1 Management Director

Customer: Don Fishback, Fishback Management and Research

We have a program that launches other programs to run a nightly process of data collection and manipulation. This program currently runs serial and has basic checking procedures to make sure that dependent programs are finished before running; however, this process is not perfect, and several times it will run out of order, or not finish correctly. Proposal: A program that will launch processes in parallel and make sure that dependencies are finished before the dependent process is launched. Also, we would want simple statistics stored and displayed for each of the sub-processes, so we can see CPU load, memory usage, and total time that a process took. This will allow us to streamline the sub-processes and optimize the data collection process.

2 Training Web Application for SQS Quality Assurance New Hires

Customer: SQS (software quality, testing), Matt Messer

Enhance Training Web Application for SQS Quality Assurance New Hires Previous CS499 groups have developed a web application for new SQS employees to use as a training tool for identifying defects. This application is built on PHP, Apache, and SQL. It needs to be further enhanced to provide a more robust interface and new features, while identifying existing (purposeful) defects within the site.

3 Online multi-player games

Customer: Tony Elam, Director of Strategic Initiatives, College of Engineering

These projects develop online multiplayer games. Safe House has been developed by previous CS 499 teams, and the development will be completed. Warp Arena would be a new development. Only one of these games will be selected as a project for this semester. The one selected will be the one desired by the majority of students selecting Project 3 as their desired project, and chosen for the project. If you select project 3, list which game is your first choice. Note that you are committing to work on either of these games, even if your favorite is not selected.

Safe House Game

Safe House is a game of investigation, teamwork and survival for 3-9 players.

Players take on the role of terrorists, counter-terrorist and neutral characters. Each character has different winning conditions and initially no one knows each other’s identity. During the game you must uncover your team mates and enemies. Killing your enemies is always a top priority, as is survival!

The Safe House board game exists but is unpublished (see sample board and cards). Previous CS 499 Classes have created a browser based version of the board game (95% complete).

The class team must complete implementation of this game and develop an AI engine (main focus of this year’s project) to support multiple “robotic” players thereby supporting from 1 to 9 players. Also, there is interest in offering multiple base boards for extended play options as well (should time allow).

This project will build on the work of a previous CS499 Team. You will be given working but incomplete code. Your team must review, enhance and complete the gaming project with a focus on development of AI agents.

Description: Spring 2017 Safe House

Warp Arena Game

Warp Arena is a sci-fi game of robotic arena combat for 2-4 players.

It is the distant future. Humans no longer make war upon each other but instead resolve disputes and conflicts with robotic combat in an ever changing battleground arena. Players must harvest power discs, transport them back to their Converter, create new robotic forces and destroy their enemies. If a player loses their Converter, they are out of the game. There are multiple types of robotic resources each with unique capabilities (powerful Destroyer, fast Warper, jumping Hopper, etc.) Power discs can be used to create more robots, increase the capabilities of existing robots or acquire power cards which allow you to “warp” the arena (reconfigure a part of the battleground) and more.

The Warp Arena board game exists but is unpublished (see sample board piece, cards and robots here).

Your team must computerize this board game. It can be a browser based implementation or an iPad app. This is a challenging and complex game given the multiple robots, changeable board, game altering power cards and deadly combat. However, no AI agent development is required at this time.

4 Creating Chat Bot for Warehouse Solution

Customer: Brian Purvis, Tata Consultancy Services

With the launch of the TCS Drone Lab at our TCS Seven Hills Office in Cincinnati, we have seen a need for drone solution for inventory reconciliation with warehouse management system. We have developed drone solution which enables the drone to fly in warehouse autonomous and capture the videos of the inventory storage. We use these videos to extract the inventory barcode from frames, map it to the location and reconcile with Warehouse management system. We get the output file which has reconciled inventory, mismatch , missing , empty locations etc. We would like to develop in premise ( local ) chat bot for this scenario where inventory auditor can query using normal English language either thru chat or thru voice and system should reply with results to query. For example , how many locations are empty?, how many locations have missing inventory.

