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Student projects

Below follows a list of project descriptions for students. Some of the projects are finished, some are in progress, and some are still available to students that want to do a UG4, MSc or a PhD projects.

If you want to do an MSc or PhD with us then you need to go through the application procedures set by the School of Informatics. Make sure you discuss your research proposal first with Malcolm Atkinson or David Robertson. Important to note: you need to apply under Intelligent Systems & their Applications.

List of projects

Accelerating data intensive applications using MapReduce

14 January 2010 - 3:08pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Hwee Yong Ong
Grade: 
first

Principal goal: by a way of real case study in the Life Science, the goals of this project include: 1) Understanding data-parallel processing using MapReduce model for addressing Performance issues in data intensive applications; 2) Investigating how to adapt data mining algorihtms to the MapReduce model; 3) Prototyping and comparing performance with other frameworks that support data intensive applications.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
MSc
Background: 
Knowledge of programming in Java; Database, Data mining and integration, and distributed computing.
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Liangxiu.Han
Jano.van.Hemert
Subject areas: 
e-Science
Algorithm Design
Computer Architecture
Computer Communication/Networking
Distributed Systems
Parallel Programming
Student project type: 
MSc student project
References: 
* [1]J. Dean, S. Ghemawat, Mapreduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters, in: In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2004, pp. 137–150. * [2]L. Han, J. I. van Hemert, R. Baldock, M. Atkinson, Automating gene expression annotation for mouse embryo, in: R. H. et al. (Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Advanced Data Mining and Applications, ADMA 2009), Vol. LANI 5678, 2009, pp. 469–478. * [3]EURExpress-II, http://www.eurexpress.org/ee/ * [4] ADMIRE, http://www.admire-project.eu/

Detection and elimination of personal data contained in medical images

5 January 2010 - 4:13pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Yassar Almutairi

Principal goal: evaluating and implementing different techniques for detecting, recognising and eliminating text containing personal data in medical images.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
MSc
Background: 
Good programming skills; experience with image processing desirable
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
David.Rodriguez
Fan.Zhu
Student project type: 
MSc student project
References: 
- James Z. Wang, Michel Bilello and Gio Wiederhold, A Textual Information Detection and Elimination System for Secure Medical Image Distribution Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Proceedings of the AMIA Annual Symposium, vol. 1997 symposium suppl., pp. 896, Nashville, TN, October 1997. - Datong Chen, Jean-Marc Odobez, Hervé Bourlard, Text detection, recognition in images and video frames. Pattern Recognition 37(3): 595-608 (2004) - I. Neamatullah et al. “Automated de-identification of free-text medical records” BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2008, 8:32

Rapid portals for cloud computing

27 November 2009 - 3:50pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Gareth Francis
Grade: 
first

Principle goal: to extend Rapid, which is existing technology, so that it can run compute jobs on several cloud infrastructures seamlessly, whilst ensuring additional drawbacks of cloud computing technology are overcome.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
MSc
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Jos.Koetsier
Subject areas: 
e-Science
Other
WWW Tools and Programming
Student project type: 
MSc student project

Rapid development of a web portal for cosmology data analysis

27 November 2009 - 2:53pm — Jano.van.Hemert

Principle goal: to design and implement a web portal using Rapid (http://research.nesc.ac.uk/rapid/) that allows advanced users to create new analyses and that allows all users to pick up and use these analyses on data from astronomy data archives.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
MSc
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Jos.Koetsier
Other supervisors: 
Thomas Kitching, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh
Subject areas: 
e-Science
Other
WWW Tools and Programming
Student project type: 
MSc student project

Improved data logging, sharing and analysis for the British Geological Survey's School Seismology project

23 November 2009 - 7:10pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Jon Gilbert

The School Seismology project (http://www.bgs.ac.uk/schoolseismology/) enables schools to detect signals from large earthquakes happening anywhere in the world. It is used to teach a range of basic science concepts in over 400 schools around the UK by detecting world earthquakes in the classroom using a simple seismometer system and exchanging Earthquake data with schools around the world.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
UG4
Background: 
Knowledge of Linux essential. Experience with web service development useful.
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Other supervisors: 
Paul Denton, British Geological Survey
Subject areas: 
e-Science
Computer Communication/Networking
Software Engineering
WWW Tools and Programming
Student project type: 
UG4 student project

Optimising Distributed Data Integration and Data Mining Service through Transformation of Data Workflow into Parallel Stream

