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Some Android Phone distributed applications
n.b. there were some very succesful summer projects in the
DTG which
show that java development of sophisticated applications for these
devices is pretty painless. We are interested in the possibility of kernel development projects but until we
know if this can be done reliably, its not yet on the cards (an interesting kernel add on would be to make TCP
work over multiple paths simulataneously so one could use both WiFi and HSPD/3G simultaneously...there's
working code out there for this on a MAEMO/Linux stack which ought to port...).
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P2P User Contributed Live Video
Everyone has heard of youtube, but it takes a lot of resources to
upload something to it. Most smart phones have a decent camera
(e.g. android HTC G2 phones have 5Mpel video capabile). What if we
could stream live video, in an ad hoc mobile net (wifi, bluetooth)
rather than via the cellular net - people could subscribe by tags
or by human source (e.g. friend on facebook or latitude).
Essentially, this would be an application-layer multicast overlay, that would use intermediate phones (one in
contact via whatever wireless local hop was avaialbe and that are part of the ssytem) to cache copies until the
next "hop" towards a subscriber is availabile. Subscriptions would percolate through the net (indeed,
subscriptions might be distributed using the cellular net since they will be small items) whereas video chunks
or files will percolate "towards" subscribers, from "providers" in a dynamically changing mesh.
The idea of doing it this way is to avoid the large cost of uploading (Indeed, the 3G nets might not be capable
of dealing with the load), whereas much of the interest may in fact be relatively local (think sports arena,
rock festival, traffic jam etc).
Could be useful for giving live view of traffic ahead on a road
or of unfamiliar scene, or for giving multiple crowd views of a
sports event.
The Haggle
Project has some nice infrastructure software for this sort of
application, including coping with disconnections (cache the
content on a device for later pick up, or send it into the cloud).
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
Keywords: Mobile, Distributed, Media, Java, Smart Phone.
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Home Tagging/Barcoding and Energy Use monitoring of stuff in your house - Neverlost
You know when you lose something in your house
how either backtracking through your day, or else asking someone
else is the way to find it.
So how about we tag things in the house using a camera on our smart
phone. We also (see the MSR SenseCam project) log scene changes as
we walk around. We can then find lost objects or replay our day til
we trigger a memory of where they were. WHen you buy a new gadget, you take a pic, and classify it n the
database and tag it. As you walk around, the phone takes snaps (e.g. whenver there's a big enough scene change
triggers by enough image diff, or by acceleromter, or even by "arriving" or "departing" according to geo-loc
(e.g. Google map/GPS or wifi detection of your Home Access Point).
A nice extension is to take home appliances (TV, washing machine, PVR, dishwasher) that have LEDs that show
what they are doing, and take a few snaps that classify them as "on", "off", "sleeping", etc. Then the people
walking around the house taking snap shots, provide a log of devise usage during the day. THis could be later
compared with the overall bill for the house (the meter might be readable with a camera phone app, or else
meter readings might just be web accessible)
and used to determine what devices in the house cost most and see if its worth changing peoples' usage
patterns.
We could do this collaboratively (with our facebook friends) for
wider searches. THe results of pictures of gadgets (remote controls, keys, etc)
would be put in a shared "tuple-space" that one can then search - this ould use a DHT on the phones, or could
just be on a server (home server or in the "cloud").
There was a project at Intel a while back that used smart camera phones and 2D barcodes, but this is a bit
different - we use simple image mapping.
Of course, if you lose your own phone, you are totally lost:)
(Of course, if this design is any good, it will let you find your phone by asking friends' help!)
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
Keywords: Mobile, Distributed, Finding Lost Stuff with a Smart Phone.
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Car Pooling extension to miniBus
The miniBus application developed by David Tatersall this summer, allows users of public transport to see live arrival info.
Essentially, the cloud (a server in the infrastructure) looks after aggregating information from multiple
public transport providers, and then users can subscribe to this information, from their smart phone, via 3G or
WiFI, and get local (e.g. if they have google map location service with GPS or via triangulating their position
from cell ower or WiFi APs - all this is already done). They then get info appropriate (e.g. the CitiBus 1 is
about to arrive at a stop just up the road) and can route plan.
This project is an extension to allow private car drivers to offer
their journey info, securely, as if they are a public transport
operator into the same system. i.. Make the system symmetric, so users of a phone can also be (semi-)public
transport operators.
A key requirement is to understand how to integrate an acceptable privacy
architecture into the system. This might be based aroudn extensions to Facebook groups and security mechanisms,
or might be completely new. Clearly, location privacy is of much concern to many people, so this needs to be
thought out carefully (a server should not hold suvh information in the plain, and key distribution and even
revokation would need to be part of the system design architecture).
