List of Projects

Project Submission is Closed for BOOM 2017

Thank you to all the presenters.











Title Description
Accessimaps We implemented all the steps
involved in human computer interaction design through this project to build a
solution to find accessible entrances for users to assist in independent
living. Individuals with mobility difficulties
have been found to face a lot of difficulty while commuting from one place to
other. This problem has become a major impediment to their independence in
executing their daily activities and travel. On conducting extensive user
interviews for understanding specific problems and goals of these users, it
was realized that individuals with mobility difficulties bound on a
wheelchair faced severe problems in their commute in terms of accessibility
and navigation. To address this
problem, we have come up with niche accessibility and navigation mobile
application ‘Accessimaps’ to empower our users with accessibility points and
navigation routes of specific buildings for them better and pre-plan their
commute to various destinations. The application also lets our users save
particular routes to let others access them without prior search feed and
thereby help the community.
http://bit.ly/invision_prototype_video
http://bit.ly/prototype_invision
Baby
Bump
Obesity is the most
outstanding problem during pregnancy, resulting in significant consequences,
such as difficult deliveries and gestational diabetes. In the US 70% of women
that are overweight before pregnancy end up in the obese category. To tackle
this issue we propose an Alexa Skill to help these women manage and track
their weight as well as connect with the pregnant community.
Benefits
of Resource Disaggregation in Datacenters
The slowdown of Moore’s law
has led to surfacing of several fundamental limitations of today’s
server-centric architectures. As a result, a new computing paradigm is
emerging — a disaggregated architecture, where each resource type is built as
a standalone “blade” and a network fabric interconnects the resource blades.
While beneficial from the computer architecture perspective, conventional
wisdom suggests that decoupling of resources will lead to performance
degradation for legacy systems and applications. Thus, widespread adoption of
such architectures is currently gated on systems community building systems
and applications optimized for this emerging computing paradigm. We present preliminary evidence that the
above blockage may be unfounded. Our main insight is that disaggregated
architectures offer finer-grained resource multiplexing and improved
“packing” of jobs compared to server-centric architectures. We show that, for
many legacy systems and applications, performance degradation due to resource
disaggregation can be completely offset by improvements due to higher
resource utilization in disaggregated architectures. (Paper submitted to the Usenix HotCloud
’17 workshop)
Brought
to Light
Brought to Light is a
desktop game that combines the puzzle and thriller genres, dropping you in a
ruin with no map and no way to deal with enemies except candlelight. Instead
of favoring light or shadow, strategically switching between light and dark
is needed to explore the environment, avoid and interact with enemies, unlock
doors, and eventually escape each level. The light and dark offer different
advantages over the environment, with monsters turning from helpful tools to
deadly enemies when the light changes. Alternating between the light and dark
states to solve the puzzles and find the escape, you are never safe.
CiceroDB:
Optimizing Voice Output of Relational Data
Recent research on data
visualization aims at automatically identifying the best way to represent
data on visual interfaces. Supported by a Google faculty Award, the Cornell
Database Group is currently studying the complementary problem of "data
audiolization". The goal here is to optimize the way in which structured
data is represented via audio interfaces. This problem setting is motivated
by emerging devices such as Google Home or Amazon Echo that interact with
users primarily over voice based interfaces. In this demo, we present a very early
prototype of CiceroDB, an experimental database system that will offer
different modules to translate data into voice output. In the current
prototype, we model voice output optimization as an NP-hard optimization
problem with the goal to reduce speaking time for outputting a given data set
(subject to user-defined output precision constraints). The current prototype
applies either exhaustive or polynomial time algorithms with approximation
guarantees to solve the voice output optimization problem and reads out the
optimized results. We currently reduce speaking time by removing redundancies
which is appropriate for outputting relatively small data sets. In future
work, we will explore methods to transmit information that allow users to get
insights about the distributions underlying larger data sets.
