of the project  nvolve spatial search and text classification. This system will assist NC4's information analysts to research current incidents quickly, ensuring up-to-date incident information in the hands of NC4's clients.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Melissia O'Neill
  Student Team: Russ Rutledge (Project Manager), Martin Hunt, Josh Utter-Leyton, Micah Lamdin.
  
  
• Sandia National Laboratories— Extending and Analyzing on Object-Based Filesystem Simulator
  
  Sandia Labs is building a simulator to simulate the cpu, network, and storage components of a supercomputer. The Clinic team is working on the simulation of the storage nodes, adopting last year's storage-node simulator as a starting point. They are updating the file system and DiskSim, a hard disk simulator, to make the simulator more accurate. The team will also perform additional validation of the simulator.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: Jonathan Beall, Kapy Kangombe, Andrew Taylor, Daniel Turner (Project Manager).

• The Aerospace Corporation — A Grid-Enabled Biometrics Identification Framework for Video Surveillance Applications
  
  This Clinic project addressed face recognition and grid computing with a framework for distributed biometric identification. ANUBIS, the Aerospace networked upgradeable biometric identification system, is a grid-enabled surveillance application that applies face recognition to video streams. ANUBIS utilizes Aerospace's Switchblade library, a Java framework for the distributed processing of streaming data, and the Identix FaceIt toolkit, and is extensible to accommodate alternative biometric data schemes.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Michael Coupland (Project Manager, fall), Stephanie Grush, Mac Mason, Paul Wais (Project Manager, spring), Matt Mock (fall)
  
  
• Areva T&D, Inc. — Video Game Interfaces for Power Grid Management
  
  The Areva T&D Clinic project is to design and prototype a new user interface for Areva T&D power grid management software using ideas from computer game interfaces. In particular we use techniques from real-time strategy games to improve navigation, draw attention to important events, and adaptively display relevant information.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Jason Arold (Project Manager), Michael Beyer, Jeremy Lennert, Robin Schriebman, Matthew Walsh.
  
  
• The Boeing Company — Computer Simulation of the GPS Ground Network
  
  To maintain accuracy, GPS satellites require regular corrections to their broadcast orbital parameters. An extensive network of ground antennas and control stations throughout the world periodically updates the satellites’ orbital parameters, and transmits the updated information to each satellite. Currently, this process occurs at least once a day. Raising the update frequency would increase the accuracy of GPS, but would increase network traffic within the ground network with unknown consequences. To test the impact of such changes on network load, the Clinic team has developed a simulation framework using inexpensive PCs to represent the various nodes in the ground network.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Michael Erlinger
  Student Team: Christopher Dahlberg, Christopher Erickson, Andrew Kim, Marshall Pierce (Project Manager).
  
  
• Fair Isaac Corporation — Techniques for Visualizing Large Sets of Business Rules
  
  This project investigated various visual structures for sets of business rules.  The team developed software for transforming arbitrarily constructed decision trees into Oblivious read-Once Decision Graphs (OODGs) and Exception Directed Acyclic Graphs (EDAGs). The team then analyzed the visual complexity of the different structures to determine whether the OODGs and EDAGs are more human-readable than the original trees. This work will form the foundation for a potential EDAG visualization component for Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor system.
  
  Faculty Advisors: Professor Christine Alvarado, Professor Belinda Thom (fall)
  Student Team: Kristen Kurimoto (Project Manager, spring), John McCullough, Matt Reynolds (Project Manager, fall), Will Shipley.
  
  
• Laserfiche — Computer-Assisted Document Filing
  
  Filing is a tedious chore for organizations storing electronic documents in a large hierarchy of folders.  To make this task easier, the team built an easily extended framework that determines a set of likely locations for documents needing to be filed.  We generate these recommendations by determining the similarity between a new document and the documents already present in the directory using a combination of text, image, and metadata classifiers.
  
  Faculty Advisors: Professor Melissa O’Neill (fall), Professor Christopher Stone (spring)
  Student Team: Rebecca Carson (Project Manager, spring), Russ Osborn, Erik Shimshock  (Project Manager, fall), Brian Young.
  
  
• NC4 — Faster Disaster News Aggregation and Analysis
  
  NC4 provides their customers with breaking news alerts as incidents occur by monitoring and analyzing over 2,000 news sources. The goal of this project is to further automate NC4's online information filtering process, allowing analysts to maintain a sharper focus on news events and their potential impact on clients. The NC4 Clinic team has worked to develop new systems for collecting, analyzing, and distributing information to NC4’s analysts.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christopher Stone
  Student Team: Ryan Ausanka-Crues, Forrest Briggs (Project Manager, fall), Andrew Campbell, Bill Hewitt (Project Manager, spring).
  
