public_html: comparison bsc-projects-14.html

equal deleted inserted replaced

-:4846ce596db9
+:841fdad7fcdc
 defined as &ldquo;a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and
 stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum
 necessary.&rdquo; I am always happy to supervise like-minded students.</H4>
 <ul class="striped">
-<li> <H4>[CU1] Regular Expression Matching and Partial Derivatives</H4>
+<li> <H4>[CU1] Regular Expression Matching and Derivatives</H4>
 <p>
 <B>Description:</b>
 <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">Regular expressions</A>
 are extremely useful for many text-processing tasks such as finding patterns in texts,
 introduced in 1950 by <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cole_Kleene">Stephen Kleene</A>,
 you might think regular expressions have since been studied and implemented to death. But you would definitely be
 mistaken: in fact they are still an active research area. For example
 <A HREF="http://www.home.hs-karlsruhe.de/~suma0002/publications/ppdp12-part-deriv-sub-match.pdf">this paper</A>
 about regular expression matching and partial derivatives was presented last summer at the international
-PPDP'12 conference. They even work on a followup paper that has not yet been presented at any
+FLOPS'14 conference. The task in this project is to implement their results.</p>
-conference. The task in this project is to implement their results.</p>
 <p>The background for this project is that some regular expressions are
 &ldquo;<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS#Examples">evil</A>&rdquo;
 and can &ldquo;stab you in the back&rdquo; according to
 this <A HREF="http://tech.blog.cueup.com/regular-expressions-will-stab-you-in-the-back">blog post</A>.
 For example, if you use in <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A> or
-in <A HREF="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/">Ruby</A> (probably also other mainstream programming languages) the
+in <A HREF="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/">Ruby</A> (or also a number of other mainstream programming languages according to this
+<A HREF="http://www. computerbytesman.com/redos/">blog</A>) the
 innocently looking regular expression <code>a?{28}a{28}</code> and match it, say, against the string
 <code>aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa</code> (that is 28 <code>a</code>s), you will soon notice that your CPU usage goes to 100%. In fact,
 Python and Ruby need approximately 30 seconds of hard work for matching this string. You can try it for yourself:
 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/cgi-bin/repos.cgi/afl-material/raw-file/tip/progs/re.py">re.py</A> (Python version) and
 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/cgi-bin/repos.cgi/afl-material/raw-file/tip/progs/re.rb">re.rb</A>
 mounting a nice <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack">DoS attack</A> against
 your program if it contains such an &ldquo;evil&rdquo; regular expression. Actually
 <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A> (and also Java) are almost immune from such
 attacks as they can deal with strings of up to 4,300 <code>a</code>s in less than a second. But if you scale
 the regular expression and string further to, say, 4,600 <code>a</code>s, then you get a <code>StackOverflowError</code>
-potentially crashing your program.
+potentially crashing your program. Moreover (beside the problem of being painfully slow) according to this
+<A HREF="http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Regex_Posix">report</A>
+nearly all POSIX regular expression matchers are actually buggy.
 </p>
 <p>
 On a rainy afternoon, I implemented
 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/cgi-bin/repos.cgi/afl-material/raw-file/tip/progs/re3.scala">this</A>
 expression matchers in Python and Ruby.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now the authors from the
-<A HREF="http://www.home.hs-karlsruhe.de/~suma0002/publications/ppdp12-part-deriv-sub-match.pdf">PPDP'12-paper</A> mentioned
+<A HREF="http://www.home.hs-karlsruhe.de/~suma0002/publications/ppdp12-part-deriv-sub-match.pdf">FLOPS'14-paper</A> mentioned
 above claim they are even faster than me and can deal with even more features of regular expressions
 (for example subexpression matching, which my rainy-afternoon matcher cannot). I am sure they thought
 about the problem much longer than a single afternoon. The task
 in this project is to find out how good they actually are by implementing the results from their paper.
-Their approach is based on the concept of partial derivatives introduced in 1994 by
+Their approach is based on the concept of derivatives introduced in 1994 by
 <A HREF="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.56.2509&rep=rep1&type=pdf">Valentin Antimirov</A>.