Cloud
Model
While many cloud providers
appear to provide identical services, actual performance may vary greatly based on user applications,
underlying technologies, and other factors. In this project, we explore the difference between many
cloud services such as Fractus, Amazon EC2, and Microsoft Azure and try to understand why those differences
exist. We will explore performance related to both the network and storage. We also mimic real
world usage with a test application called Ceph.
Constableaux Constableaux is an automated
theorem prover and educational tool based off of the method of analytic
tableaux. Given a formula in propositional logic, Constableaux proves whether
or not it is a tautology, and generates an interactive, step-by-step tree visualization
of a proof or counter-example. Our project aims to help students who have
trouble grasping the underlying intuition behind proofs of propositional
logic by presenting them through a visual medium. Propositional logic is the
foundation for theoretical computer science, but we’ve found that many
students, including us, have trouble following proofs with case analysis and
heavy branching. The size of a page forces textbook writers to present proofs
in a linear fashion, when the intuition behind such proofs is anything but
linear. Our tool presents proofs in a tree-like structure, which more closely
models the way we reason about such proofs. Additionally, students can run
through a proof step-by-step, zooming into specific portions of the proof
with explanations along the way. Constableaux was created as a cummulative
project for MATH/CS 4860: Applied Logic, in Fall 2016, under the supervision
of Professor Bob Constable.
Cornell
Data Science Training Program
The Cornell Data Science
Training Program, a one-credit course offered through the Cornell Data
Science project team, is a twelve-week unofficial course that focuses on
manipulating data, visualizing trends, and implementing machine learning
algorithms. Students, who are not expected to have any programming
experience, are exposed to concepts through the R programming language, which
is used to complete four assignments and two real-world data science
projects. The goal of the training program is to give students practical
hands on experience with data science, and to equip them with the tools
needed to take on their own projects. Topics include linear and logistic
regression, decision trees, bayesian classifiers, clustering algorithms, text
analytics, big data tools, and ensemble methods. Over 100 students are
currently enrolled.
Cornell
Hyperloop
We are an engineering
project team competing in SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition.
Cornell
Mars Rover
The Cornell Mars Rover
project team designs an innovative Mars rover to compete in the University
Rover Challenge. We are an interdisciplinary student-run team that brings
together talented minds from engineering, science, and business. Together, we
foster creativity through the development of our competitive design.
Cornell
Reviews
A course review website for
Cornell students, by Cornell students.
Cornell
RobotArt
This project competes in the
RobotArt competition. Our team collaborates with Cornell Autonomous Systems
Lab (cornell-asl.org) to implement an autonomous, artistic behavior on KUKA
Youbot. The implemented system is able to create visually interesting paintings
on canvas.
Cornell
Steel Bridge
Cornell Steel Bridge is an
interdisciplinary project team that designs, fabricates, welds, and
constructs a 20’ multi-member steel bridge for the annual ASCE Student Steel
Bridge competition. During our design phase, we extensively use modeling
software such as MASTAN and Autodesk Fusion 360 to analyze element forces and
capacities, connection strength, and failure modes in buckling and lateral
stability. MASTAN is a matrix structural analysis program that serves as our
primary tool for linear elastic finite element bridge modeling, while Fusion
360 functions as a key component for optimizing our bridge connections. Using
these applications, we completed our bridge design for the 2017 competition
during the fall semester, and both programs have optimized the iterative
process for the analysis phase of our work.
Cornell
University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
The Cornell University
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV) team designs and builds fully
autonomous vehicles for competition and research.
Cornell
University Unmanned Air Systems – Theia
We are an interdisciplinary
project team that combines aspects of computer science, engineering, and
business.
CU
There
It’s tough to find
interesting events on campus since sources of information are decentralized:
most people rely on Facebook event recommendations. We’ve created a system
that uses Facebook data (and other event data sources if need be) as the
basis of an IR system for searching public Cornell events by time, location,
organization, keyword, etc. In addition to the events finder, we built a
system that will apply machine learning to events data to help event
organizers intelligently plan on-campus events by determining the location
and time of the event that maximizes attendance.