  
• Sandia National Laboratories— Design and Implementation of a Object-Based Filesystem Simulator
  
  As the need for greater computing power becomes more apparent in the simulation of complex systems, the computers themselves have reached the limits of their fundamental designs. Sandia National Laboratories has initiated an ambitious project with the goal of simulating supercomputers in order to find and eliminate the bottlenecks inherent in current architectures. The goal of this Clinic project is to create an I/O node simulator that will be eventually integrated with Sandia’s larger project.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: David Coyne, Selene Tan, Esteban Molina-Estolano, Mark Kegel (Project Manager).
  
  

• The Aerospace Corporation— Grid-Enabling the VISPERS Application
  
  The team designed and implemented a version of waveform analysis tool, VAIL, based on the "grid" highly-parallel computing paradigm, using the Globus toolkit. VAIL is part of a larger system that analyzes real-time sensor data to characterize the vibroacoustic shock environment of launch vehicles. The team conducted a performance analysis of the grid-enabled tool, measured speedup, and analyzed communication bootlenecks. They also researched and surveyed the current state-of-the-art in grid computing tools and provided a study to facilitate future grid implementations by The Aerospace Corporation.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Brian Bentow (Project Manager), Jon Dodge, Aaron Homer, Chris Moore.
  
  
• Applied Biosystems — PCRNet 2.0
  
  PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) Net is a piece of software used to monitor and control GeneAmp PCR 9700 instruments. These instruments, inturn, are used to amplify DNA samples. Amplified DNA samples can be analyzed and then used in forensic analysis, gene sequencing, and genetic defect determination. The team enchanced PCRNet by improving the user interface, extending the error logging capabilities, and enabling core features of the application to be run across a local network.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Belinda Thom
  Student Team: Jacob Seene (Project Manager), Timothy Chew, Krislin Lee, Paul Scott.
  
  
• The Boeing Company — Modeling and Simulation of GPS
  
  The current United States Air Force's Global Postioning System (GPS) consists of earth-orbiting satellites and a world-wide network of monitoring stations. The team developed a simulation model representing the GPS using the OPNET network modeling platform. The model has been verified via data provided by Boeing and other sources. The team created a set of "what if" scenarios and applied them to the GPS model to evaluate possible modifications to the GPS infrastructure.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Michael Erlinger
  Student Team: Victoria Krafft (Project Manager), Tarun Abhichandani, Brian Merdian, Trudi Miller, Sonya Zhang.
  
  
• Fair Isaac Corporation — Constrained Optimization in Convex Programming
  
  Fair Isaac Corporation provides companies with mathematically-based solutions for a variety of business problems. Many of these problems can be modeled using quadratic programs with large numbers of variables and linear constraints. The team has taken on the task of developing a prototypical software package that solves linear and quadratic programs. A number of algorithms have been incorporated into this package to accurately solve these types of problems.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Brian Tagiku (Project Manager), Dave Buchfuhrer, Dan Halperin, Brad Tennis, Chris Weisiger.
  
  
• Google, Inc. — Differential Test Coverage Analysis in the Context of the Wine Project
  
  This project will help ensure that Google's Windows applications run properly under Wine, which is a program that allows Windows programs to run under Linux. The team improved coverage tools to identify areas of untested code used by an application. The team also used these new tools to identify bugs in Wine that affect Google applications, focusing on the Picasa application.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Cal Pierog (Project Manager), Aaron Arvey, Edward Kim, Evan Parry.
  
  
• Laserfiche — Distributing Search in a Document Database
  
  As organizations make the shift from paper documents to electronic document imaging systems, the size of electronic document repositories is constantly growing. This team has researched distributed methods for reducing the amount of time required to perform full-text searching in large document databases.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Adam Kangas (Project Manager), Janna DeVries, Joseph Walker, Kamil Wnuk.
  
  
• Sandia National Laboratories— Mesh Optimizatiion Algorithms for Parallel Computing with MESQUITE
  
  This Clinic project extended the MESQUITE mesh smoothing toolkit developed by Sandia National Laboratories to operate on a distributed processing cluster. Parallel smoothing requires efficient partitioning of meshes into subparts, correct smoothing of those subparts, and effective cross-cluster synchronization during and after computation. The project drew on existing research in the field of distributed mesh smoothing and on established tools, including MESQUITE itself, the Zoltan partitioning toolkit, and the MPI toolkit for distributed computing. Distributed computation would be pointless without speedup over ordinary singe-CPU computation, so the team also developed and deployed performance analysis methods which have inspired further optimizations to the code.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Melissa O'Neill
  Student Team: Dominik Slusarczyk (Project Manager), Elisa Celis, John Hicks, Yu-Min Kim.
  