An extension might see how to get several people in a google latitude group to meet at a point (e.g. a pub in
cambridge) using suitable transport, shared or not! an extension might cope with politely leaving some people
out.
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
Keywords: Mobile, Distributed, Ride Sharing, Security, Smart Phone.
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Bio-feedback Juggling Tutor for Smart Phone w/ Acceleromerter
A ot of new phones have prtty reactive accelerometers - one could
imagine, then, juggling several of these phones (above a cusion,
presumably to minimise cost when you drop them!). A suitably clever
programme could tell when the optimal time to throw each phone in the air
would be - it could use one of the well-known juggling pattern
description languages (for which there are parsers and even simulators).
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
Keywords: Accelerometers, Geometry, Audio/learning, Smart Phone.
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Everyone has heard of youtube, but it takes a lot of resources to
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Goose. Distributed Social Network Services
80% of the world population didn't have Internet access yet in 2008. This ratio is even higher if we consider exclusively developing regions. However, the mobile penetration in these areas is quite high and the people still rely on traditional social mechanisms to communicate. All these facts point out that using mobile phones and the human mobility as the network infrastructure can be the way for deploying social network services and connectivity in developing areas. However, developing areas with limited network are not the only scenarios where that kind of service can be used.
Goose is a distributed Social Network Service (SNS) framework initially designed for providing SNSs for developing countries and also for social experimentation. Its main features are its modularity and scalability in order to support new services that can be adapted to the needs of the local communities. In fact, it allows the users to have full control of their information and it does not require any network infrastructure since the messages can be sent both using local connectivities on a store and forward fashion or through the existing infrastructure (e.g. GSM network).
The first prototype was built on J2ME in order to target as many mobile phones as possible. However, the success of Android handsets makes interesting to explore the possibilities that this platform can offer us to deploy that kind of distributed systems (from GUI to connectivity features and security).
We are looking for a student interested in porting and optimising the system for the Android platform and also willing to explore the possibility of including new features to the system (e.g. support to new applications, connectivities and a resource management optimisation). Resources management, specially memory, processing power and battery, are key when developing mobile and ubiquitous applications to do not affect the user experience.
Contact: Narseo Vallina
Keywords: mobile application, distributed system, social network services, Delay Tolerant Networks
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Lost in Translation
Ever find yourself in a foreign country eager (or clueless) to what is
written on a shop sign or restaurant menu? With your trusty phone, its
camera and some existing web-services that could all be a thing of the
past.
Image analysis skills are a bonus, but also an interest in making (the
ever increasing) global travel experience easier, safer and possibly more
fun.
Contact: Kharsim
Yousef
Keywords: Mobile, Translation, Camera, Image, Analysis.
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A rapid prototyping interpreter for native libraries
Contact: Stephen Kell
Dynamic languages like Python are commonly praised for shortening the programmer's edit--run--debug
cycle. One useful feature is the read--eval--print loop, where snippets of code can be tried out
“live” in an interactive fashion, simply by doing something like
>>> import foo
and then typing Python statements line-by-line which exercise the foo library. It would be
nice if we could do this not only for Python libraries, but for regular shared libraries
libfoo.so. This project would produce an implementation of a subset of Python, designed to
satisfy this requirement.
Thanks to modern dynamic linking and loading infrastructure, dynamically loading code in response to
interpreter commands (like the above) is easily achieved (see dlopen(3)). However, as documented by a recent LtU post, interpreters of dynamic
languages are not written to make use of this infrastructure, nor of the standard descriptive
metadata (such as DWARF) output by compilers (and consumed by debuggers). Instead, they roll their
own interpreter-specific data structures and metadata formats. The result is that there is an
artificial “syntactic gap” between interpreted and compiled languages. The usual
“solution” is a wrapper generator like Swig but this
is hardly adequate: owing to the the syntactic gap, it still doesn't allow direct run-time sharing
of data (i.e. objects in one world may not directly reference objects in the other), adds
unnecessary runtime overhead (thanks to the proxying and/or copying which indirect access entails),
necessitates boilerplate glue code whenever compiled and interpreted worlds communicate, and is very
difficult to debug (since machine-level debuggers can't meaningfully inspect interpreter-level data
structures, and vice-versa). By contrast, this project would avoid the problem by arranging that
Python and “native” objects are essentially indistinguishable at run time. Supporting
Python-style dynamism is a major challenge, but can be done. There are some interesting
philosophical questions concerning raised by this project (such as the effect on language semantics,
particularly run-time safety properties, when values in a running program no longer
“belong” to one language or another) which would need to be covered in the dissertation.