 I used them once myself in a <A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Publications/rexp.pdf">paper</A>
 in order to prove the <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myhill–Nerode_theorem">Myhill-Nerode theorem</A>.
 So I know they are worth their money. Still, it would be interesting to actually compare their results
 with my simple rainy-afternoon matcher and potentially &ldquo;blow away&rdquo; the regular expression matchers
-in Python and Ruby (and possibly in Scala too).
+in Python and Ruby (and possibly in Scala too). The application would be to implement a fast lexer for
+programming languages.
 </p>
 <p>
 <B>Literature:</B>
 The place to start with this project is obviously this
 Finally, there are millions of other pointers about regular expression
 matching on the Web. I found the chapter on Lexing in this
 <A HREF="http://www.diku.dk/~torbenm/Basics/">online book</A> very helpful.
 Test cases for &ldquo;<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS#Examples">evil</A>&rdquo;
 regular expressions can be obtained from <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS#Examples">here</A>.
 </p>
 <p>
 <B>Skills:</B>
 This is a project for a student with an interest in theory and some
 <p>
 An alternative is to not generate machine code, but build a compiler that compiles to
 <A HREF="http://www.w3schools.com/js/">JavaScript</A>. This is the language that is supported by most
 browsers and therefore is a favourite
 vehicle for Web-programming. Some call it <B>the</B> scripting language of the Web.
-Unfortunately, JavaScript is probably one of the worst
+Unfortunately, JavaScript is also probably one of the worst
 languages to program in (being designed and released in a hurry). <B>But</B> it can be used as a convenient target
 for translating programs from other languages. In particular there are two
 very optimised subsets of JavaScript that can be used for this purpose:
 one is <A HREF="http://asmjs.org">asm.js</A> and the other is
 <A HREF="https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki">emscripten</A>.
 But if Scala is a problem, my code can also be translated quickly into any other functional
 language.
 </p>
 <p>
-<B>PS:</B> Compiler projects, like this [CU2] and [CU3], consistently received high marks in the past.
+<B>PS:</B> Compiler projects, like this [CU2] and [CU6], consistently received high marks in the past.
 I suprvised four so far and none of them received a mark below 70% - one even was awarded a prize.
 </p>
-<li> <H4>[CU3] Language Translator into JavaScript</H4>
+<li> <H4>[CU3] Slide-Making in the Web-Age</H4>
+<p>
+The standard technology for writing scientific papers in Computer Science  is to use
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX">LaTeX</A>, a document preparation
+system originally implemented by <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth">Donald Knuth</A>
+and <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport">Leslie Lamport</A>.
+LaTeX produces very pleasantly looking documents, can deal nicely with mathematical
+formulas and is very flexible. If you are interested, <A HREF="http://openwetware.org/wiki/Word_vs._LaTeX">here</A>
+is a side-by-side comparison between Word and LaTeX (which LaTeX &ldquo;wins&rdquo; with 18 out of 21 points).
+Computer scientists not only use LaTeX for documents,
+but also for slides (really, nobody who wants to be cool uses Keynote or Powerpoint).
+</p>
+<p>
+Although used widely, LaTeX seems nowadays a bit dated for producing
+slides. Unlike documents, which are typically &ldquo;static&rdquo; and published in a book or journal,
+slides often contain changing contents that might first only be partially visible and
+only later be revealed as the &ldquo;story&rdquo; of a talk or lecture demands.
+Also slides often contain animated algorithms where each state in the
+calculation is best explained by highlighting the changing data.
+</p>
+<p>
+It seems HTML and JavaScript are much better suited for generating
+such animated slides. This <A HREF="http://www.impressivewebs.com/html-slidedeck-toolkits/">page</A>
+links to 22 slide-generating programs using this combination of technologies.
+<A HREF="http://www.impressivewebs.com/html-slidedeck-toolkits/">Here</A> are even more such
+projects. However, the problem with all of these project is that they depend heavily on the users being
+able to write JavaScript, CCS or HTML...not something one would like to depend on given that
+&ldquo;normal&rdquo; users likely only have a LaTeX background. The aim of this project is to invent a
+very simple language that is inspired by LaTeX and then generate from code written in this language
+slides that can be displayed in a web-browser.
