CSCI 4970: Computer Science Capstone Project

Fall 2012

Meeting time: TR 1:30-2:45
Classroom: PKI 155
Instructor: Dr. Harvey Siy
Office: PKI 281B
Phone: (402)554-2834
Email: hsiy at unomaha dot edu
Office Hours: By appointment (call or email ahead)
Textbook:
(optional)
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion. Addison-Wesley, 2010. Available online.
(optional) Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design by Liskov and Guttag, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Overview

The Capstone Project represents the crowning achievement of a Computer Science student's undergraduate experience, enabling him or her to apply fundamental computer science principles to the solution of real-world problems. Students will employ software engineering techniques to develop the project in a systematic manner.

Prerequisites

Learning Objectives

Students who complete this course will:
  1. Recognize and appreciate how fundamental computer science principles apply to real-world problems.
  2. Improve their communication skills through interaction with an actual client.
  3. Gain proficiency in modeling, implementing and testing nontrivial software applications.
  4. Gain more experience in working in teams.

How it works

In parallel, we will have lectures for the first few weeks. Topics covered include:

Suitable Projects

While there are lots of possibilities, projects are expected to have an innovative computational component requiring the nontrivial application of computer science theory and concepts. Example application types include scheduling, optimization, simulation, data mining, cyber-physical systems, and scientific computing.

Projects will usually involve sophisticated algorithms manipulating complex information, and may involve overlapping areas such as language processing, networks, embedded systems, real-time systems, parallel computation, databases, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, etc.

Many common project proposals involve the creation of a large database system with some sort of web interface. While such information systems-based projects are not outside the scope of possibilities, it is expected that such systems should go beyond implementing basic CRUD (create/read/update/delete) operations and provide intelligent capabilities and services to the client.

Evaluation

There are no exams or graded homeworks in this course. Students will be evaluated based on the quality of the project at the end of the semester. Evaluation rubrics will be provided at the start of the semester.



Back to homepage.