The following are descriptions of some ideas for CS470 projects. If you select one of these projects then I can give you further information and can act as a user in many cases.
Application-Oriented Projects
The Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship awards grants to UAA students based on research proposals. A list is available here: http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/ours/opportunities/research/index.cfm. Right now the proposals are just sent in via email. What we would like is an online system where students can upload their proposal to an online website. Project details would be tracked in a database. This would be a miniature version of NSF's fastlane (http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov). This might be integrated at some point with the Undergraduate Research Database .
Systems like Classroom Presenter, Ubiquitous Presenter, and InkSurvey allow students with a computer in class to submit an electronic response to some question to the instructor. However, these systems must either run on a remote server (may be undesirable for privacy) or are rather difficult to set up. What is requested here is a lightweight student submission system that runs as an executable on the instructor's PC. Students in the class could connect, view the current "exercise", draw/type to complete the exercise, then submit it to the instructor. Ideally everything would be in an executable (e.g. implement own mini web server) but depending on the implementation might require installing some other software such as Apache or IIS, but one of the goals would be to make the installation as painless as possible.
There has been some recent interest in developing some type of phone application. Most smartphones are able to run Java ME programs. Netbeans 6 includes a simulator.
Games of all types make excellent projects, as they require knowledge gleaned from algorithms to graphics and artificial intelligence. Candidates include arcade games, adventure games, role-playing games, or networked games.
Sadly, our AIBO robot is dead, but we do have a number of RidgeSoft Intelli-Brain robots that are programmable via Java and have line, infrared, and ultrasonic sensors. What you would do with it is up to you...
Research-Oriented Projects
For these projects, there is a delivery goal of a paper writeup suitable for submission to an appropriate conference. If a paper is actually submitted and accepted, student travel funds might be available.
In this project we would like to use the Undergraduate research database to visualize the research expertise that exists on campus. A proposal of the project we submitted to the Chancellor's research fund is available here: MockHoancaChancellorsFund-09Submission.doc. There are likely multiple projects here. Another version would be to implement an applet to visualize the network of researchers using a visualization system like prefuse or Jung .
We have a Sharp 3D Monitor available for use. In addition to data visualization projects there are also lots of possibilities for games with a 3D monitor.
Pick your own!
You are welcome and encouraged to pick your own project! Run pre-proposal by instructor for approval.