+</p>
+<p>
+This sounds complicated, but there is already some help available:
+<A HREF="http://www.mathjax.org">Mathjax</A> is a JavaScript library that can
+be used to display mathematical text, for example
+<blockquote>
+<p>When \(a \ne 0\), there are two solutions to \(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\) and they are
+\(x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}\).</p>
+</blockquote>
+by writing code in the familiar LaTeX-way. This can be reused. There are also plenty of JavaScript
+libraries for graphical animations (for example
+<A HREF="http://raphaeljs.com">Raphael</A>,
+<A HREF="http://svgjs.com">SVG.JS</A>,
+<A HREF="http://bonsaijs.org">Bonsaijs</A>,
+<A HREF="http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/">JSXGraph</A>). The inspiration for how the user should be able to write
+slides could come from the LaTeX packages <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)">Beamer</A>
+and <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGF/TikZ">PGF/TikZ</A>.
+</p>
+<p>
+<B>Skills:</B>
+This is a project requires good knowledge of JavaScript. You need to be able to
+parse a language and translate it to a suitable part of JavaScript using
+appropriate libraries. Tutorials for JavaScript are <A HREF="http://www.w3schools.com/js/">here</A>.
+A parser generator for JavaScript is <A HREF="http://pegjs.majda.cz">here</A>. There are probably also
+others. If you want to avoid JavaScript there are a number of alternatives: for example the
+<A HREF="http://elm-lang.org">Elm</A>
+language has been especially designed for implementing easily interactive animations, which would be
+very conveninet for this project.
+</p>
+<li> <H4>[CU4] An Online Student Voting System</H4>
+<p>
+<B>Description:</B>
+One of the more annoying aspects of giving a lecture is to ask a question
+to the students and no matter how easy the question is to not
+receive any answer. Recently, the online course system
+<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com">Udacity</A> made an art out of
+asking questions during lectures (see for example the
+<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012">Web Application Engineering</A>
+course CS253).
+The lecturer there gives multiple-choice questions as part of the lecture and the students need to
+click on the appropriate answer. This works very well in the online world.
+For  &ldquo;real-world&rdquo; lectures, the department has some
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response">clickers</A>
+(these are little devices which form a part of an audience response systems). However,
+they are a logistic nightmare for the lecturer: they need to be distributed
+during the lecture and collected at the end. Nowadays, where students
+come with their own laptop or smartphone to lectures, this can
+be improved.
+</p>
+<p>
+The task of this project is to implement an online student
+polling system. The lecturer should be able to prepare
+questions beforehand (encoded as some web-form) and be able to
+show them during the lecture. The students
+can give their answers by clicking on the corresponding webpage.
+The lecturer can then collect the responses online and evaluate them
+immediately. Such a system is sometimes called
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response#Smartphone_.2F_HTTP_voting">HTML voting</A>.
+There are a number of commercial
+solutions for this problem, but they are not easy to use (in addition
+to being ridiculously expensive). A good student can easily improve upon
+what they provide.
+</p>
+<p>
+The problem of student polling is not as hard as
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting">electronic voting</A>,
+which essentially is still an unsolved problem in Computer Science. The
+students only need to be prevented from answering question more than once thus skewing
+any statistics. Unlike electronic voting, no audit trail needs to be kept
+for student polling. Restricting the number of answers can probably be solved
+by setting appropriate cookies on the students
+computers or smart phones.
+</p>
+<p>
+<B>Literature:</B>
+The project requires fluency in a web-programming language (for example
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript">Javascript</A>,
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)">Go</A>,
+<A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>). However JavaScript with
+the <A HREF="http://nodejs.org">Node.js</A> extension seems to be best suited for the job.
+<A HREF="http://www.nodebeginner.org">Here</A> is a tutorial on Node.js for beginners.
+For web-programming the
+<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012">Web Application Engineering</A>
+course at <A HREF="http://www.udacity.com">Udacity</A> is a good starting point
+to be aware of the issues involved. This course uses <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>.
