Jim
Hunter
Final Year Projects 2008/2009
My projects fall into two
categories: useful and research (which isn't meant to say that
research isn't useful!)
Useful
Automatically
Planning a Hill-Walk
When a hill-walker looks at a map to plan a walk for a day
(s)he uses quite a lot of knowledge in interpreting
the map. A number of factors have to be taken into account:
·
What
are the features of interest that 'anchor' the route (e.g. tops of hills)?
·
How
long is the route?
·
How
much climbing is involved?
·
How
long will it take?
·
What
are the significant 'way points' (i.e. the intermediate points that anchor the
route such as cols, river crossings, etc.)?
·
How
do you avoid certain features (slopes that are too steep, cliffs, rivers that
are too wide, etc)?
·
Where
do you start and finish the walk (usually involves road access)? Do these have
to be the same?
The aim of this
project is to see what maps are available electronically, and to see if it is
possible to use the information contained within them to propose a day's walk
given some initial constraints (e.g. hill(s) to be climbed, maximum distance
and time, etc.). A lot of examples are available in books – one way of
testing the success of the project would be to see if these routes are
reproduced. Last year's project on Munro bagging started to look at electronic
maps and would provide a good starting point.
An assistant for planning theatrical
productions
One of the earliest tasks that has to be performed by the director of any theatrical
production is that of ‘blocking’. This mean deciding where the
characters shall be on stage at any particular time, how they get from one
position to another, how they enter and exit etc. These movements need to be
related to the lines that are being spoken or sung.
The object of the project would be to
develop a web-based package that would assist a director in performing this
task. The client software would allow the producer to sketch out the essentials
of a set (i.e. entrances, exits and any significant locations, e.g. a table),
to plot the movement of characters, and to tie this to the script. The results
would be kept on the server and available (a) to the director for editing and
(b) to members of the cast to inspect (in read-only mode). Suitable provision
would have to be made for the printing of hard-copy.
I have worked with a local producer who has
generated and used such blocking diagrams on paper and who would be very
interested in such a project. A well designed and implemented solution would
get used. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing like this available
commercially.
JessWin
Mark 2
Those of you who did CS3014 last year will have used ClipsWin – a development environment for CLIPS which
ran under windows. ClipsWin works very well and is reliable.
This year CS3014 practicals use Jess (which is similar to CLIPS but implemented
in Java) and practicals are being done in a Linux lab (where ClipsWin can't be used). An IDE called JessWin
is supposed to be a Java implementation of ClipsWin . Unfortunately (as
the third years will tell you) it is buggy.
The aim of this project is to re-implement ClipsWin from scratch as JessWin(2). The
functionality of ClipsWin would be used as the
starting point for the requirements for JessWin(2) but the differences between Jess and CLIPS would have to
be taken into account.
Research
Interpreting
movements
My main
research interest is in the application of knowledge-based techniques to the
interpretation and abstraction of complex multi-channel time series. My current
work is concerned with the physiological data (heart rate, oxygen saturation,
etc) that are routinely measured in Intensive Care Units.
However I'm
getting interested in the interpretation of the measurements of motion (mainly
hand and arm) that people make in undertaking simple everyday tasks (such as
making a cup of tea). One application area is that of the monitoring and
rehabilitation of patients who have suffered a stroke. The projects would be
undertaken in collaboration with colleagues in Psychology (Dr Mark
Mon-Williams) and Rehabilitation Medicine (Dr Alistair Cozens).
One of the
ways of measuring motion of a person over time is to attach small optical
markers and to track the positions of those markers in 3-D space. Mark uses a
system called Optotrak to do this.
Once we have
the measurements of the locations of parts of the subjects
body over time (as time series in X, Y and Z for each marker) the problem is to
say what he or she is doing at any particular moment. That way we can see if
there is any cognitive impairment due to the stroke – is the person
undertaking the task in the way that an unimpaired person would, or do they
seem to be confused.
The aim of
this project is to write software which will analyse these signals and compare
them with higher level descriptions of the tasks. A considerable number of
analysis routines written in Java are already available through the TSNet system and these could be
built upon.
October 2008
j.hunter@abdn.ac.uk