On Tuesday, May 30, the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) held its annual Senior Design Project Competition which showcased four outstanding senior project development groups.
Senior Design Project is part of a multi-term capstone experience involving in-depth study and application of computing and informatics. Students work in teams to develop a significant product.
The projects require the use of a development process that includes planning, specification, design, implementation, evaluation and documentation. Projects are often conceived by external stakeholders who guide the requirements process and ultimately use the resulting application. Groups may be interdisciplinary with students from varied departments within the
College of Engineering and the Digital Media program in the
Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design.
This year, a total of 31 senior projects were developed at CCI – the most projects in the College’s history.
Projects are judged in a multi-level competition on originality, compliance with software engineering principles, completion and their successful deployment. This year’s judges included Rob Johnson, chief architect of the Unisys health program at Unisys Systems; Earlin Lutz, advisory software engineer at Bentley Systems; Colin Kerr, software engineer at Bentley Systems; Brian Mitchell, PhD, senior director of Cigna’s architecture team; and Paul Fryzel, programmer at Condé Nast.
CCI would like to thank this year's Senior Design Project Competition
sponsors for their generous support: Unisys, Bentley, Cigna, and Condé Nast.
This year’s CCI Senior Project Competition prize winners include:
Description: Highwater is a roguelike survival game that places heavy emphasis on simulated weather conditions, a procedurally generated city, and intuitive crafting. The weather simulation tracks a storm which causes fluctuations in temperature, wind, and water level, creating a constantly changing terrain for the player to navigate. Highwater is set in a city generated by leveraging procedural meshes to providing a different iteration each playthrough. Crafting allows players to gather various raw materials, each with properties that allow users to experiment with and combine items in many ways to create more complex tools.
Team Members: Colan Biemer, Allison Frauenpreis, Gabrielle Getz, Jasmine Marcial, Laura Mo, Shreya Patel
Faculty Advisor: Jeffrey Salvage, teaching professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Frank Lee, PhD, associate professor of digital media, Westphal
Description: In this age of the Internet, we have abundance of information. Today, to find any information, we use search engines like Google. These systems don’t give a definite answer but provide a list of Web pages which may have the answer. Drexel Chatbot is a question answering system which tries to understand the query and provide a definitive answer using neural networks. For example, if it receives the question: "what time does the gym close today?", it may give the response: “the gym closes at 10 p.m. today.” Similar question answering systems exist for other domains, but Drexel Chatbot focuses on only answering questions about Drexel, making it more reliable than other general purpose chatbots. Drexel chatbot provides a Web API that serves the chatbot. Other developers can then use the API to integrate the system into their own applications. Sample web and mobile interfaces demonstrate the use of the API.
Team Members: Thomas Amon, Aaron Campbell, Daniel Fitzick, Nanxi Zhang, Shishir Kharel, Hoa Vu
Faculty Advisor: Filippos Vokolos, PhD, associate teaching professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Marcello Balduccini, PhD, assistant research professor, CCI
Description: With so much useful information on the internet, it can be hard to keep track of websites and PDFs for reference. Bookmarks are clunky to organize, and keeping multiple tabs open can slow down your computer and clutter your screen. However, with Archivist, all the websites and PDFs that you store are both easily accessible via our comprehensive search feature and out of the way when not in use. A carbon copy of a webpage can be archived in just a few seconds without ever leaving the page by using Archivist’s chrome extension. Each saved item is tied to automatically generated and editable metadata and tags to make the document easy to locate using our custom designed search. After saving, you can even search the text of a file to find an exact paragraph or phrase that you are thinking of.
Team Members: Charles Gilliam, Dung Mai, Robert Edwards, Scott Selinger, Tyler Boswell
Faculty Advisor: Rosina Weber, PhD, associate professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Lorraine Richards, PhD, assistant professor, CCI
In addition to the final four teams, the following outstanding projects received special recognition:
Best Health Care Application (tied)
Project: iPearDescription: iPear is a mobile application that provides emergency dispatchers with more accurate location data for mobile 9-1-1 calls and information relevant in emergency situations.
Team Members: Alex Yang, Austin Schaeffer, Chris Ozgar, Daniel Lopez, Nathan Andrews, Nina Huenke
Faculty Advisor: Chris Yang, PhD, associate professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Alex Zausner, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Best Health Care Application (tied)
Project: DisEasy
Description: DisEasy provides easy-to-use data visualizations to depict their disease likelihood relative to empirical population data using patient laboratory results.
Team Members: Angeline Aguinaldo, Kofi Lewis, Lucy Moss, Joel Parks, Julian Plotnick, Flint Rowell
Faculty Advisor: Rosina Weber, PhD, associate professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Anita Gupta, DO, PharmD
Best Virtual Reality Game
Project: Shadow Circuit
Description: A fast-paced, room scale virtual reality sports game utilizing whips and gravity wells to redirect the ball.
CCI Team Members: Mike DiLucca, Andrew DiNunzio, Johanna Oberto, John Gall, Sanjay Balaji
Digital Media Team Members: Daniel Ingman, Tyler Schacht, Mike Cancelosi, Cory Zicolella, Ryan Badurina
Faculty Advisor: Jeff Salvage, teaching professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Stefan Rank, assistant professor of game art & production, Westphal
Best Project Management
Project: Menti
Description: Menti is a system you teach, naturally reinforcing your own understanding of algebra.
CCI Team Members: Micah Chao, Aaron Segal, Ryan Young, Alex Palmatier, Jonathan McDaniel
Faculty Advisor: Filippos Vokolos, PhD, associate teaching professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Mike Fiocco, Father Judge High School
Best Community Service
Project: LifeKit
Description: The United States is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. Many patients and drug users are dying of overdoses in record numbers. Oftentimes, help is simply not available and/or not on time. Lifekit seeks to be a rapid response system to overdosers — notifying emergency responders to quickly neutralize the effects of the overdose with a drug called Naloxone. With the LifeKit self-designed proprietary hardware to measuring body posture and respiratory rate, the app will automatically detect overdoses and alert responders of the overdosers’ whereabouts for assistance.
CCI Team Members: Khoi Tran Kathy Lu Jacob Smith Anh Le Jaehoon Kim Justice Ogbonna
Faculty Advisor: Filippos Vokolos, PhD, associate teaching professor, CCI
External Stakeholder: Anita Gupta, DO, PharmD