Cupcake
Froster
we designed, built, and
programmed an economical and easy-to-use cupcake frosting machine. Our
cupcake froster can create 3 major cupcake designs: spiral, flower, and
Pokéball. It utilizes a Photon microprocessor, DC motors, stepper motors and
drivers, laser-cut acrylic, 3D printed parts, and ready-made structural
parts. Frosting is pumped from a syringe by using a lead screw and an acrylic
plate. To create patterns, we have a Lazy Susan rotating base and a sliding platform, both powered by
stepper motors. Together, we have a simple and elegant machine that creates
interesting designs.
Depth
Perception for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Deserted
Desktop Game
Magic Studios, a team of 6
undergraduate students, collaborated to develop this desktop game. Deserted
is a turn-based tactics game revolving around the character Dara who forms
alliances with spirits to fight in a tournament challenging the upper class.
Extending
Cultural Comprehension
As part of research in the
Intercultural Communication Lab, we created two Google Chrome extensions
designed to increase understanding among speakers of different languages on
Facebook. We use IBM Watson’s Alchemy API and TextRazor API to conduct
sentiment, emotion, and entity analyses on foreign posts to provide users
with information to improve comprehension of cultural context.
cred.it A design for the treatment of fake news on Facebook. With the recent onset of concern about the prominence of fake news, we felt that this problem would be especially relevant. Our project includes mockups and prototypes for an extension that would tackle fake news and unverified news.
Fridge
Friend – A Food Waste Solution
Our project is focused on
reducing consumer-side food waste by allowing people to better visualize the
contents of their refrigerator. By
raising awareness of food consumption habits, we hope to better inform purchasing
behavior and reduce the environmental ramifications of food waste.
GraffitiBot GraffitiBot is a portable
device that can be used to create art in public places. It consists of a
drawing head, two wall-mounted stepper motors controlled via stepper drivers,
and a Photon microcontroller. It is capable of drawing on virtually any smooth
surface including blackboards, whiteboards, glass, paper, and even painted
walls. GraffitiBot can also draw with nearly any implement: pens, markers,
pencils etc. GraffitiBot can be used to inspire education, advertise a
project, make public announcement, or create art.  The project is
useful because it promotes artistic and technological literacy while sparking
a dialogue about the boundary between art and technology. Is it a tool or a
creator?  Is its work derivative or original? GraffitiBot revisits
old questions about the role of machines in our lives.
HealthPass:
Bridging Communication Gaps Within the Healthcare System
HealthPass is a digital
application that allows for patients to take control of their own healthcare
data, learn about their health status and seamlessly transfer their medical
information to any healthcare facility around the world. We developed this application
in response to data gathered during interviews with international students
who expressed their frustration in dealing with the healthcare system in the
United States. These patients told us about not being able to seamlessly
transfer their basic medical information such as immunization and allergy
records and not fully understanding what practitioners were communicating to
them. To develop the application, we employed the use of a user-centered
design process that included gathering insight from our target user
population through feedback sessions. This allowed us to improve on our
prototypes and through several iterations, we were able to design an
application that most effectively responded to the needs of our target users.
Hippo:
a HIPAA-compliant Video Chat App
Cornell Engineering World
Health is building a HIPAA-compliant telemedicine platform for doctors and
patients to conduct virtual appointments through video conferencing. The
platform aims to provide health care to patients in remote or under-resourced
areas.
Koober An interactive website
integrated with PredictionIO to predict taxi demand based on past usage and
analyze trends depending on time, location, and weather.
Laser
Penguins
Laser Penguins is a
multiplayer networked game for iOS and Android devices. It is a top-down
shooter with bullet ricochet and a fast paced, bite-sized play time.