+To evaluate the answers from the students, Google's
+<A HREF="https://developers.google.com/chart/image/docs/making_charts">Chart Tools</A>
+might be useful, which is also described in this
+<A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZtgT4jgnE8">youtube</A> video.
+</p>
+<p>
+<B>Skills:</B>
+In order to provide convenience for the lecturer, this project needs very good web-programming skills. A
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)">hacker mentality</A>
+(see above) is probably also very beneficial: web-programming is an area that only emerged recently and
+many tools still lack maturity. You probably have to experiment a lot with several different
+languages and tools.
+</p>
+<li> <H4>[CU5] Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos</H4>
+<p>
+<B>Description:</B>
+This project is for true hackers! <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi">Raspberry Pi's</A>
+are small Linux computers the size of a credit-card and only cost &pound;34 (see picture left below). They were introduced
+in 2012 and people went crazy...well some of them. There is a
+<A HREF="https://plus.google.com/communities/113390432655174294208?hl=en">Google+</A> community about Raspberry Pi's that has more
+than 150k of followers. It is hard to keep up with what people do with these small computers. The possibilities
+seem to be limitless. The main resource for Raspberry Pi's is <A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org">here</A>.
+There are <A HREF="http://www.themagpi.com">magazines</A> dedicated to them and tons of
+<A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=39">books</A> (not to mention
+floods of <A HREF="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=raspberry+pi">online</A> material).
+Google just released a
+<A HREF="http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/">framework</A>
+for web-programming on Raspberry Pi's truning them into webservers.
+</p>
+<p>
+<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino">Arduinos</A> are slightly older (from 2005) but still very cool (see picture right below). They
+are small single-board micro-controllers that can talk to various external gadgets (sensors, motors, etc). Since Arduinos
+are open-software and open-hardware there are many clones and add-on boards. Like for the Raspberry Pi, there
+is a lot of material <A HREF="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=arduino">available</A> about Arduinos.
+The main reference is <A HREF="http://www.arduino.cc">here</A>. Like the Raspberry Pi's, the good thing about
+Arduinos is that they can be powered with simple AA-batteries.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have two such Raspberry Pi's including wifi-connectors and two <A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/camera">cameras<A>.
+I also have two <A HREF="http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Store/Introducing-the-Freakduino-Chibi-An-Arduino-based-Board-For-Wireless-Sensor-Networking.html">Freakduino Boards</A> that are Arduinos extended with wireless communication. I can lend them to responsible
+students for one or two projects. However, the aim is to first come up with an idea for a project. Popular projects are
+automated temperature sensors, network servers, robots, web-cams (<A HREF="http://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/electronics/shard-rain-cam/">here</A>
+is a <A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3547">web-cam</A> directed at the Shard that can
+<A HREF="http://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/shard-rain-cam-quantifying-cloudy/">tell</A>
+you whether it is raining or cloudy). There are plenty more ideas listed
+<A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=15">here</A> for Raspberry Pi's and
+<A HREF="http://playground.arduino.cc/projects/ideas">here</A> for Arduinos.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are essentially two kinds of projects: One is purely software-based. Software projects for Raspberry Pi's are often
+written in <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>, but since these are Linux-capable computers any other
+language would do as well. You can also write your own operating system as done
+<A HREF="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/">here</A>. For example the students
+<A HREF="http://www.recantha.co.uk/blog/?p=4918">here</A> developed their own bare-metal OS and then implemented
+a chess-program on top of it (have a look at their very impressive
+<A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-03bouPsfEQ&feature=player_embedded">youtube</A> video).
+The other kind of project is a combination of hardware and software; usually attaching some sensors
+or motors to the Raspberry Pi or Arduino. This might require some soldering or what is called
+a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard">bread-board</A>. But be careful before choosing a project
+involving new hardware: these devices
+can be destroyed (if &ldquo;Vin connected to GND&rdquo; or &ldquo;drawing more than 30mA from a GPIO&rdquo;
+does not make sense to you, you should probably stay away from such a project).