5 The 911 of immigration applications

Customer: James Osborne, immigration lawyer

The application will be called ”Ya Abogado / Lawyer now “ in the United States.

Immigration assistance application… will be deployed around the world to assist with the rampant abuse of detention and arrest.  It’s an attempt to bring lawyers to the foreground and out of the prison and court room.

This app startup will show on the screen a group of immigration lawyers who are available to take a call at the moment the police or INS officials are confronting an individual. It will document the full encounter and hopefully keep the person and or family out of jail. The immigrant will instantly be supported by competent lawyers insuring all laws are followed in the apprehension and imprisonment of innocent people.

On activation of the app, the phone will send the phone owners data (name and address; email; phone number; current location) to the lawyer and activate the front and back cameras so the lawyer can interface with the officers at that moment.

The lawyer will be able to add others to the call as needed (other lawyers, social services personnel; judges or other law enforcement officials).  The lawyer will interface with the police and or INS officials, advising the immigrant of their rights and keeping the immigrant out of jail.

The entire encounter will be recorded to the cloud there by making it available to any other officials who may need to get involved.

This application will use a geo-fencing feature so lawyers all over the country and world can participate.  The on screen lawyer selection pool will reside within a 25-50 mile area of the client’s current location thereby keeping everything local.  

A small fee may be charged for this initial interaction so the lawyers will not have to work for free.

6 Virtual reality project using the microphone

customer: Bob Henz, Badger Technologies by Jabil

Create a VR "experience" or "game" that incorporates input from the microphone. I personally have experience using the (free) Unity3D game engine to dabble with Oculus and GearVR apps but I believe it can also be used with google cardboard and google daydream. The idea would be to read data from the microphone of the device. On GearVR or cardboard or daydream that would be the microphone of the phone, for Oculus it would be a microphone attached to the computer. Then the data is processed into some parameters such as frequency analysis (FFT), beat detection, amplitude envelop (i.e. how loud), and then those parameters effect the environment of the experience/game in some way. Here are some examples: (1) Imagine a music visualizer jagged lightning, (abstract shapes bouncing and pulsing to music) that surrounds you instead of just being on the screen of your computer and that visualizes the music you're listening to on your stereo (instead of having to queue up an mp3 through the program), (2) A game where the enemies approach you along rows associated with frequencies you have to whistle at certain frequencies to shoot in certain rows, (3) you're standing on a hill by a forest. If you yell, a deer raises its head, and a flock of birds takes flight. If you are quiet long enough butterflies approach. If you hum or whistle the same frequencies as the wind whistling through the branches you can make the wind blow stronger. Students will have to provide their own VR hardware and have moderately powerful computers (preferably with a microphone) to develop in Unity3D. Anything that can smoothly run Minecraft (for example) should be powerful enough for this development.

7Analysis of Supreme Court rulings

customers: Dr. Justin Wedeking, Dr. Michael Zilis Department of Political Science

We are political science professors who study the U.S. Supreme Court. With high levels of polarization and controversy in American politics, the judicial branch is taking on an increasingly important role. We are political science professors who study the U.S. Supreme Court. Since video cameras are not allowed in the Court, Americans depend on the news media and political elites to describe cases, controversies, and rulings, and it is important to understand the types of discussions that Americans have about them. Do Americans see the Court as a legal institution that is above politics and guided by law? Are changes in the media environment remaking how citizens think about the judiciary? Our projects look at ways to gather data and help us research our interests. Also, because we use different platforms we would like anything that is developed to be compatible with both.

Project 7 description

Projects 8, 9, 10 Computer Aided Design for crash and crime scene investigation

customer: Mike Flamm, Delta V Innovations Inc.

Delta V Innovations is committed to providing software specializing in Computer Aided Design for crash and crime scene recreation, storage of captured data, and sharing among users: data, analysis and simulation of events. With law enforcement in mind, Delta V Innovations also intends to offer this software application to numerous users including but not limited to insurance agencies, private investigators, and car manufacturers.

