Software Engineering Student Project Spotlight

05-16-2017

Writer(s): Kristyn Childres

Students in Professor H.E. “Buster” Dunsmore’s course in software engineering (CS 40700) spend the semester working in teams in a real-life software development experience. Students create a project of their own or choose from a variety of project ideas, some of which are requested by the department’s Corporate Partners program. Teams take a product through the full software development lifecycle using Scrum methodology. The projects they develop have the potential to improve society and enhance people’s quality of life, both on campus and beyond.

Graduate teaching assistant Hasini Gunasinghe, who is a CS 40700 project coordinator, said, “As they manage the challenges they face throughout the semester, students’ skills evolve drastically – both their technical skills and teamwork skills. These skill sets are essential to their success in the software industry.” 

Graduate teaching assistant Alina Nesen, head CS 40700 project coordinator, said, "The course offers a lot of freedom, and thus requires maturity, because the students get to choose their teammates and then decide what kind of project they would like to work on. Their interests are reflected in the choice of the projects. This semester, a number of teams incorporated machine learning and data mining techniques into their apps. I always enjoy watching how the projects develop in the course of the semester, from an initial idea presented in the project charter to a fully working application that we then can see at their final demo.”

The four projects mentioned below demonstrated dedication and creativity and are representative of the high quality of all teams’ projects.

ML_Fight

Sade Ajayi, Rayten Arnold Rex, Alex Meyer, Randy Pitcher and Andrew Systma developed ML_Fight, a one-player fighting game where a user competes with an opponent powered by a neural network. Using coevolution of NEAT neural networks, the game adapts to the user so that no two games are exactly the same.

EZDecide

Nankin Jin, Jiapei Liang, Yaoxi Liang, Zhixuan Yu and Wu Zheng worked together to develop EZDecide, a platform where people can get advice from friends or strangers about the choices they face in their lives, from where to go on vacation to what to eat for dinner. Users post decisions they’re facing, and other users can vote on the options.

PaperChat

Developed by William Huang, Zhaoji Jiang, Murtuza Kainan, Eric Theller and Thomas Worns, PaperChat allows users to set up a fully-functioning chat on their website with just a few clicks. The platform features sentiment analysis, user interface customization, automatic moderation and chat history logs that allow site administrators to gain insights from the interactions that take place on their website. 

WPEAR (Weather Prediction Evaluation and Reporting)

WPEAR (Weather Prediction Evaluation and Reporting) is a weather data visualization and comparison pipeline. Created by Lala Vaisno De, Dhairya Doshi, Stephen Harrell and Mengxue Luo, the pipeline downloads and visualizes data from the NOAA and generates a website where users can view the visualizations. 

View pictures from the teams’ presentations.