+</p>
+<p>
+<center>
+<img style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in;
+"src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/RaspberryPi.jpg" width="313" height="209">
+<img style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in;
+"src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Arduino_Uno_-_R3.jpg" width="240" height="209">
+</center>
+</p>
+<p>
+<B>Skills:</B>
+Well, you must be a hacker; happy to make things. Your desk might look like this:
+<center>
+<img style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in;
+"src="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/rpi-photo.jpg" width="209" height="313">
+</center>
+</p>
+<li> <H4>[CU6] Language Translator into JavaScript</H4>
 <p>
 <b>Description:</b>
 <A HREF="http://www.w3schools.com/js/">JavaScript</A> is a language that is supported by most
 browsers and therefore is a favourite
 difference between these projects and this one is that they translate into relatively high-level
 JavaScript code; none of them use the much lower levels <A HREF="http://asmjs.org">asm.js</A> and
 <A HREF="https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki">emscripten</A>.
 </p>
-<li> <H4>[CU4] Slide-Making in the Web-Age</H4>
-<p>
+<li> <H4>[CU7] An Infrastructure for Displaying and Animating Code in a Web-Browser</H4>
-The standard technology for writing scientific papers in Computer Science  is to use
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX">LaTeX</A>, a document preparation
-system originally implemented by <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth">Donald Knuth</A>
-and <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport">Leslie Lamport</A>.
-LaTeX produces very pleasantly looking documents, can deal nicely with mathematical
-formulas and is very flexible. If you are interested, <A HREF="http://openwetware.org/wiki/Word_vs._LaTeX">here</A>
-is a side-by-side comparison between Word and LaTeX (which LaTeX &ldquo;wins&rdquo; with 18 out of 21 points).
-Computer scientists not only use LaTeX for documents,
-but also for slides (really, nobody who wants to be cool uses Keynote or Powerpoint).
-</p>
-<p>
-Although used widely, LaTeX seems nowadays a bit dated for producing
-slides. Unlike documents, which are typically &ldquo;static&rdquo; and published in a book or journal,
-slides often contain changing contents that might first only be partially visible and
-only later be revealed as the &ldquo;story&rdquo; of a talk or lecture demands.
-Also slides often contain animated algorithms where each state in the
-calculation is best explained by highlighting the changing data.
-</p>
-<p>
-It seems HTML and JavaScript are much better suited for generating
-such animated slides. This <A HREF="http://www.impressivewebs.com/html-slidedeck-toolkits/">page</A>
-links to 22 slide-generating programs using this combination of technologies.
-<A HREF="http://www.impressivewebs.com/html-slidedeck-toolkits/">Here</A> are even more such
-projects. However, the problem with all of these project is that they depend heavily on the users being
-able to write JavaScript, CCS or HTML...not something one would like to depend on given that
-&ldquo;normal&rdquo; users likely only have a LaTeX background. The aim of this project is to invent a
-very simple language that is inspired by LaTeX and then generate from code written in this language
-slides that can be displayed in a web-browser.
-</p>
-<p>
-This sounds complicated, but there is already some help available:
-<A HREF="http://www.mathjax.org">Mathjax</A> is a JavaScript library that can
-be used to display mathematical text, for example
-<blockquote>
-<p>When \(a \ne 0\), there are two solutions to \(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\) and they are
-\(x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}\).</p>
-</blockquote>
-by writing code in the familiar LaTeX-way. This can be reused. There are also plenty of JavaScript
-libraries for graphical animations (for example
-<A HREF="http://raphaeljs.com">Raphael</A>,
-<A HREF="http://svgjs.com">SVG.JS</A>,
-<A HREF="http://bonsaijs.org">Bonsaijs</A>,
-<A HREF="http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/">JSXGraph</A>). The inspiration for how the user should be able to write
-slides could come from the LaTeX packages <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)">Beamer</A>
-and <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGF/TikZ">PGF/TikZ</A>.
-</p>
-<p>
-<B>Skills:</B>
-This is a project requires good knowledge of JavaScript. You need to be able to
-parse a language and translate it to a suitable part of JavaScript using
-appropriate libraries. Tutorials for JavaScript are <A HREF="http://www.w3schools.com/js/">here</A>.
-A parser generator for JavaScript is <A HREF="http://pegjs.majda.cz">here</A>. There are probably also
-others.
