[Irtalk] honours projects at UCT computer science for 2015

[Hussein Suleman]

hi folks

it is that time of the year again where we specify honours projects for 
computer science students ... and i write to see if anyone wants to 
collaborate this year

if you have a suitably-sized research problem related to information 
retrieval, ICT for development (especially educational technology) or 
digital libraries (or some other area that i am interested in) that 
might benefit from 2-4 students (typically very competent programmers) 
working on it for 3-4 months, please contact me by email within the next 
week (i.e., by 20 feb) to talk about it.

basically, we do all the work - all you specify is the problem and
possibly steer the students if necessary. right now all we need is short
(500 words? which i write anyway) descriptions of the projects. the 
students then select their projects off a very long list and if a 
particular project gets selected then we start work in earnest 
(otherwise we try again next year or some such thing).

many projects from previous years have been published, often 
internationally, for example:
* 2011 low-bandwidth video conferencing @SAICSIT2012
* 2011 Bonolo (generic file-based DL) @ICADL2012
* 2010 Copying Archives (evaluation of LOCKSS openness, project 
suggested by SUN) @TPDL2011
* 2009 Bushman Online Dictionary (visual dictionary, project for UCT 
Fine Arts) @ICADL2010
* 2009 CALJAX (AJAX-based repository) @SAICSIT2010
* 2008 Wordbank (Web-based language preservation) @ZAWWW2009

while not the norm, some projects produce production-quality tools, such 
as the Zamani Data Archive from 2014.

it seems i can only specify 3 projects - i can put together 3 projects 
internally, but would prefer to work with others. i can also steer a 
conversation with other members of our staff if there is a more 
appropriate supervisor e.g., in areas related to graphics, AI,
databases, etc. and this has worked successfully many times in the past.

for some ideas on the breadth and depth of our past projects, visit the
honours project archive linked off http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/

if you have any questions, feel free to shout

ttfn,
----hussein

=====================================================================
hussein suleman ~ hussein at cs.uct.ac.za ~ http://www.husseinsspace.com
=====================================================================