  

• The Aerospace Corporation — Launch Range Countdown Clocks
  
  Countdown clocks, a common tool of launch ranges, are used to synchronize and control the numerous and complex series of actions leading to the launch of a space vehicle or guided missile. However, countdown clocks rely on a standard for time distribution and synchronization that, in comparison to modern digital protocols, is anachronistic and needlessly restrictive. The Clinic team will present an entirely new standard for the management of range countdown clocks founded on modern and effective protocols, such as the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP), which will improve both the accuracy and flexibility of countdown time services.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Jonah Cohen (Project Manager, fall), Joshua Smallman (Project Manager, spring), Amanda Parmelee, Alan Strohm.
  
  
• CPI Corp. — Developing A Personal Digital Transcriber
  
  Computer Product Introductions (CPI) is interested in the development of a portable real-time speaker-independent speech-to-phoneme system which transcribes, compresses, stores, and plays back sound files. Charged with a subset of these goals, the CPI Clinic team has been asked to research speech-to-text software and phoneme readability, and to modify a batch speech-to-phoneme software in order to produce readable annotated phoneme output.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Matt Livianu (Project Manager), Melissa Federowicz, Matt Ferlo, Colleen Hamilton.
  
  
• Cryptek, Inc. — Network Security Controller Performance Validation
  
  Cryptek, Inc. provides secure communications products for the government and private sectors. Our project is to stress-test a central component of the Cryptek system, the Network Security Controller (NSC), by creating software that mimics the encrypted network traffic from thousands of hardware nodes known as DiamondLinks. We are developing software that will go through an authentication protocol simultaneously for a large number of simulated DiamondLinks, and record the NSC's performance.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: Keith Stevens (Project Manager), Matthew Beaumont-Gay, Victoria Krafft, Alex Popkin.
  
  
• LaserFiche — Document Imaging Using Off-the-Shelf Digital Cameras
  
  The goal of our Clinic project is to develop a software module that converts a digital photo of a document into an image that looks scanned. It finds, straightens, and orients the document while providing confidence values to ensure reliability. Also featured are methods to help reduce the effects of distortion and lighting irregularities introduced by the camera.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Ed Heaney (Project Manager), Zak Andree, Zach Clegg, James Darpinian.
  
  
• Medtronic/MiniMed— Diabetes Data Management Software API Design and Development
  
  With approximately 17 million people in the US with diabetes, Medtronic MiniMed has produced several distinct lines of diabetes devices to aid in the treatment of the disease. These devices, however, do not utilize a standard communication format. The Clinic team is designing and implementing an extensible interface that will unify communication with Medtronic MiniMed's current and future insulin pumps, glucose sensors, and related diabetes technology.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Belinda Thom
  Student Team: Jessica Fisher (Project Manager), Aja Hammerly, Mark Fredrickson, Jon Huang.
  
  
• NeonGecko.com, Inc.— Automated Management of Community Websites
  
  This project developed tools to analyze posts made to NeonGecko's on-line discussion forums, classify posts into known topic areas, and identify new topics.  The team applied supervised learning techniques (trained with precategorized posts) to determine topics of new posts. The team used clustering techniques to identify groups of posts that are markedly different from existing topics and thus might be new topics. Project work stressed extensive technique testing and delivery of a functional system.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Melissa O'Neill
  Student Team: Drew d’Avis (Project Manager), Brian Merdian, Mark Nelson, Jenny Xu.
  
  
• Northrop Grumman Corporation — Anomaly Detection in Health and Status Telemetry Data
  
  Detection of anomalies in satellite health and status data requires real-time processing capabilities in order to reduce the ill effects of equipment malfunctions and other undesirable events. The team designed and implemented an extensible software architecture that enables anomalies to be detected and displayed in visual form. In addition to preset monitoring capabilities, our system provides learning capabilities based upon techniques from adaptive signal processing and adaptive resonance theory.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Erika Rice (Project Manager), Daniel Marley, Gabriel Neer, Jesse Ruderman
  
  
• Optivus Technology, Inc. — Patient Alignment Through X-Ray Imaging
  
  The goal of this Clinic project was to upgrade the alignment system on Optivus Technology’s Proton Beam Therapy System (PBTS) Eye-Beam Line by replacing the obsolete components with digital imaging devices and an accompanying software package. This involves both mechanical and electrical engineering to implement the hardware requirements, and software development to create the supporting software.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Patrick Little, Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Michael Tuck-Lee (Project Manager), Mjumbe Poe, Knut Strom-Jensen, Anand Vemuri.
  