-</p>
-<li> <H4>[CU5] An Online Student Voting System</H4>
-<p>
-<B>Description:</B>
-One of the more annoying aspects of giving a lecture is to ask a question
-to the students and no matter how easy the question is to not
-receive any answer. Recently, the online course system
-<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com">Udacity</A> made an art out of
-asking questions during lectures (see for example the
-<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012">Web Application Engineering</A>
-course CS253).
-The lecturer there gives multiple-choice questions as part of the lecture and the students need to
-click on the appropriate answer. This works very well in the online world.
-For  &ldquo;real-world&rdquo; lectures, the department has some
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response">clickers</A>
-(these are little devices which form a part of an audience response systems). However,
-they are a logistic nightmare for the lecturer: they need to be distributed
-during the lecture and collected at the end. Nowadays, where students
-come with their own laptop or smartphone to lectures, this can
-be improved.
-</p>
-<p>
-The task of this project is to implement an online student
-polling system. The lecturer should be able to prepare
-questions beforehand (encoded as some web-form) and be able to
-show them during the lecture. The students
-can give their answers by clicking on the corresponding webpage.
-The lecturer can then collect the responses online and evaluate them
-immediately. Such a system is sometimes called
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response#Smartphone_.2F_HTTP_voting">HTML voting</A>.
-There are a number of commercial
-solutions for this problem, but they are not easy to use (in addition
-to being ridiculously expensive). A good student can easily improve upon
-what they provide.
-</p>
-<p>
-The problem of student polling is not as hard as
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting">electronic voting</A>,
-which essentially is still an unsolved problem in Computer Science. The
-students only need to be prevented from answering question more than once thus skewing
-any statistics. Unlike electronic voting, no audit trail needs to be kept
-for student polling. Restricting the number of answers can probably be solved
-by setting appropriate cookies on the students
-computers or smart phones.
-</p>
-<p>
-<B>Literature:</B>
-The project requires fluency in a web-programming language (for example
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript">Javascript</A>,
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)">Go</A>,
-<A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>). However JavaScript with
-the <A HREF="http://nodejs.org">Node.js</A> extension seems to be best suited for the job.
-<A HREF="http://www.nodebeginner.org">Here</A> is a tutorial on Node.js for beginners.
-For web-programming the
-<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012">Web Application Engineering</A>
-course at <A HREF="http://www.udacity.com">Udacity</A> is a good starting point
-to be aware of the issues involved. This course uses <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>.
-To evaluate the answers from the students, Google's
-<A HREF="https://developers.google.com/chart/image/docs/making_charts">Chart Tools</A>
-might be useful, which is also described in this
-<A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZtgT4jgnE8">youtube</A> video.
-</p>
-<p>
-<B>Skills:</B>
-In order to provide convenience for the lecturer, this project needs very good web-programming skills. A
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)">hacker mentality</A>
-(see above) is probably very beneficial: web-programming is an area that only emerged recently and
-many tools still lack maturity. You probably have to experiment a lot with several different
-languages and tools.
-</p>
-<li> <H4>[CU6] An Infrastructure for Displaying and Animating Code in a Web-Browser</H4>
 <p>
 <B>Description:</B>
 The project aim is to implement an infrastructure for displaying and
 animating code in a web-browser. The infrastructure should be agnostic
 Good skill in lexing and language parsing, as well as being fluent with web programming (for
 example JavaScript).
 </p>
-<li> <H4>[CU7] Implementation of a Distributed Clock-Synchronisation Algorithm developed at NASA</H4>
+<li> <H4>[CU8] Implementation of a Distributed Clock-Synchronisation Algorithm developed at NASA</H4>
 <p>
 <B>Description:</B>
 There are many algorithms for synchronising clocks. This
 <A HREF="http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120000054_2011025573.pdf">paper</A>
 concurrency. You can do this for example in the programming language
 <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A> with the help of the
 <A HREF="http://akka.io">Akka</a> library. This library enables you to send messages
 between different <I>actors</I>. <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/node/242">Here</A>
 are some examples that explain how to implement exchanging messages between actors.
