Every student pursuing a major in Mathematics, Computer Science, or Statistics is required to complete a Senior Year Experience (SYE) project, which counts as a one semester course. It is possible to spread the project out over a full year.
Here are the students whom I have mentored in the past and their project titles and presentation abstracts.
Isaac Brinkman (Fall 2019 – Spring 2020)
Physics Engine Re-imagined in Unity
Details to be added later.
Joshua Epstein and Travonte Wheeler (Fall 2019 – Spring 2020)
Game Design and Development with Unreal Engine
Details to be added later.
Remi LeBlanc (Fall 2019 – Spring 2020)
Visualizing Weather/Climate and Their Impact on Economy/Society
Details to be added later.
Sai Wei (Fall 2019)
Intelligent Assistant with Natural Language Understanding for WeChat
“This Senior Year Experience project is a continue project from my [Sai’s] SLU Fellowship research project, “Aptapp: An In-app Assistant Providing Helpful Guidance on WeChat
Functionality”. Starting from the goal of user-experience optimizing, I [Sai] re-developed Aptapp and researched into Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for the past semester. Since WeChat had a major update for mini-programs in August, I eliminated the old design, which requires transitions between three platforms with many redundancies in terms of interactions. Keeping the old features like floating window and background audio playing, new Aptapp allows users to search for guidance with keywords and get access to the guidance easily without leaving the mini-program. On the other hand, I started my research in NLP by reading relative resources and following along open online courses to learn the basic concept. Because of the time limitation, I didn’t get to implement my own NLP system or model this semester. Instead, I wrote a paper summarizing the basic concepts and implementation techniques I’ve learned about NLP to enhance my understanding in this field.”
Nevaan Perera (Fall 2018)
Implementing a Service Request and Response Platfrom using Node.js
Details to be added later.
Evan Page (Fall 2017 – Spring 2018)
Developing a Mobile Application Controlled LED Light System Using Raspberry Pi
“There are many LED light-strip systems that are controlled by a remote or a mobile application on your phone. This project uses a Raspberry Pi system (a small single-board computer) to build a similar system from scratch. The Raspberry Pi system powers and controls the Led lights, and accepts messages from an Android app. Using the microphone, the Android app listens to music, and analyzes it to compute the colors for the LED system. Then, the app communicates the colors by sending UDP (user-datagram protocol) messages to the Raspberry Pi system. Preliminary testing results demonstrate that it provides a positive experience to the audience, and further testing will help tune the system for a better experience.”
Soukaina Alami Idrissi (Fall 2016 – Spring 2017)
DailyHabit.co
“Dailyhabit is an online web application which lets you keep track of your daily habits and long-term goals. I started this project during the web programming course with Prof. Lisa Torrey and turned it into a Senior Year project. I will be talking about how I acquired a domain and launched the website online, as well as the different tools and functionalities that I added to the web application.”
Madison Rusch (Fall 2016)
APR2.1: A Google Chrome Extension
“As my Senior Year Honors Project, I worked on improving the end-user experience of APR2. APR2 is currently used by students, faculty, and staff, making this an ideal project to reach a wide audience within the St. Lawrence community. Using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, I built and debugged a Google Chrome extension to augment the APR2 website. My extension provides a course catalog with additional features to the current website in an attempt to make the catalog more user-friendly and navigable. Throughout the project, I improved my understanding of web programming and computer networks as well as my ability to code. The goal of this extension is to help the St. Lawrence community utilize the APR2 website to its fullest potential.”
Edward Morreale (Spring 2016)
Videogames and you! A look at small scale videogame development
“Videogames have been played and enjoyed for decades, but just how exactly is one constructed? In this presentation I will be giving my experiences in video game development. There are many different processes that are involved when even doing simple things like getting a character to move across the screen, and this can overwhelming to someone looking in from the outside. The goal of the presentation is to give a high level overview of the game development process, and looking at how some of the different components of games relate to the classes I have taken here at St. Lawrence. Additionally, I will talk about what are some practices that both professionals and other independent designers conduct. Other non-programming aspects of game development such as art and music will be discussed as well. The talk will conclude with a demo of my current progress.”
Zhengjing Chu (Spring 2016)
The use of toxicity score and advanced matchmaking algorithm in improving MOBA gaming experience
“Players are grouped into teams for matches in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, and their gaming experience heavily depends on their teammates. Teammates with toxic behaviors can negatively impact players’ experience. Our goal is to develop an optimal toxicity vector to identify toxic players with sufficient classification rate. First, we design a simulation program to create a simplified gaming environment with three type of players: positive, neutral and toxic. After each match, all players provide feedback about their teammates. A wide range of simulation configurations are tested to determine how well the toxicity score method works compared to random matching.”
Son Vuong (Fall 2015)
Haggle with Google Flight: Predicting flight prices
“In today’s internet Age, travel agent is a profession of the past. So, how do you haggle with that flight search engine to get the best price on your flight home? This talk focuses on the relationship between the percentile of flights’ prices and various search options that a user can configure. The target variable, predicted percentile, shows where a particular query configuration lies in the range of historical prices. By using this variable, we would be able to determine whether that particular price is the deal of your life! Queried via Google Flights Engine on a fixed set of destinations, our data consists of over 2 millions flights. We explored this complex relationship on three different levels:a fixed trip with given origin, destination, departure date and return date; a flexible trip given a range of departure date and return date; and a vacation trip given the fixed trip length of 9 days, that occurred in the next 300 days.”
Kirby Kaylor (Spring 2015)
Old McDonald had a Sensor
“High tunnels are gaining popularity in farming communities as they allow for vegetables to be grown all year. When the outside temperature is too cold, the sides can be rolled down to capture the sun’s natural heat, while minimizing heat loss. When the outside temperature is warm enough, the sides can be rolled up to prevent overheating. However, these high tunnels tend to be out in fields, making them too far away to run electricity. This project programs “motes” to not only provide the sensors to read temperature and humidity, but also create an ad hoc network to wirelessly transmit their data.”
Thomas Ball and Jeremiah Bunton (2014-2015)
Northstar Cafe Mobile Order App
“At noon every day, the North Star café becomes swamped with students all
trying to get food in the brief time they have between classes. Heavy load on
dining services often results in orders that are not fill in time for the
next class period, and these late orders are wasted. The understaffed café
had to cut services such as allowing orders to be phoned in to avoid wasted
food, causing customer dissatisfaction. While both Thelmo and Dining services
are trying to find a solution for dealing with the lunch rush in an efficient
manner, I would like to propose my own solution. An electronic system of
placing and paying for orders allows the dining services to receive orders
remotely that are already sorted to the right station without taking an
employee away from his/her duty. My SYE focuses on building a consumer side
interface, an Android app, with which users can browse the menu and place and
pay for orders. The orders are stored in a database and can be accessed by
users and café staff. Surveying a pool of customers and researching the
application cycle and required network resources, I developed an Android app
that currently supports menu browsing and storing orders in a database as a
proof of concept. The system can be expanded to accept payments and allow the
café staff to receive and analyze orders to meet the customers’ needs
better.”
Choong-Soo Lee @ SLU 