  
• Raytheon and BioStar Group — Intrusion Detection and Prevention Based on Immunology
  
  The goals of this Clinic project are to research, design, and develop a host-based Artificial Immune System (AIS) for intrusion detection based on the biological immune system. The main areas of focus for the project are to investigate and improve the idea of "self" in an AIS for more accurate anomaly detection, and to allow for a dynamic concept of "self" without compromising security.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger
  Student Team: Robert Bailey (Project Manager), Ian Ferrel, Kevin Pang, Jeff Scherpelz.
  
  
• SnapTrack( A QUALCOMM Company) — Wireless-Assisted GPS Applications
  
  The SnapTrack Clinic team developed two cell-phone applications, Direction Finder and Friendar, which demonstrate SnapTrack's Assisted-GPS technology. Direction Finder demonstrates the utility of a cell phone user being able to quickly acquire driving directions from their current location. Friendar demonstrates the fast update speed and high accuracy of A-GPS by allowing users quickly to pinpoint their friends' locations.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christopher Stone
  Student Team: Corey O’Connor (Project Manager), Alice Liu, Stuart Mershon, Tatsuya Oiye.
  
  

 2003 Summer Project

• Raytheon — Investigating Artificial Immune Systems
  
  Conventional methods of computer security have many shortcomings. The team focused on the application of biological immune system paradigms to computer security. After assessing the various aspects of the biological immune system, as well as the current state of artificial immune system research, the team designed and implemented an extension to an existing artificial immune system.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger
  Student Team: Brandt Erickson, George Kuan, Michael Terkowitz, Andrew Yip. 
  
  

 2002-2003 Projects

• The Aerospace Corporation— Implementing the Interoperable IETF/IDWG/IDXP Protocol With Proxy/Tunnel Capability
  
  In the world of Intrusion Detection there is a need for a common message format and transport protocol so that different organizations can collaborate. This allows for the easy correlation, display, and long term storage of intrusion information. This year's project builds on the work of previous intrusion detection projects sponsored by The Aeorspace Corporation. It provides for messages to securely pass through firewalls using a newly specified BEEP (Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol) profile called Tunnel.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger
  Student Team: Nicolas Hertl (Project Manager), William Berriel, Chip Bradford, Richard Fujiyama.
  
  
• Auditude — Music Similarity and Recommendation
  
  The team investigated content-based similarity relationships between musical performances. Similarity is a complex concept involving many judgments. The team focused their attention on a combination of rhythm, timbre, and apparent loudness. The team developed software that extracts these features from a recording and uses them to categorize new music, to make recommendations, and to generate playlists that arrange music in a sequence with smooth transitions between songs.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Melissa O'Neill
  Student Team: Paul Ruvolo (Project Manager), Brad Poon, Elizabeth Schoof, Nicholas Taylor.
  
  
• Boeing Air Traffic Management — Design and Prototype of a Low-Cost Weather Information System for General Aviation
  
  The team designed and implemented a proof-of-concept design for delivering weather data to aircraft pilots in-flight. Using a Pocket PC PDA as a hardware architecture and a custom client and server, they were able to deliver METAR (Meteorological Reports) and NEXRAD (NEXt-generation RADar) to pilots. The current implementation uses 802.11b wireless technology for the communication, but is ideally suited for satellite-based broadcast as a final product.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: Paul Paradise (Project Manager), Luke Hunter, Kyle Kuypers, Rafael Vasquez.
  
  
• Green Media Toolshed — Development of a Community-Supported Media-Contact Database
  
  In order to effectively deal with a high reporter turnover rate, the Green Media Toolshed team's goal was to develop a community-supported media-contact database that is economically viable for non-profit organizations by minimizing the need for a large research staff. The team implemented and assessed the effectiveness of user and data quality metrics, as well as automated checking tools, to coordinate the efforts of a network of volunteer data checkers.
  
  Faculty Advisors: Professors Geoff Kuenning and Josh Hodas
  Student Team: Christine Spritke (Project Manager), Marissa Anderson, Ben Frantzdale, John Suarez.
  
  
• Kofax Image Products, Inc. — Design of an Automated Email Response System
  
  The goal of the Kofax Clinic Project was to design and construct a system that can learn by example to provide candidate responses to customer service questions. The system learns to respond to incoming E-mail by first observing human responses. Then as new questions are asked to the customer service staff the system will suggest possible answers by drawing on responses to similar questions that the system has previously seen.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: John Sander (Project Manager), Ryan Crabb, Jeffrey Jirsa, Joe Malone.
  
