The first phase of the capstone experience is the selection of a project and the creation of teams. To help in this process, this page includes a list of some brief summaries of potential project ideas, although this list is by no means exhaustive. We very much welcome project ideas that stem from the team.

You may also wish to take a look at past project descriptions that have been selected in recent years. Those are not meant as future projects, but instead as a demonstration of the range and scope of capstone projects.

Potential Projects

• Monitoring patients' cardiovascular health via common wearable fitness devices
• Biology Education: Supporting Graphical Modeling of Biological Systems
• Detecting Common Spelling and Gramatical Errors by Mining Wikipedia Changelogs
• Firefox Support for Languages
• A Study of Bus Stop Quality in St. Louis County
• An Interactive Exploration of Huffman Encoding

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• Monitoring patients' cardiovascular health via common wearable fitness devices

  Organization: SLU Physicians
  Potential Client: Dawn Hui, MD
  Potential Supervisor: tbd
  Description: The goal is to develop a system that allows for medical remote evaluation of patients using biometric data (e.g. heart rate, activity, sleep) from existing commercially available wearable devices (e.g., a Fitbit). The system will rely upon a patient's mobile phone for the communication link from the device to the remote electronic medical records, and will allow physicians to remotely monitor and communicate with patients. The system may also calculate additional variables derived from the primary data such as variability of heart rate and activity and to alert a physician to detection of critical levels.

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• Biology Education: Supporting Graphical Modeling of Biological Systems

  Organization: SLU Biology
  Potential Client: Dr. Elena Bray-Speth
  Potential Supervisor: tbd
  Description: Students in SLU's introductory biology courses must demonstrate their understanding of biological systems by developing graphical (box-and-arrow) models of such systems (e.g., food chains, signaling pathways, metabolic networks). From the perspective of a computer scientist, these models seem quite similar in style to flowcharts that represent stages over a time series, or UML diagrams that capture the relationships between entities.

  Currently, students in these classes submit hard copies of hand-drawn diagrams, and if making later refinements of those models, they create and submit a new hard copy. The goal of this project would be to develop web-based tools that would provide convenient and uniform support for (a) students' creation, revision, and submission of such diagrams, and (b) instructors review, grading and providing feedback to learners. Additional goals would be to support educational research by doing downstream data analysis of aspects of the full collection of student-generated diagrams.

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• Detecting Common Spelling and Gramatical Errors by Mining Wikipedia Changelogs

  Organization: SLU CS
  Potential Client: Dr. Kevin Scannell
  Potential Supervisor: Dr. Kevin Scannell
  Description: The goal is to mine the changelog history on Wikipedia for your chosen language to try and extract the most frequent spelling and grammatical errors. Then, (1) turn this into a proofing tool to avoid the same errors in the future, and (2) analyze and publish the results to help language teachers focus on the most common mistakes. Could also potentially try this with source repositories for open source software translations.

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• Firefox Support for Languages

  Organization: SLU CS
  Potential Client: Dr. Kevin Scannell
  Potential Supervisor: Dr. Kevin Scannell
  Description: The goal is to write a Firefox addon that allows a language learner to click on any word on a web page, stem the word for your chosen language, look up the result on an appropriate dictionary web site, and display the result in a little js popup. Things like this exist for a fixed language/dictionary site - would want flexibility/generality.

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• An Interactive Exploration of Huffman Encoding

  Organization: SLU CS
  Potential Client: Dr. Michael Goldwasser
  Potential Supervisor: Dr. Michael Goldwasser
  Description: In a past project, a wonderful interactive tool was developed allowing Computer Science students explore the topic of Huffman encoding. Unfortunately, that software was developed as a Java applet (available here), and its accessiblity has been greatly hampered in recent years by the lack of primary support for running Java in browsers. The goal of this project would be to: (1) redevelop a similar application in JavaScript for greater accessibility, and (2) look for additional ways to extend or improve the functionality of the original tool.

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• A Study of Bus Stop Quality in St. Louis County

  Organization: SLU Sustainability
  Potential Client: Allison Davis and Charlie Garavaglia
  Potential Supervisor: tbd
  Description: The goal is to create a tool for urban study that would overlay shapefiles regarding MetroBus routes and stops in St. Louis County with Google Maps and street view, allowing researchers to study the condition of the bus stops. Extended project goals may be to provide further tools to facilitate the aggregation of data.

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