Note that supporting the Python C API would not be necessary at this stage.
Warning: this is a research-oriented project! It's also at the difficult end of
the spectrum. If you're interested, it's very important that you chat to me so that we can hammer
out a proposal which makes a good project from the examiners' perspective (as well as being an
interesting piece of work). It would also be nice for any prospective student to be familiar with
Python (or be keen to learn) and to have a strong interest in both programming languages and
practical system-building. Evaluation rests on our ability to evaluate an implementation of a known
language, by one or more of completeness (how many language features are implemented?), conformance
(of the features implemented, how accurately do they adhere to the specification?) and performance
(what are the CPU and memory costs of running the implementation for various classes of program?).
Essentially we can do all of these by running existing Python programs on the implementation.
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A self-organising file system
Contact: Stephen Kell
If you're anything like me, your file system tends to build up collections of assorted downloads
which ideally you'd like to sort through and file somewhere appropriate in a directory structure.
You probably also have some files which you misfiled for various reasons. It'd be neat if a tool
could learn the rules underlying our individual filing system, and then automatically file stuff as
it comes in, and point out exceptions to the rules caused by misfiling.
There are several potentially interesting aspects to this: learning rules based on a
manually-classified training set; expressing rules in some sort of logic; implementing
interesting predicates in that logic by analysing files in a semantically aware way.
Although I picked the file system as the target domain (since it's what I find hardest to keep
organised!), you could possibly do something similar with mail, bookmarks, and so on. However, the
idea is to go beyond simple syntactic rules on available metadata: you should aim to support
reasonably complex rules and sophisticated semantic discrimination, and this probably makes file
systems the most suitable domain. For example, in my file system I make several distinctions that
aren't captured simply by file name or type: distinctions among written articles based on what
they're about, distinctions among music based on whether it's from a record I own (i.e. has a
corresponding entry in my cddb cache), and so on. You might support these and other kinds of
semantic awareness using NLP techniques (using named entity recognition, perhaps) or image
recognition techniques, or music recognition techniques, and so on.
To take on this project, you should really be someone who has a need for such a system! In other
words you should have your own large file system to work with, and most importantly, some
non-trivial filing policies to implement. Given these, a thorough evaluation of the system will
involve measuring the accuracy of classification achieved by your system, and should be pretty easy.
Overall difficulty: moderate.
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Visualisation of software
Contact: Stephen Kell
Visualisation of software is useful for a number of reasons: comprehension, prototyping, debugging,
profiling and so forth. Various projects are possible which would implement and evaluate a tool for
visualising software in some particular way, aimed towards one or other of these goals.
Specific example problems include: visualising dynamic structure of programs at the object level
(most likely for debugging); visualising static structure at the module level (for comprehension or
prototyping); visualising communication patterns within execution traces (for debugging or
profiling). The hardest part in all cases is making the visuals comprehensible to the viewer:
usually there will be too much data, and/or too dense an interconnection structure, for these to be
useful without further processing. For example, in the case of static graph-based abstractions, such
as call graphs or linkage graphs, usually the number of edges is a problem, since it makes the
layout completely incomprehensible; there are many interesting techniques for clustering nodes,
grouping related edges and eliminating uninformative ones. Three-dimensional visualisations are also
a very interesting avenue, which has been less well-explored and can possibly allow more of the raw
complexity to be usefully retained.
Evaluation of the effectiveness of a visualisation is slightly tricky, but there are a number of
reasonable proxy metrics such as reduction in size (number of nodes/edges in the graph), reduction
in edge crossings (in a two-dimensional graph layout), accuracy of approximation (i.e. how well your
edge grouping/clustering has preserved the information in the original graph). Difficulty: depends
on what specific project you choose, but probably moderate to hard.
- Optimising object placement in a client-server distributed system
Contact: Stephen Kell
If you've ever tried using a thin-client protocol (say an X11 application, or even a web
application) over a high-latency link, you will have noticed that latency kills the user experience.
Web applications fare better than X11, however, because the client side is
“thicker”---the user interface elements are implemented in the browser, so simple UI
operations do not require a round-trip.
The aim of this project is to develop a simple distributed runtime which generalises these
observations into a system which is continually optimising itself with respect to the placement of
its working storage and/or computation. It must do this across variations in latency and throughput
of the link between client and server, and amid disparity of computational resources available at
each. Essentially we are exploiting a dynamic partitioning of computation and storage between the
client and server locations, rather than the usual static one. This is neat because users generally
don't care where computation happens, nor where working storage happens, but it's these which
largely determine performance of the system. (Users usually do care a little about where persistent
storage happens, by contrast.)
