SENIOR PROJECT IDEAS Prof. Carla Purdy

Images (c) QT Luong / terragalleria.com

1. "ROBUST COMPUTER SIMULATION & EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTING"
Currently, powerful mass-produced computer chips allow us to develop complex simulation programs for applications such as bioinformatics, ecology, disaster management, and design of next-generation aircraft. In addition, we now have the computing power to study the application of heuristic and stochastic techniques to learn more about computationally hard problems such as satisfiability. In this ongoing project we seek to develop user-friendly tools to support robust computation and accurate visualization in compute-intensive application areas.

2. "COMPUTATIONAL MOLECULAR BIOLOGY"
Since the structure of DNA was determined in the 1950's, molecular biologists have continued to develop methods to collect data about biological processes and components. Managing and understanding the massive amounts of data being collected requires ever more sophisticated computational tools. In our laboratory we are working on several projects in this challenging and important area. There are continuing opportunities to contribute to one of these projects. Projects may seek to understand natural biomolecular phenomena or may be directed towards using biomolecular components for computational tasks through "synthetic biology".

3. "INTELLIGENT COMPUTING IN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE"
Today software and hardware systems are increasingly relying on "intelligent" techniques, such as neural nets, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and Gibbs sampling, to achieve the computational power necessary to solve large complex problems.
In our lab we are concentrating on hardware and software systems which incorporate "intelligent" techniques to solve problems in image processing, information assurance, sensor data processing, and system design and simulation. We would welcome the assistance of committed undergraduates to work with us on well-defined subprojects to extend our system capabilities and to thoroughly test what we have developed so far.

4. "SYSTEM RESOURCE CALCULATOR"
In analyzing computer systems performance and resource usage, we usually look at the time and space required to run a program (software) or the cycle time, area used, and power requirements (hardware). Underlying these measures are many other quantities, for example, the environmental impact of producing a chip or the number of workers that a system may replace. In this project we will work on developing a user-friendly program to calculate some of these "hidden" resource requirements for computer systems.