Stories of Accomplishments by Our Students

Senior Design 2011-12

Senior Design is a sequence of two courses (CS 423 and CS 424) that all Computer Science and Cybersecurity majors take in their senior year. Students divide into groups of 4-6 and work on a project from September to May. The course instructor, Prof. David Klappholz, recruits "real clients:" clients inside or outside of Stevens (usually outside) who have a real-world software need. The need may be for a program written from scratch, for a re-design of a flawed or outdated program, for integration of incompatible systems, etc. Teams meet with their clients throughout the year but client contact is especially important at the beginning of the year. During this time teams elicit project requirements from the client. Later during the year, teams move on to design, coding, test, and delivery phases.

Please follow this link to Prof. Klappholz's site where you will find descriptions of the 8 2011-12 senior design projects:

• Autism Teaching Suite Project
• Bayonne Economic Opportunity Foundation (BEOF) CMS/Website Project
• Hoboken Transportation/Parking Dashboards Project
• ID8 Marketing and Sales Tool (IMAST) Project
• OpenMRS Project
• RescueMe Android Phone/Tablet Project
• Rip Current Tracker Project
• XIPRR (Experience-Informed Project Risk Reduction) Project

Senior Design 2012-13

The 2012-13 senior design projects are:

• Efficient eBay

  Many people use eBay occasionally to find household goods, clothing, furniture, etc. On the other hand, serious collectors of various types of objects typically use eBay very frequently and for significant amounts of time -- often daily for an hour or more. This project is aimed at developing software to help frequent users of eBay to save a good deal of time in searching for items of interest.

• Quantitative Finance

  The goal of this project is to build an application to support efficient and effective portfolio and risk management. The application will provide tools and analytics to drive investment decisions. For example, it will support portfolio construction, position and trade analysis, risk metrics, and performance monitoring. The application will feature a selection of market models and an optimization engine to identify risks and trading opportunities. The user will be able leverage these tools to build a custom strategy based on quantitative analysis.

• Roommates

  Students about to enter college who intend to live in dormitories are often paired with incompatible roommates. The purpose of this project is to develop a software system that will aid students in avoiding this sort of problem. Students about to enter Stevens -- or upper class students about to request dormitory rooms -- will be invited to take web-based compatibility-related surveys, surveys developed through the use of focus groups of both freshmen and upperclassmen who live or have lived in dormitories; the results of the surveys will be used to suggest potential matches to entering students, and the system will then enable them to communicate with one another by email; once students have made their decisions, the system will enable students to forward them to Residence Life, the Stevens office that operates the dormitory system.

• Smart City

  The concept underlying smart city software is to provide residents a way to interact with their city via their mobile devices in order to foster sustainable living, better governance, efficient use of city services, and ultimately a higher quality of life. IBM has invested a good deal of capital in smart city software around the world. Cities such as Singapore and Amsterdam are already making great strides toward attaining recognition as smart cities. The initial purpose of the Smart City project is to develop a mobile application that collects data that Hoboken residents seek on a daily basis and displays it in a manner that allows them to interact with their city in a new way. The final product of the Smart City project will be a generic platform that any city can easily adapt to its own use.

• Solar Decathlon

  The U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon is an award winning program that challenges college teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive. The purpose of this project is to work with teams from other disciplines at Stevens Institute of Technology to build a successful entry to the next solar decathlon competition. The development team's goal as a part of the larger team is to develop the software that will control the entire house and will ensure that energy is used in the most efficient manner possible. The software created will receive data from sensors monitoring the house and will use that information to make decisions.

• Study Plan

  The Study Plan Organizer will be a web application that allows advisors and students to streamline the process of constructing individualized schedules of courses, schedules that will enable the students to graduate in the desired numbers of semesters in a department whose degree requirements are rather complex and will, as a result, help reduce errors, and the stress that advisors and students regularly go through.

Stevens Scholars Summer Research Projects

Stevens Scholars is an invitation-only program in which undergraduates apply their engineering and scientific knowledge to design and research. The Stevens Scholars program immerses qualified undergraduates in unique and valuable hands-on exploration and application -- experience not traditionally available at the undergraduate level at most universities. One of many opportunities afforded to Stevens Scholars is the chance to work on a special research project with a Faculty Research Mentor during the summer months.

Below are brief summaries of some of the summer research projects performed in recent years by Stevens Scholars in Computer Science and Cybersecurity:

Summer 2012 -- Joseph Risi Investigating the Crowds advised by Prof. Jeffrey Nickerson

Summer 2012 -- Chris Federici: Strong Randomness from Common Hardware advised by Prof. Antonio Nicolosi

Summer 2012 -- David Orshan and Julian Sexton: Information Flow Security for Android Apps advised by Prof. David Naumann

Summer 2011 -- Michael Paulauski: Enforcing Information Flow Requirements in Web Applications advised by Prof. David Naumann

Curricular Practical Training (CPT) Fall 2012

TBD