To take on this project, you will need a very strong set of practical skills, and should already
have ideas about how you would go about implementing such a system. For example, you might take an
X11 client and server, and build a runtime monitoring and migration service which optimises the
system by moving state (objects) or computations (threads; harder!) between client and server. One
option would then be to reengineer the communication protocol to use an object middleware like Java
RMI, and extend the JVM to support migration of objects (i.e. atomically replacing a local object
with a stub, which hands off to a migrated copy of the original object on a remote system).
However, you should expect to bring your own ideas to the problem. Experimental evaluation is fairly
straightforward with this project. There are also (if you do it well!) lots of interesting
algorithms involved. Difficulty: hard!
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Boot Optimizer
Contact: Ripduman
Sohan
The idea behind this project would be to build a tool that
analysis and optimizes the boot for a typical Linux PC. There is much
scope for integrating (and quantitatively evaluating) a number of
techniques that have been implemented previously (parallel startup,
background startup, reorg of disk blocks, etc) and scope for some new
ideas (delayed loading, load balancing, etc).
Ideally, at the end of the project you will have created an
open-source tool that implements a number of boot optimization
techniques and have numbers evaluating the effectiveness of each of
these techniques.
To take on this project you should have a good idea of Linux, esp
what the boot process entails, a strong set of practical skills and
the ability to design and write a moderately large program properly.
Difficulty: moderate.
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Calorie Counting For Nerds
Contact: Ripduman
Sohan
As a tubby exercise avoider my only weaponry in the battle of the
bulge is to pay close attention to the calorific content of the food I
consume. With the recent (government) push towards healthy eating,
food labelling had been standardized using the Traffic
light standard which provides instant access on the major
composition elements of most processed and pre-packaged foods.
The point of this project would be to create a tool that will
allow me to track my consumption using a smart phone (iPhone, Android
based, etc). I should be able to take a picture of the label and have
the application identify and parse the label, log it and account it
towards my daily intake.
While the baseline project is sufficient, there is a lot of scope
for novelty. For example:
- Is it possible to automatically parse and extract the more
detailed food nutrional information?
- Can you work out the embodied energy contained in the
consumed foods?
- How would you handle non-packaged foods? (You can do it
simply using freely available food lists or more complicatedly
through image recognition (e.g. using IMENSE's engine).
- Is it possible to work out my energy consumption/expenditure
differential using an Inertial Measurement Unit (some modern
smartphones have these)?
A successful execution of this project would not only gain my
external gratitude, but also has the potential for earning you
some money and notoriety. You should have a basic idea of
computer vision and strong practical skills. Difficulty: moderate to
hard.
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Fine-Grained Energy Accounting
Contact: Ripduman
Sohan
The purpose of this project is to instrument the Linux Kernel
so what we can easily and accurately account energy consumption
to user-level processes. It would be immensely useful to know,
for example, that the Apache web server I'm using is costing me a
certain amount in pence for the energy consumed in CPU usage,
RAM usage, disk and network.
While this project seems pretty abstract it's quite simple
and easy to implement and is composed of two distinct elements.
First you need to measure the runtime consumption of common
peripherals and secondly you need to write the accounting
framework. Fortunately, I have numbers for the first goal so you
only need accomplish the second -- and I have ideas on how to do
this part.
To tackle this project you need to have a strong practical
skills, a strong working knowledge of Linux and an overview
understanding of how the Linux kernel works. Difficulty:
moderate to hard.
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TPM Based SSH Keys
Contact: Ripduman
Sohan
Recently, Piete Brooks was forced to restrict remote SSH
access to the lab from known locations because a login was
compromised and the attacker harvested a bunch of SSH keys to try
and break into the lab.
One mechanism for preventing this sort of attack would be to
make use of the
Trusted Platform Module present in the BIOS of modern
computers to store elements of the SSH key. This way, there is
no copy of the private key available to harvest.
A successful execution of this project would create a set of
tools for storing, accessing and modifying the SSH key within the
BIOS and modify the SSH server/client to use it. Extensions to
the project would involve creating a generic framework to store
arbitrary passwords (e.g. for website logins) so that users do
not have to write them down or store them on disk.
Tackling this project would require you to have strong
practical skills and a cursory interest in computer security.
Difficulty: moderate to hard.
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Integrating Page Dirty Bit Sampling In The Linux Kernel
Contact: Ripduman
Sohan
Modern operating systems use heuristics to determine when pages
have been accessed and do not make use of hardware features for the
purposes of portability and simplicity. However, using this
information may lead to more accurate and useful page access
information thus increasing the effectiveness of the page cache.
