Projects are generally done in teams and taken from the following list of possible projects. Contact possible partners and advisors and work out the details for spring advising. Note that CS/DATA 396/398 is a two-semester, Fall-Spring course; see the Schedule page for details.
| Title | Description | Advisor |
|---|---|---|
| Computational Modeling Projects |
Professor Araújo is proposing computational modeling
projects in a variety of domains, including:
|
E. Araújo |
| AI Tools for Thought and Understanding |
We are looking for between 1 and 3 teams to work on the
following projects. Students are strongly recommended to
enroll in CS-300-A
(Human-Centered AI) in 25FA.
|
K. Arnold |
| Geofeed: A New Dawn on IP Geolocation |
Background: Geolocating IP addresses has been a
longstanding problem in research on Internet measurement and
cybersecurity. Researchers have developed various
approaches, such as RTT triangulation and DNS hostnames, to
infer the location of IPs. Commercial IP geolocation
database products, like MaxMind and ipinfo.io, employ their
own proprietary methods, often resulting in conflicting
results. In 2021, the IETF published RFC 9092, recommending
that network operators release location information of their
IP prefixes using a standardized format called Geofeed, and
publish the data via the WHOIS database.
Project goals: In this project, we will analyze multiple datasets (including Geofeed data) and conduct Internet measurements to answer research questions regarding this new approach to IP geolocation. For example, what is the coverage of Geofeed across the Internet? How frequently do operators update Geofeed information? Does the Geofeed information align with other state-of-the-art IP geolocation methods? If not, which IP geolocation method is more trustworthy? What has been done:
Collaborations: The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center Knowledge and skills requirements:
|
R. Chang CAIDA UC SanDiego |
| Measuring the speed test measurement platforms |
Background: Various commercial speed test platforms
(notably Ookla's www.speedtest.net) has become an important
Internet service which allows users to gauge their network
performance, mainly in terms of throughput and latency.
Although they are widely deployed and used, their
measurement mechanisms, however, are largely opaque to the
public. There are also no readily available tools to
evaluate their accuracy and understand their limitations. As
another consequence, measurements from different platforms
may give different results, and it is difficult to tell
which one(s) to believe (or disbelieve).
Project goals: By reverse engineering the non-disclosed speed test measurement methods, CAIDA has developed a tool that performs the same speed test measurement but with additional control knobs. The first project objective is to validate whether this tool performs the same measurement as the speed test platforms do. The second is to use different models for computing the throughput and latency with the purpose of finding the most scientifically sound results. The last one is to configure the control knobs to further increase the measurement accuracy. What has been done:
Collaborations: The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center Knowledge and skills requirements:
|
R. Chang CAIDA UC SanDiego |
| Life Giving Water International (continuation) |
Life Giving Water International (LGWI) is a missions organization that, along with a local organization based in Riobamba, Ecuador, builds water systems in rural communities throughout Ecuador. For many water system operators in rural communities, the tasks of tracking water usage, managing payments and financing of the system can be daunting. During water system construction, water meters are installed at each home, tracking water use of individual homes. LGWI would like to build-up the app to include optical character recognition to allow water system operators to simply take photos of the water meters which would then calculate monthly use as well as the associated cost of the calculated water use. As LGWI trials the app with a few select communities this summer and fall, incorporating improvements based on the comments received from these communities will also be part of the project. | M. DeHaan (LGWI) |
| Calvin EMR (continuation) |
This project will continue work on the Calvin Electronic
Medical Record project, developed for the Nursing department
for use with their students in nursing simulations. This is
a web development project that utilizes HTML, CSS, Angular,
and Typescript. The project may take a slightly different
trajectory this year because the project will become a
product, sold to other universities. I don’t know exactly
what the goals of the coming year will be, but one idea is
to develop an extensive library of end-to-end tests of the
product.