  
• LaserFiche — Automatic Form Recognition, Alignment, and Extraction
  
  The LaserFiche project involved creating a software tool that automatically matches the image of a filled-in paper form to a corresponding blank template from a database. This tool permits a document-processing system to handle a large set of mixed forms without requiring a human to identify each one. Once an input form is identified, an anchoring step aligns and extracts the user's input in order to improve the performance of additional form processing.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Brandt Erickson (Project Manager), Josh Kline, Jessica Lee, Jonathan Shriver, Robert Strickland.
  
  
• Magulandia Studio — Animated Public Service Announcement
  
  The purpose of the Magulandia Studio Clinic project was to create a 30-second public service announcement addressing road rage. The team used Maya (a 3D computer graphics animation tool used in movies such as Shrek) to build the necessary models and animate a short sequence for the PSA. The animation style utilizes exaggerated characters and scenery. The sequence uses personifications of cars and animals to make a comic point about the need to control one's temper on the road.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Alisa Decker (Project Manager), Mira Stoilova, Rosie Wacha, Joanna Wu.
  
  
• Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, Space Systems Division — Software Hardening in Space-Based Systems
  
  Current space-based digital electronics lag their commercial counterparts by several generations. The physical hardening process required to protect these components from exoatmospheric radiation events is both costly and time-consuming. This project examined the feasibility of implementing a software-based alternative to this process. Specifically, the team examined the question of whether the increased processing power and memory capacity of commercially available components provide sufficient resources for software-implemented detection of radiation effects.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christopher Stone
  Student Team: Andrew Klose (Project Manager), Eric Angell, James Simmons, Marty Weiner.
  
  
• Sandia National Laboratories — Implementation of and Experimentation with a Clustering Tool
  
  The team created a tool for simultaneously visualizing several different reductions of multi-dimensional data sets. It also analyzed these sets using geometric techniques and clustering. To assess clustering fitness, the team implemented validity metrics that quantitatively compare solutions and algorithms in various ways. The tool was used to analyze data sets ranging from journal citations to popular music.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Belinda Thom
  Student Team: Avani Gadani (Project Manager), Daniel Lowd, Brian Roney, Eric Wu.
  
  
• Teradyne, Inc. — Extensible Data Management for Semiconductor Design-for-Testability
  
  Teradyne's DFT (Design for Testability) Software Group is developing a software system that enables semiconductor manufacturers to exploit DFTtechnologies in order to reduce test costs, accelerate time to market, and enhance yield. However, to make the best use of DFT, semiconductor manufacturers must also be able to easily manage and interpret the automatically generated test results along with existing semiconductor design information and new information produced by DFT diagnosis tools. This Clinic team created a Java and XML/XSLT based system to meet this need.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Kristal Pollack (Project Manager), Mike Bailey, Annie Chang, Peter Tempest.
  
  
• Teradyne, Inc. — Test Data Management System
  
  The team designed and prototyped a system with web-based interfaces for managing data from high-performance automated semiconductor test equipment based on distributed persistent data storage. The system enables users of a test service to query and process results from a wide range of geographic sites using interfaces that decouple test equipment specifics. The system is entirely based on the emergent Java Two Enterprise Edition (J2EE) framework and includes capabilities for fault tolerance and recovery.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Micah Garside-White (Project Manager), Conor Sen, Ryan Gibson, Adrian Mettler.
  
  

2001-2002 Projects

• The Aerospace Corporation— Implementing an IDMEF Message Management Tool
  
  The Aerospace Corporation has sponsored a series of projects focusing on issues in intrusion detection in computer networks.  The Intrusion Detection Working Group  of the Internet Engineering Task Force (a standards body) is developing a common XML message format for communicating intrusion detection events, called the Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF). The team designed and implemented a web-accessible database-driven application to display, manage, and facilitate the manual correlation of IDMEF messages.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger
  Student Team: Eric Heitzman (Team Leader), Richard McKnight, Eider Moore, Rayford Sims.
  
  
• Auditude.com — Performance Independent Melody Recognition
  
  The team developed software that identifies songs based on monophonic audio performances of the song, and reported on research toward the more difficult problem of recognizing songs from polyphonic performances. This software is intended to complement Auditude’s existing technology that recognizes commercially recorded performances in real time.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Jason Yelinek (Team Leader), Matt Brubeck, Joshdan Griffin, Eric Huang.
  