-</p>
-<li> <H4>[CU8] Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos</H4>
-<p>
-<B>Description:</B>
-This project is for true hackers! <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi">Raspberry Pi's</A>
-are small Linux computers the size of a credit-card and only cost &pound;34 (see picture left below). They were introduced
-in 2012 and people went crazy...well some of them. There is a
-<A HREF="https://plus.google.com/communities/113390432655174294208?hl=en">Google+</A> community about Raspberry Pi's that has more
-than 150k of followers. It is hard to keep up with what people do with these small computers. The possibilities
-seem to be limitless. The main resource for Raspberry Pi's is <A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org">here</A>.
-There are <A HREF="http://www.themagpi.com">magazines</A> dedicated to them and tons of
-<A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=39">books</A> (not to mention
-floods of <A HREF="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=raspberry+pi">online</A> material).
-Google just released a
-<A HREF="http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/">framework</A>
-for web-programming and for turning Raspberry Pi's into webservers.
-</p>
-<p>
-<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino">Arduinos</A> are slightly older (from 2005) but still very cool (see picture right below). They
-are small single-board micro-controllers that can talk to various external gadgets (sensors, motors, etc). Since Arduinos
-are open-software and open-hardware there are many clones and add-on boards. Like for the Raspberry Pi, there
-is a lot of material <A HREF="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=arduino">available</A> about Arduinos.
-The main reference is <A HREF="http://www.arduino.cc">here</A>. Like the Raspberry Pi's, the good thing about
-Arduinos is that they can be powered with simple AA-batteries.
-</p>
-<p>
-I have two such Raspberry Pi's including wifi-connectors and two <A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/camera">cameras<A>.
-I also have two <A HREF="http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Store/Introducing-the-Freakduino-Chibi-An-Arduino-based-Board-For-Wireless-Sensor-Networking.html">Freakduino Boards</A> that are Arduinos extended with wireless communication. I can lend them to responsible
-students for one or two projects. However, the aim is to first come up with an idea for a project. Popular projects are
-automated temperature sensors, network servers, robots, web-cams (<A HREF="http://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/electronics/shard-rain-cam/">here</A>
-is a <A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3547">web-cam</A> directed at the Shard that can
-<A HREF="http://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/shard-rain-cam-quantifying-cloudy/">tell</A>
-you whether it is raining or cloudy). There are plenty more ideas listed
-<A HREF="http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=15">here</A> for Raspberry Pi's and
-<A HREF="http://playground.arduino.cc/projects/ideas">here</A> for Arduinos.
-</p>
-<p>
-There are essentially two kinds of projects: One is purely software-based. Software projects for Raspberry Pi's are often
-written in <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>, but since these are Linux-capable computers any other
-language would do as well. You can also write your own operating system as done
-<A HREF="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/">here</A>. For example the students
-<A HREF="http://www.recantha.co.uk/blog/?p=4918">here</A> developed their own bare-metal OS and then implemented
-a chess-program on top of it (have a look at their very impressive
-<A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-03bouPsfEQ&feature=player_embedded">youtube</A> video).
-The other kind of project is a combination of hardware and software; usually attaching some sensors
-or motors to the Raspberry Pi or Arduino. This might require some soldering or what is called
-a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard">bread-board</A>. But be careful before choosing a project
-involving new hardware: these devices
-can be destroyed (if &ldquo;Vin connected to GND&rdquo; or &ldquo;drawing more than 30mA from a GPIO&rdquo;
-does not make sense to you, you should probably stay away from such a project).
-</p>
-<p>
-<center>
-<img style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in;
-"src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/RaspberryPi.jpg" width="313" height="209">
-<img style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in;
-"src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Arduino_Uno_-_R3.jpg" width="240" height="209">
-</center>
-</p>
-<p>
-<B>Skills:</B>
-Well, you must be a hacker; happy to make things. Your desk might look like this:
-<center>
-<img style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in;
-"src="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/rpi-photo.jpg" width="209" height="313">
-</center>
 </p>
 <li> <H4>[CU9] Proving the Correctness of Programs</H4>
 <p>
 </TD>
 </TR>
 </TABLE>
 <P>
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