March
Madness Kaggle Model
The Kaggle Competition Team
is a subteam of the Cornell Data Science project team. We developed an
ensemble model for predicting 2017 March Madness tournament results on
Kaggle, an online data science competition platform. Each team member
developed their own logistic regression model with a unique set of engineered
features, using metrics such as the ELO rating system and Massey Ordinals. We
then combined these into one logistic regression model that uses the outputs
of each individual’s model as features.
Memory
Dis-aggregation For Rack Scale Computers
Modern computers have
processors coupled with memory. But memory utilization is not the same across
all servers. Depending on various applications running on server, some may be
under-utilizing the memory while others may be in need of extra memory. With
recent advances in the speed of networks, we can now start thinking of
decoupling the processor with the local memory. The servers would all be
connected on a network and would share memory. This makes it easier to scale
memory as per the application. This is the idea behind Memory dis
aggregation.
Mount
Sputnik
The player takes control of
Yuri, a Russian rock climber who wants to follow in the footsteps of his
namesake and reach the stars. Using only his own body, Yuri must scale
treacherous terrain, managing both his energy and unwieldy limbs, to reach
space.
Napkin
Folding Machine
We built a prototype in
Rapid Prototyping that folds napkins. It starts with a flat napkin, and has
wooden flaps passing it down an assembly line. It pops up a napkin at the
end.
Open
Mind – Human Swarm Interaction in the Context of Construction
The field of swarm robotics
is increasingly popular, however, human swarm interaction is poorly
understood. Our goal is to improve understanding of how one person can
control a swarm; how many people can work efficiently alongside swarms; and
what metrics can be used to evaluate such systems. Specifically, based on an old system for
autonomous collective construction of 3D structures, we have developed
autonomous agents able to assemble structures towards a user-specified goal
in the online game “Minecraft”. Minecraft is a natural environment for
experimenting with construction techniques, and has a set of open API’s to
allow external intervention. We have developed a simple browser tool to let
users design their desired structure; we then compile this into a custom data
structure that can be used by the simulated robots. We also allow human users
to join the game to work alongside the agents, and introduce a human foreman
who can observe and manage the workforce through an overlay GUI to ensure
completion of the correct structure.
This framework will lay the groundwork for future studies of how
robots and humans may collaborate efficiently in complex scenarios, and how
we can enable a layman user to operate a large swarm of ubiquitous robots.
Para:
A Plane’s Journey
A paper airplane has escaped
from its cold, claustrophobic office prison and aims to explore the open
world. Interested in the little plane’s adventure, you accompany it using
your wind powers to guide it through the unfamiliar and sometimes hostile
environment. We created this game
in CS4152 with Walker White, and are continuing to work on it. In the project
URL I have linked to a trailer.
Plant
Operations Smartphone Tracker
The Plant Operations
Smartphone Tracker (POST) is a suite of applications for the collection,
analysis, optimization, and visualization of water quality data from rural
water treatment plants in central america. With POST, plant operators and
implementation partners can easily track plant parameters and visualize
performance over time. Data collection is fully robust to intermittent
internet connection, and optimal for use in remote laboratory settings. POST
is installed in several water treatment plants in Honduras and has collected
over 4000 submissions from plant operators since Spring 2016.
Reduct Reduct, an educational game,
aims to teach novices basic programming concepts with a comprehension-first
approach based on operational semantics. The game slowly transitions from
concrete, block-based representations of code to the underlying JavaScript,
ensuring understanding while still teaching the language syntax. We present
both the base game, which deals with functions, equality, Boolean values, and
other core constructs, as well as an extension which introduces imperative
programming features, such as mutable state, expression ordering, and loops.
Remote
AXI
In our project, we
investigate the architectural implications of tunneling the AXI bus over a
network between nodes, for the purpose of memory and I/O disaggregation. We
will test our assumptions using a prototype running on an FPGA.
Shoal
Storm
Shoal Storm is a
stealth-action side scroller developed by Intertidal Games. Shoal Storm is
written in Java using libgdx, Box2D, and Gradle. The game features dynamic
collision detection, enemy AI, and elegant fish swarming.