Note: To protect the customer's intellectual property, students on these projects will be required to sign non-disclosure agreements.

There are currently 3 areas of development:

Our goal is to use these platforms combined to provide law enforcement officials an end to end solution for analyzing crashes. Customers will be able to use the mobile application in the field to collect data, use the desktop application to view, edit, and finalize the data, and will then be able to upload all final projects which will allow other users to select locations by a Google Earth style map, and “See” the crash using Augmented Reality style interface on their mobile device.

11, 12, 13, 14 Four projects involving augmented reality

Customer: Brainwaive Ethar Project

Note: To protect the customer's intellectual property, students on these projects will be required to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Descriptions provided here.

Brainwaive Ethar Project 1: CS 499 Project 11

Brainwaive Ethar Project 2: CS 499 Project 12

Brainwaive Ethar Project 3: CS 499 Project 13

Brainwaive Ethar Project 4: CS 499 Project 14

For Projects 1,2 you will be developing Hololens apps on Windows, using Visual Studio, and Unity. When selecting these projects in Assignment 1, state that you have access to a Windows laptop/PC. For Projects 3,4 you will become knowledgeable with the Microsoft Azure tool set, creating the database for the project, as well as the overall architectural design, and develop the project solution for the use cases to be solved during the semester.

15, 16 Toyota Scrum Tools

Customer: Troy Morgan, Toyota Manufacturing

Our Toyota Information Systems department has been going through a Scrum "transformation" for the past year. The Scrum lifecycle has really helped us to deliver solutions to our customer that are both exactly what they want while providing fast business value incrementally. However, with this newly adapted lifecycle our traditional tools don't provide what we need to manage, track, and report product status effectively. We are in need of online Scrum tools to help manage our products, and we need to collaborate with team members distributed in remote locations. Last semester one team implemented a web page framework along with a story effort estimation voting tool that works great and is ready for expansion!

Project 15: We would like to add functionality that will allow us to track and report high level project status to management and executive level ( we are calling it the "Wallchart Tool")

Project 16: We would also like to add a tool for estimating and tracking team availability with reporting for planned and actual. There is a lot of potential in both of these products.

We will invite you to our facility, show you what we need and how we will use it, and will also provide a brief, hands-on "Scrum 101 Introduction" to your team.

Presentation slides:

http://www.cs.uky.edu/~paulp/CS499/toyota.ppt

17 Smart Z Slicing

Customer: Dr. Hank Dietz, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Normal 3D printing always holds Z constant and uses a constant Z step while extruding, but modulating Z can produce better strength and surface smoothness. A crude example is https://hackaday.com/2016/07/27/3d-printering-non-planar-layer-fdm/ and this sort of trick could be composed with something like http://manual.slic3r.org/expert-mode/variable-layer-height The goal here is to implement a slicer modification that in some way handles the Z axis more intelligently; for example, VariSlice ( http://www.instructables.com/id/Variable-Slicing-for-3D-Printing-on-Autodesk-Ember/ automatically ) automatically selects planar layer thicknesses to smooth-out surfaces, but wouldn't it be nice if it could be modified to also allow non-planar layers (e.g., to follow the surface contour)? There are a variety of possible approaches.

18 MOG Clean-Up

Customer: Dr. Hank Dietz, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering MIMD On GPU is software that allows MIMD parallel code (i.e., code written for a muti-core processor or cluster) to run inside GPU hardware. The goal here would be clean-up of the MOG code, https://github.com/aggregate/MOG/ , and implementation of some useful system calls. A good paper overviewing how this works is http://aggregate.org/MOG/icpp12.pdf

19 Low-Cost Internet of Things/Hardware Monitoring

Customer: Ashley Holbrook, Lexmark

Using a Raspberry PI, IOT web app, and sensors for data collection, create an application that ties into Amazon IOT.  The application can be used to collect and track sensor data, provide web app alerts based on certain conditions, and display data graphically.

20 Neural Nets for Games

Customer: Ashley Holbrook, Lexmark

Using neural nets, create a system that will visually identify poker hands.