  
• Boeing Air Traffic Management — Design and Prototype of Low-Cost Weather Information System for General Aviation
  
  Foul weather contributes to aviation accidents and delays. To enhance aviation safety, The Boeing Company wishes to develop a low cost method to display real-time weather data in the cockpit of general aviation aircraft.  The Clinic team designed and developed a system that gathers weather data, obtains GPS coordinates, and graphically displays that data on the screen of a Compaq iPaq PDA, in a form that is familiar to and usable by pilots.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: Cora Hussey (Team Leader), Christopher Lee, Jonathan Morley, Morgan Wagner, Neilsen Yu.
  
  
• Center For Integration Of Medicine And Innovative Technology(CIMIT) — A Distributed Medical Monitoring System for Real-Time Patient Diagnosis (joint with Engineering Clinic)
  
  Current patient monitoring procedures in hospital intensive care units generate large volumes of raw patient data.  Doctors lack resources to properly process this data and a significant portion goes unused.  Tools capable of detecting long-term trends and correlations within this data will allow doctors to more accurately diagnose patients.  The Clinic team designed and implemented a distributed hardware/software architecture for developing condition-specific software models which provide high-level analysis of raw patient data.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ruye Wang (Engineering)
  Student Team: Grant Baxter (Team Leader), Adam Fischer, Daniel Lee,  Steven Yan.
  
  
• Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. — Algorithms and Data Structures for Time-Dependent Networks
  
  ESRI provides tools for capturing, storing and analyzing networks of virtually any type, from highways to electrical wiring. This project augments ESRI's system with the ability to represent networks where the cost of traversing an edge changes with time, and to solve shortest-path queries on these new time-dependent networks. This will allow ESRI's customers to model bus schedules, rush-hour traffic, and similar phenomena, allowing greater accuracy in determining shortest paths.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Kylie Evans ’03 (Team Leader), Nathaniel Dirksen, Melissa Chase ’03, Jacob Creed.
  
  
• I/O Software, Inc. — Biometrically Enabling Web Applications
  
  I/O Software is a leading developer of security software using biometrics to restrict access to data and applications on computers. They have asked the team to extend their software's capabilities to securing access to web pages. This product, in the form of server-side and client-side plug-ins, performs a biometrically-enabled user verification sequence between the local user's browser and a remote database to control access to online assets.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Josh Hodas
  Student Team: Jocelyn Chew (Team Leader), Michael Cramblett, Donald Lawton, Daniel Phiffer.
  
  
• Marine Biological Laboratory— Multilevel Parallelization of the Smith-Waterman Algorithm
  
  A common task in molecular biology is the search for similarity between a given strand of DNA or protein and the sequences in a database such as GenBank. The most accurate search programs aimed at this problem are based on the Smith-Waterman algorithm. Typical open-source implementations are slow while fast commercial implementations are quite expensive. The team implemented a parallelized version intended to be freely distributed while being performance competitive with commercial packages.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Ben Zeckel (TL Spring), Kurt Dresner (TL Fall), Drew Levin, Andrew Magis, Eric Ong.
  
  
• Optivus Technology, Inc. — Proton Beam Treatment System Vacuum Monitoring and Control System
  
  The team developed a distributed software system that allows centralized monitoring and automated control of a large number of vacuum devices. It will be used in proton beam-based cancer treatment facilities where an extensive vacuum system is needed to treat patients. Optivus, providing technical oversight and support for Loma Linda University Medical Center's Proton Beam Therapy Center, will use the system with the goal of preventing vacuum loss and thus improving patient treatment.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoffrey Kuenning
  Student Team: Patrick Vinograd (Team Leader), Saba Ahmad, Geoffrey Romer '03, Aaron Clark.
  
  
• QUALCOMM Incorporated — Software Development Tools for ARM-Based Wireless Devices
  
  QUALCOMM, Inc. has developed BREW, a software API for ARM-based handheld devices. BREW enables developers to write applications that can be run on a variety of such devices, including wireless phones. The team was asked to reduce the cost of developing BREW applications by finding a way to use GNU GCC within the Windows NT/2000 environment to compile BREW applications for the ARM target, eliminating the need for the expensive ARM compiler suite.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Christopher Stone
  Student Team: Roy Shea (Team Leader), Samuel Ahn, Andrew Schoonmaker, Erin Sperry.
  
  
• Teradyne, Inc. — Automatic Generation of Distributed Service Adapters
  
  The team developed a software tool that, given a Java interface, generates adapters that allow programmers to use Java components in a distributed computing environment in a transparent fashion.  The adapters are themselves software components that perform translation between two software interfaces. Additionally, the team investigated the challenges inherent in maintaining the usual semantics of a non-distributed programming system while providing distributed capabilities.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Michael Allen  (Team Leader), Aaron Boyer, Edward Miller, Jason Wither.
  