1 September 2009 - 7:41pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Chee Sun Liew

Over the past decades, running large-scale experiments using computational tools has become popular in modern science. The data processing steps involved in such experiments are usually complex and compute intensive. A challenge arises when the demand comes from large collaboration projects that involve running computations across institutions and continents, where the data and machines are located on distributed sites. The common solution to make the experiments more manageable is executing the processing steps as a workflow, using domain-specific or generic workflow management systems.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
PhD
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Malcolm.Atkinson
Jano.van.Hemert
Student project type: 
PhD student project

Improving quality and reliability of results in gene expression studies by accounting for systematic artefacts

14 August 2009 - 4:39pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Rob Kitchen

With the growing complexity and procurement costs of these high-throughput platforms, it is becoming increasingly common for the experiments to be deployed in central ‘core facilities’. This service-oriented paradigm is a recent development and one that is generally welcomed by lab-researchers and data-analysts as it encourages the standardisation of experimental protocols and reduces costs of hardware maintenance.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
PhD
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Other supervisors: 
Prof Peter Clarke (School of Physics); Dr Varrie Ogilvie (Molecular Medicine Centre, University of Edinburgh)
Subject areas: 
e-Science
Bioinformatics
Student project type: 
PhD student project

Google Summer of Code 2009: Generating User Interfaces to the Cloud

21 March 2009 - 9:21pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Raviteja Dodda

Rapid is a unique way of quickly designing and delivering web portal interfaces to applications that require computational resources, such as utility computing infrastructures or high-performance computing facilities. It focuses on the requirements of the end-user by designing customised user interfaces for domain-specific applications that allow users to achieve particular tasks.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
NR
Background: 
Knowledge of Java is required. A bit of experience with XML is useful.
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Jos.Koetsier
Subject areas: 
e-Science
WWW Tools and Programming
Projects: 
Rapid
Student project type: 
Internship student project
References: 
Rapid: http://research.nesc.ac.uk/rapid/ Google Summer of Code 2009: http://socghop.appspot.com/ OMII-UK: http://www.omii-uk.ac.uk/ EUCALYPTUS: http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/ Hadoop: http://hadoop.apache.org/

Improving knowledge curation in structured wiki-like collaborative environments

10 February 2009 - 3:22pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Luna De Ferrari

This work aims at defining, modelling and evaluating the integrated use of collaborative software and machine learning for building high quality knowledge resources. A possible scenario is Molecular Biology, where high-throughput data production is overwhelming the traditional centralised data annotation by paid experts. Many biological resources have moved to collaborative software platforms, predominantly wikis, in an effort to involve the wider community and replicate the success story of Wikipedia.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
PhD
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Other supervisors: 
Igor Goryanin, School of Informatics; Stuart Aitken, AIAI
Student project type: 
PhD student project
References: 
[1] William A Baumgartner, K. Bretonnel Cohen, Lynne M Fox, George Acquaah-Mensah, and Lawrence Hunter. Manual curation is not suffcient for annotation of genomic databases. Bioinformatics, 23(13):i41–i48, Jul 2007.

Planning Emergency Movement for the Built Environment

10 February 2009 - 3:17pm — Jano.van.Hemert
Student: 
Thomas French

The goal of this project is to investigate methods for finding emergency movement plans in dynamic and uncertain environments, specifically buildings. Current techniques used to solve these problems, like (Opasanon, 2004), make unrealistic assumptions about human behaviour during emergency movement. For example, they assume that occupants travelling through a building do not directly interact, and, therefore, provide instructions that presume people who arrive at a decision point at the same time will split up if told to do so.

Project status: 
Finished
Degree level: 
PhD
Supervisors @ NeSC: 
Jano.van.Hemert
Other supervisors: 
Austin Tate, AIAI; Stephen Potter, AIAI; Gerhard Wickler, AIAI; Jose Torero, School of Engineering
Subject areas: 
e-Science
Algorithm Design
Genetic Algorithms/Evolutionary Computing
Projects: 
FireGrid
Student project type: 
PhD student project
References: 
(Opasanon, 2004) S. Opasanon. On Finding Paths and Flows in Multicriteria, Stochastic and Time-Varying Networks. PhD thesis, University of Maryland, 2004. (SFPE, 2002) SFPE. SFPE Handbook for Fire Protection Engineering. National Fire Pro- tection Association, 3rd edition, January 2002.

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