Team members should have taken or be taking CS336 or have significant experience with web development. |
V. Norman S. VanderWal (Calvin Nursing) |
| Bruce Dice Museum Interactive App | This project will develop an app to deliver interactive activities for visitors to the museum. One idea is to deploy Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons in the cabinets around the museum and then create an app the detects when a visitor is near a beacon and have the app display information about items in that display. The app could be customized for different demographics – visiting school children, college students, families, etc. The museum already has iPads which are not being used, so the app could be installed on these devices and given to visitors to use. | V. Norman K. Ratajeski (Calvin GGE) |
| Plaster Creek Stewards App | The Plaster Creeks Stewards (PCS) organization at Calvin, started by Prof. Dave Warners in the Biology Department, “seeks to reconcile relationships between people and the natural world by restoring health and beauty to the Plaster Creek Watershed.” The organization now employs almost no “high tech” for collecting data, presenting data to an audience via the web, managing their greenhouses, etc. This project would seek to partner with PCS to help them use interactive website or mobile apps to improve their workflows, information communication, etc. | V. Norman A. Lubberts (Plaster Creek Stewards) |
| Data Analysis and Topic Modeling on Church Sermon Transcripts | We will explore and uncover recurring themes and theological emphases in church sermons using topic modeling techniques. Analyzing these sermons computationally can provide insights into how religious messages evolve over time, respond to historical and societal events, or differ across denominations. The core analysis uses unsupervised machine learning techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Visualization tools such as pyLDAvis and word clouds will be used to make the results interpretable, showing how certain topics appear more frequently in certain time periods, in specific pastors' sermons, or across denominations. This also opens up venues for reflections on ethical implications of applying computational methods to churches and religious discourse. | F. Pasquini Santos B. Santini (RTS Atlanta) |
| Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) for Board
Games (continuation) |
We will use Python library SIMPLE to develop a reinforcement learning model to play a modern board game like Azul, Splendor or Qin (you can choose, given that it is simple in rules so we can implement easily, but complex enough to require strategic decision-making). If we succeed in that, we will then try to implement techniques to give results explaining its decisions in a human-understandable way (such as attention mechanisms, decision trees, or model introspection methods). This will be a nice way to investigate how the game is balanced towards certain elements or dominant strategies and offer insight on how to play the game well. We can also develop, later, some graphical user interface that would guide a player through the game and give hints about good strategies. | F. Pasquini Santos |
| Reader's Tools | In this project we will continue exploring the use of Large Language Models to make the experience of reading a books at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL.org) more interactive and engaging. One area of focus is “Ask CCEL a question.” Instead of scouring a book to find an answer, why not just ask the book your question? We will continue work on a system for the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) that is able to answer questions such as “What did the Early Church Fathers have to say about the Trinity?” This system is based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology using a LLM to formulate answers. Another possible area of focus is in adding LLM-powered tools to the book reading interface that enable users to see modernized language, explanations, and historical context. | H. Plantinga |
| IoT and Embedded Projects |
I am open to supervising any nifty IoT projects based on the
Raspberry Pi or some other comparable platform. Such a
project would combine the use of sensors
and/or actuators, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications,
along with a database and webpage or app for control and
monitoring. Possibilities include:
|
D. Schuurman |
| Course Schedulizer (continuation) |
This project will continue work on the 2020-2025 Course Schedulizer projects, which developed an application used by department chairs to create, modify, and report departmental course schedules at Calvin (Application & GitHub). Users are able to import schedules from past semesters, specify course assignments, check for scheduling conflicts, and export schedules in a format that can be used to populate the official course schedule. The application is written as a Web application using ReactJS and Typescript. Specific upgrades for next year’s project will be determined by the end of this year. | K. VanderLinden, R. Pruim |
| Mobile Game for Self Care |
In this project we will create a mobile game that combines
gaming elements with self-care tasks to boost mental health.
Our game will have a whimsical and calming atmosphere and be
centered around helping the creatures who live in your
village. The game will have a 2D, side-scrolling art style
with an open-world hub and levels that involve platforming
and puzzles.
Staying positive and healthy can be tough! Similar apps are either too game-heavy, or too task-heavy. This game aims to find a balance between these two extremes and to promote self-care tasks in an engaging way. We are looking for people who are interested in learning Unity and C#, or a similar development environment, to develop the game, and who are passionate about either mental health or video games. |
K. VanderLinden |
Projects are generally chosen from the list given above. However, if you have another idea, feel free to discuss it with an appropriate faculty member. The department may need to open and/or close project proposals in order to distribute students evenly across projects and faculty members.
Some projects from the past involved advisors outside of the Department of Computer Science. This is acceptable but you’ll need one official advisor from the department as well. This advisor will serve as your administrative liaison to the department.