  
• Teradyne, Inc. — VisiFault
  
  Teradyne makes automatic test equipment (ATE) for semiconductor devices. As devices grow more complex, test vectors becomes much larger, and the time required to analyze the failures grows too long. The team developed a system, VisiFault, which graphically displays scan failure results from the ATE and physical fault results from a diagnosis program so one can quickly pinpoint causes of failures. VisiFault also provides functions such as aggregation and comparison to help in analyzing the data.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Hang Tang '03 (Team Leader), Michael Szal, Don Wang, Stephen Friedman '03.
  
  
• United Devices— Reimplementation of Scientific Applications in a Massively Distributed Framework
  
  United Devices (UD) provides distributed computing solutions to clients with a wide range of projects, with a focus on aiding bioinformatics research. UD has created the UD MetaProcessor platform, a robust, scalable, and extensible client and server solution for massively distributed computing. The Clinic team was tasked with porting two existing single-machine bioinformatics applications to the MetaProcessor Platform.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Melissa O'Neill
  Student Team: Steve DiVerdi (Team Leader), Elmer Kim '03, Aaron Namba, Megan Thorsen.
  
  

2000-2001 Projects

• The Aerospace Corporation— Implementing the IETF IDWG Intrusion Alert Protocol
  
  The Aerospace Corporation sponsored a series of projects focusing on issues in intrusion detection. The Intrusion Detection Working Group (IDWG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, a standards body) has been developing a common method of communicating intrusion detection events. This consists of two parts, a transport protocol and a message format. In this project, the Clinic team assisted in the development, implementation, and evaluation of two proposed transport protocols.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger
  Student Team: Roy Pollock (Team Leader), Tim Buchheim, Benjamin Feinstein, and Greg Matthews.
  
  
• DirecTV, Inc.— Anywhere Interactive DIRECTV Guide
  
  The team upgraded the current implementation of DirecTv's web-based TV guide system. The system should allow extensive customization based on user preferences, and be accessible both at a computer and via wireless hand-held devices. In addition, the system should include the functionality of the newest generation of DIRECTV's program guide, which is included with the most recent line of set-top units.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Josh Hodas
  Student Team: David Jones (Team Leader), Shantanu Bhattacharyya, Shimona Carvalho, Masashi Ito, and Robert Patt.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Prototyping the Spacecraft Onboard Interface
  
  JPL would like to move away from the traditional practice of designing custom communications protocols for each device and mission, and towards using a layered approach called the Spacecraft Onboard InterFace (SOIF). To that end, the team was to implement TCP/IP on SpaceWire, a wiring bus being designed for spacecraft. Due to difficulties procuring the necessary hardware, however, the team instead focused on tools to test Firewire, another bus being considered for space use. These tools should be easily extensible for use with SpaceWire.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Geoff Kuenning
  Student Team: Daniel Smith (Team Leader), Kimberly Wallmark, and Daniel Stone.

• Marine Biological Laboratory — Extension and Implementation of Tree-Based Statistical Algorithms
  
  Michael Cummings, a biologist at MBL, is working on the analysis of antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis bacteria. By building on the work of last year's Clinic team, this year's team developed tools to predict the level of antibiotic resistance in a bacterium given its genome. These tools are flexible enough to be of use in a multitude of other classification problems.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Greg Mulert (Team Leader), Chris Lundberg, and Titus Winters.

• Microsoft Corporation — Prototype Applications of New Browser Technologies
  
  Microsoft has recently introduced its ".NET" proposal for new web-browser technologies. The team was asked to produce prototype applications of the technologies to act as motivating examples to developers to get them interested in the system and act as design examples for how to use it.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Alvin Kou (Team Leader), Michael Chan, Symon Harada, Dixon Koesdjodjo, and Kevin Wong.

• N2H2, Inc. (since acquired by Secure Computing) — Exploring Techniques for Dynamic Categorization of Web Content
  
  N2H2 provides web-content filtering services to schools and companies around the world. Their current tools rely on a static list of web-sites identified by category, which must be updated frequently. The Clinic team researched, designed, and prototyped a system for determining on-the-fly whether a page is of a specified category or not.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Gillian Allen (Team Leader), Matthew Azuma, Timothy Morgan, and Carl Yu.

• Nuera Communications, Inc. — Extending a Bulk Call Testing Tool
  
  Nuera provides high-end communication switches that carry voice telephone traffic over Internet connections. These are increasingly being used by mid-level phone service providers to bypass traditional communication paths. Testing these systems has previously required custom testing hardware costing millions of dollars. The Clinic team developed software that instead allows Nuera to use one of its own switches as a hardware test suite, eliminating this cost.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas
  Student Team: Greg Prier (Team Leader), Zeke Burgess, Steve Matthews, and Julien Sebrien (ESIEE).

