Senior Capstone Courses ... Ideas Welcome

As part of the Renaissance Computing's original framework, we are soliciting capstone project ideas from our colleagues on campus. In the past, we have had capstone projects in collaboration with Digital Humanities (that produced a system that parsed and tagged archived texts for inter-version analyses, e.g., see the final report of the project) and others. If you have an idea about a project that is sufficiently standalone, feasible within a semester's implementation, and primarily software-based, please feel free to share with us by contacting Leen-Kiat Soh at lksoh at cse dot unl dot edu.

We are also looking to "match-make" your capstone course students with our computer science seniors. Our capstone course is a 2-course, 2-semester sequence. During the first semester, the students form teams and work on a feasibility study, usually resulting in a prototype and a semester report. During the second semester, the students fully implement their project, test and evaluate the product, present their product and research & development work, and submit a full final project report. Each team usually consists of 3-5 students. Students are required to perform weekly journaling of their activities, follow their milestones and deliverable schedules, and meet with the instructor once a week per team.

The Renaissance Computing project encourages and facilitates interdisciplinary capstone projects as such projects are often (1) enlightening to students from different disciplines in terms of communication, teamwork, and diverse backgrounds, (2) inspiring to incoming freshmen students when demonstrated to them about the possibility of computing in solving many real-world applications, and (3) promoting cross-fertilization of ideas from the instructors of the course.

There are also other courses such as data mining, image processing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, that lend naturally to solve problems in informatics. Thus, this solicitation is not limited to only senior capstone courses.

The Renaissance Computing Project is funded by the NSF.