The idea in this project is to create framework to enable to the
Linux kernel to make use of the page dirty/access bits updated
when the processor writes or reads from a page. The basic idea
is to frequently scan the page table to obtain this information
and integrate it into the kernel where useful things can be done
with it (like updating the LRU cache).
Tackling this project requires you have strong practical skills,
an interest in OS/kernel development and the ability to program
in C. Difficulty: moderate to hard.
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A Toolbox For Common Image Operations
Contact: Ripduman
Sohan
I have a very dear friend who frequently has to do simple
transformation operations (border crop, affine transformations,
lightening, darkening, etc) on a large number of files at once.
She is not about to learn to use OpenCV but would love to do
these operations automatically regardless. She is not unique in
this requirement, there are quite a few people who commonly need
to carry out image operations on large sets of files.
The idea in this project is to create a toolbox for common image
manipulations that non-technical people can use. Ideally there
would be a simple english-like language they could use to
describe the operations.
Tackling this project requires you have strong practical skills,
an interest computer vision, possibly compilers and natural
language processing. Difficulty: moderate to hard.
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Dude, where's my car?
Contact: Fernando
Ramos
Almost everyone that owns a car has certainly experienced this: going
to a shopping centre or to a car park, and forgetting where you parked
it!... And then spending half an hour trying to realise if it was
stolen or not...
A simple application that records the GPS location of your car and
then guides you to it could solve the problem nicely. This would
mainly involve Java programming for an Android phone.
Besides implementing the basic application, it would also be
interesting to address some issues related to the accuracy of GPS
readings and the need of GPS indoor for such system.
Keywords: Mobile, GPS, Java, Smart Phone, Android.
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Notice: your call may be recorded to the cloud!
Contact: Fernando
Ramos
It is really nagging when you have a discussion with someone that goes
like this: "look, I told you thatâ" "sorry, but you
didn;t tell me that" "yes, I am sure I did!".
Wouldn't it be nice to prove that, in fact, you really did say
that?
A Java application built on an Android phone could help you
disentangle the knot. The phone would record all your calls and send
them to a web server (the "cloud"). Later you could access all
your calls (plus voice mail and SMS, if desired) from anywhere.
Besides programming the application for the mobile phone, a web server
would need to be setup and a webpage with decent security features put
in place.
Keywords: Mobile, Java, Smart Phone, Android, web server, voice mail,
security.
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Log me in to my mobile
Contact: Fernando
Ramos
We are so dependent on our mobile phones that when we forget them at
home it seems we've lost a limb. When this happens, it would be
nice to access your mobile from, say, any web browser. Something like
logmein (for example), but instead of accessing a PC
remotely, you would access your mobile phone instead.
An application that establishes a TCP connection with the mobile phone
and retrieves all your missed calls and messages could do the trick.
However, cell phone companies sometimes block "incoming" TCP
connections towards the phone over 3G. To overcome this problem, the
application could send an SMS with the application's IP address
and port, and then it would be the mobile phone establishing the TCP
connection. Then, it could easily send the data using the GSM or 3G
network.
Keywords: Mobile, GSM, 3G, Java, Smart Phone, Android.
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Badger Social Mobility Map
Wild life monitoring provides a huge quantity of data about animal behaviour,
but it is often difficult to understand what insights we can extract from
the collected information.
This project aims to provide an interactive
visualisation of animal movement data and their resulting social contacts. The
data has been recorded over the last year through the use of RFID tags that
are attached to each badger. The presence of an animal at a particular
place is recorded by fixed RFID readers distributed throughout a forest
environment. The amount of collected data spans different months and
contains over 30 animals.
The ultimate goal of this project is to develop an interactive application
which allows the visualization and the analysis of badger movements and
their social contacts over time.
The application should provide:
[1] Visualization of badger presence at different places (e.g. on Google
maps) and extraction of mobility paths between them.
[2] Visualization of the social network created by the encounters between
badgers in different locations and ability to sub-select time intervals in
order to investigate how badger behaviours evolve over time.
[3] Ability to correlate external (e.g. micro-climate) data against badger
movements and computation of some basic network and mobility statistics.
The most challenging point of this project is to provide a user interface
which is both appealing and usable, in order to grasp through
interaction/visual inspection of hidden features in badger behaviour. As a
consequence, this application must provide the ability to interact with the
dataset and select different views of it.
Finally, it must be a Web based application, ideally developed with a Flash, Java or
Ajax framework that integrates with online mapping solutions as Google maps.
Keywords: Badger, Mobility, Social Networks, Web, Flash, Ajax .
Contact: Salvatore Scellato