• Pomona Valley Center for Community Development — Community Information and Communications Kiosks
  
  The Clinic team developed a prototype of information kiosks to be placed in local public access points (e.g., supermarkets) to provide information about services provided by the PVCCD. Communications will be two-way, allowing, for example, users to file applications for services from these kiosks. The goal was to design a web-based system with a rugged yet easy to use interface.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Jon Strauss
  Student Team: Charles Schied (Team Leader), Ross Luengen, and Andrew McDonnell.

• QB, Inc. — A Hand-Held Client for Media Asset Management
  
  QB, Inc. provides software to corporations, such as movie studios, which need to manage large databases of media content, including photographs, audio, and video clips. The goal of this project was to produce software for a hand-held device to serve as a remote client for the QB MediaStar(TM) system. This required addressing the extreme limitations of hand-held devices, such as screen size, processor speed, storage, and communications bandwidth. The system was designed to accommodate forthcoming wireless technology as well.
  
  Faculty Advisors: Professor Christopher Stone and Professor Robert Keller
  Student Team: Katherine Roth (Team Leader), Ethan Drucker, David Herman, and Erik Nelson.

• Teradyne, Inc. — A Distributed Semiconductor Test System Interface
  
  Teradyne is a leading producer of large-scale testing systems (ATEs) for semiconductor chip manufacturers. This project sought to develop a distributed, web-based interface to information about Teradyne equipment worldwide. The system will allow Teradyne to monitor the performance of all of their customers' ATEs. It will promote closer collaboration between Teradyne and its clients through automatic licensing upgrades, bug tracking, and software update downloading, as well as support for real-time diagnosis and resolution of ATE problems.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Zachary Dodds
  Student Team: Peter Kasting (Team Leader), Dale Lovell, Bryce Nichols, and Nigel Wright (Physics).

• Yahoo! Inc. — Redesigning Yahoo! Calendar
  
  Yahoo! Calendar has over two million active users. In systems of this scale, very small design decisions can have enormous practical impact on the performance of the system. In this project the students have undertaken a ground-up evaluation and redesign of the file and computational structures used in Yahoo! Calendar, in hopes of improving performance, usability, flexibility, and interaction with other Yahoo! services.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Josh Hodas
  Student Team: Jonathan Hsu (Team Leader), William Goo, Sandra Cheng (Scripps), Brian Shin, and Matthew Wong.
  
  

 1999-2000 Projects

• The Aerospace Corporation —Tools and Protocols for Intrusion Detection Systems
  
  The growth of the Internet, and the subsequent growth in the number of corporate and institutional networks, as well as individual host computers, has resulted in an ever increasing number of occurrences of network intrusion. The Aerospace Clinic team did research into existing intrusion detection tools as well as into various strategies of fighting intrusion via the use of multiple intrusion detection systems.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger
  Student Team: Eugine Tsimberg (Team Leader), Andy Walther, Mike Samuel, and Matt Schnaider.

• Concorde Solutions, Inc. / Bank Of America— CSI Visual DOMScript Editor
  
  Concorde Solutions, Inc. (a subsidiary of Bank of America) provides a suite of tools that simplify connectivity to legacy database systems. The CSI/Bank of America Clinic team designed and implemented a visual script editor for CSI's DOMScript, a proprietary scripting language that is used to configure CSI's Data Object Manager (DOM) tool suite. Key design goals included simplifying the script-editing process while maintaining referential integrity within the domain of the application.
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Mike Erlinger and Dr. Jon Strauss
  Student Team: Jon Kodumal (Team Leader), Mike Hanley, Josh Hoyt, and Chris Santillo.

• Disney Feature Animation — Clean-Up Animation Tools
  
  [Detailed project description excluded under confidentiality agreement.]
  
  Faculty Advisor: Professor Margaret Fleck and Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk
  Student Team: Sage Weil (Team Leader), Adam Guetz, Todd Southworth, and Ben Hulse.
  
  
• HRL Laboratories, LLC — Modality Transformation Middleware
  
  One of the challenges of Internet communication is transferring information between two platforms of differing modal capabilities -- for example, between a desktop computer with a high resolution graphics display, and a handheld device with a small text-only display. One solution is through modality transformation, which allows for conversion of information to an alternate set of modalities that will work on the available platform. The HRL Clinic team developed an architecture to negotiate communication across diffe