Smart
Planner
Scheduling and making a note
of announcements and deadlines through various learning management systems
(LMS) is a cumbersome process. It is difficult to browse through different
LMS for every coursework to schedule or create events on your generic calendar.
The web application ‘Smart Planner’ addresses this problem and provides a
convenient one click solution for it. With this application, we have
automated the process of searching
deadlines through a search and get algorithm in gmail to gather the data and
put it in the app. For this project, we have built a web based android
application called ‘Smart Planner’ to schedule intelligently while containing
time. To come up with this end result, we conducted three rounds of user
interviews, design iterations and finally developed it on ionic frameworks
using angular.js. In addition to this we integrated google sign in
functionality, gmail API search (fetch deadline data from user’s gmail) and
google calendar API (to auto-populate on calendar). We have incorporated
client recommendations and user feedback at every stage of our project. When you open this application it will
automatically list your upcoming deadlines, announcements from the various
LMS without actually opening them. We have also provided a calendar that
would be automatically populated on hitting the calendar view feature on this
application. In addition, we have also incorporated a checkbox feature for
the list of deadlines to check them done on completion.
TCAT
iOS App – CUAppDev
An open-source iOS app
designed and developed from the ground up to help Cornell students use the
TCAT transit system.
Teddington Teddington is a Puzzle
Platformer computer game built by a team of 4 programmers and 2 designers
during the course CS3152. Game
description: Memories fade with age.
Staring into the empty gaze of the old lady lying next to him, Teddy wishes
his owner recognizes him. Determined to build a commemorative photo album,
Teddy ventures through the 19th century city Teddington to collect beautiful
but forgotten memories. With your power to place items anywhere in
Teddington, design the paths to help Teddy complete his quest.
Tempo Tempo is the second app from
CUAppDev. It allows users to post their song of the day and discover what
others are listening to.
The
FactChecker: Verifying Natural Language Summaries of Relational Datasets
Fake news are perceived as a
growing problem and purely manual approaches to fact checking fail to scale.
The Cornell Database Group has recently started to develop semi-automatic
tools that support users in checking natural language descriptions of relational
data. This scenario is more and more common nowadays as newspapers, articles
as well as blog entries refer to statistics that are derived from large
datasets. We analyze the text
surrounding numerical statistics to extract keywords that hint at the SQL
queries underlying the postulated numbers. We efficiently merge the
computation of alternative query candidates and analyze the match between
text and data. We finally envision a tool similar to a spell checker that
marks up verified or suspicious text passages for users while at the same
time requesting user feedback about text passages that are difficult to
analyze.
Home+ To assist with independent
living, we have built a soft robotics device to pick up things for people who
are unable to use their fingers to pick up things either because of old age
or an accident. This is a wearable pneumatic device activated by a touch sensor
which will be in the user’s sleeve. The-Helping-Hand will ensure that they
will be able to pick up things as before.
X-Docker:
Truly isolated docker containers
The cloud network access to
a seemingly infinite amount of compute and storage. What underlies the cloud
is the notion of virtual machines, a layer of software that allows physical
hardware processors to be multiplexed over many "virtual" machines.
As a consequence, Virtual machines, and lighter-weight "containers"
now power the cloud! This project aims to integrate a very popular container
technology called Docker with with a new container called X-container. Docker
is extremely popular but does not support true isolation which can lead to
security concerns. X-container is a Xen based virtual machine infrastructure
that attempts to blend the best of both worlds, the low overhead of
containers with the security of virtual machines. This project aims to
integrate Docker with the X-container runtime; providing truly isolated
docker containers while minimising the overheads from spawning a virtual
machine for each container. By using
an X-container back-end with Docker we can maintain the advantages provided
by lightweight containers while increasing security and isolation.
Resolve & Vent Guide the lonely half note Minim through a world of music by syncing in time with rhythmic obstacles.
SYNC A stress management app that creates an anonymous community for people to resolve problems and to vent about their stress.