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+<TITLE>2012/13 BSc Projects</TITLE>
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+
+<H2>2012/13 BSc Projects</H2>
+<H4>Supervisor: Christian Urban</H4>
+<H4>Email: christian dot urban at kcl dot ac dot uk, Office: Strand Building S1.24</H4>
+<H4>If you are interested in a project, please send me an email and we can discuss details. Please include
+a short description about your programming skills and Computer Science background in your first email.
+I will also need your King's username in order to book the project for you. Thanks.</H4>
+
+<H4>Note that besides being a lecturer, I am also a passionate
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)">hacker</A> …
+ defined as “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.” I am always happy to supervise like-minded students.</H4>
+
+<ul class="striped">
+<li> <H4>[CU1] Automata Minimisation</H4>
+
+ <p><B>Description:</b>
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton">Deterministic finite automata</A>
+ have many uses in Computer Science, for example for lexing
+ program code. In order to improve their run-time, automata need to be minimised, that
+ is transformed into equivalent automata with the smallest possible number of state
+ nodes.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ There is a little known method for minimising deterministic finite
+ automata by <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Brzozowski_(computer_scientist)">
+ Janusz Brzozowski</A>.
+ This method first reverses the edges of an automaton, which produces
+ a potentially non-deterministic automaton. The non-deterministic automaton is
+ then determinised using the usual powerset construction. This is repeated
+ once more and voila you obtain a minimised version of the automaton
+ you started with. It is rather surprising that this method works at all:
+ the powerset construction might produce an automaton with an exponentially
+ larger number of states, completely contrary to the idea of minimising the
+ number of states. The task of this project is to implement this method, check that
+ it actually works with some examples and
+ compare it with more traditional methods for automata minimisation
+ (in terms of run-time, code complexity, etc). Examples can be
+ obtained by translating regular expressions into automata.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <B>Literature:</B>
+ A good place to start with this project are the wikipedia articles
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFA_minimization">here</A> and
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_construction">here</A>.
+ The authoritative <A HREF="http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/ialc.html">book</A>
+ on automata is by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullmann (available in the library).
+ There is also an online course about automata by Ullman at
+ <A HREF="https://www.coursera.org/course/automata">Coursera</A>, though IMHO not
+ done with love. There
+ is also the book <i>Automata and Computability</i> by
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kozen/">Dexter Kozen</A> including more
+ advanced material about automata.
+ Finally, there are millions of other pointers about automata
+ minimisation on the web.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <B>Skills:</B>
+ This is a project for a student with an interest in theory and some
+ reasonable programming skills. The project can be easily implemented
+ in languages like
+ <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML">ML</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell">Haskell</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>, etc.
+ </p>
+
+<li> <H4>[CU2] Equivalence Checking of Regular Expressions</H4>
+
+ <p><B>Description:</b>
+ Solving the problem of deciding the equivalence of regular expressions can be used
+ to decide a number of problems in automated reasoning. Recently,
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~asperti/">Andreas Asperti</A>
+ proposed a simple method for deciding regular expression equivalence described
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~asperti/PAPERS/compact.pdf">here</A>.
+ The task is to implement this method and test it on examples.
+ It would be also interesting to see whether Asperti's method also applies to
+ extended regular expressions, described
+ <A HREF="http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~sulzmann/manuscript/reg-exp-partial-derivatives.pdf">here</A>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <B>Literature:</B>
+ The central literature is obviously the papers
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~asperti/PAPERS/compact.pdf">here</A> and
+ <A HREF="http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~sulzmann/manuscript/reg-exp-partial-derivatives.pdf">here</A>.
+ Asperti has also some slides <A HREF="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~asperti/SLIDES/regular.pdf">here</a>.
+ More references about regular expressions can be found
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">here</A>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <B>Skills:</B>
+ This is a project for a student with a passion for theory and some
+ reasonable programming skills. The project can be easily implemented
+ in languages like Scala
+ <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML">ML</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell">Haskell</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>, etc.
+ Being able to read <A HREF="http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell">Haskell</A>
+ code is beneficial for the part involving extended regular expressions.
+ </p>
+
+<li> <H4>[CU3] Machine Code Generation for a Simple Compiler</H4>
+
+ <p><b>Description:</b>
+ Compilers translate high-level programs that humans can read and write into
+ efficient machine code that can be run on a CPU or virtual machine.
+ I recently implemented a very simple compiler for a very simple functional
+ programming language following this
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/tal-toplas.pdf">paper</A>
+ (also described <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/tal-tr.pdf">here</A>).
+ My code, written in <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>, of this compiler is
+ <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/compiler.scala">here</A>.
+ The compiler can deal with simple programs involving natural numbers, such
+ as Fibonacci numbers
+ or factorial (but it can be easily extended - that is not the point).
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ While the hard work has been done (understanding the two papers above),
+ my compiler only produces some idealised machine code. For example I
+ assume there are infinitely many registers. The goal of this
+ project is to generate machine code which is more realistic and can
+ run on a CPU, like x86, or run on a virtual machine, say JVM.
+ This gives probably a speedup of thousand times in comparison to
+ my naive machine code and virtual machine. The project
+ requires to dig into the literature about real CPUs and generating
+ real machine code.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <B>Literature:</B>
+ There is a lot of literature about compilers
+ (for example <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/cwc.html">this book</A> -
+ I can lend you my copy for the duration of the project). A very good overview article
+ about implementing compilers by
+ <A HREF="http://tratt.net/laurie/">Laurie Tratt</A> is
+ <A HREF="http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/how_difficult_is_it_to_write_a_compiler">here</A>.
+ An introduction into x86 machine code is <A HREF="http://ianseyler.github.com/easy_x86-64/">here</A>.
+ A simple assembler for the JVM is described <A HREF="http://jasmin.sourceforge.net">here</A>.
+ An interesting twist of this project is to not generate code for a CPU, but
+ for the intermediate language of the <A HREF="http://llvm.org">LLVM</A> compiler
+ (also described <A HREF="https://wiki.aalto.fi/display/t1065450/LLVM+IR">here</A> and
+ <A HREF="http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html">here</A>).
+ </p>
+
+ <p><B>Skills:</B>
+ This is a project for a student with a deep interest in programming languages and
+ compilers. Since my compiler is implemented in <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>,
+ it would make sense to continue this project in this language. I can be
+ of help with questions and books about <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>.
+ But if Scala is a problem, my code can also be translated quickly into any other functional
+ language.
+ </p>
+
+<li> <H4>[CU4] Implementation of Register Spilling Algorithms</H4>
+
+ <p><b>Description:</b>
+ This project is similar to [CU3]. The emphasis here, however, is on the
+ implementation and comparison of register spilling algorithms, also often called register allocation
+ algorithms. They are part of any respectable compiler. As said
+ in [CU3], however, my simple compiler lacks them and assumes an infinite amount of registers instead.
+ Real CPUs however only provide a fixed amount of registers (for example
+ x86-64 has 16 general purpose registers). Whenever a program needs
+ to hold more values than registers, the values need to be “spilled”
+ into the main memory. Register spilling algorithms try to minimise
+ this spilling, since fetching values from main memory is a costly
+ operation.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ The classic algorithm for register spilling uses a
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_allocation">graph-colouring method</A>.
+ However, for some time the <A HREF="http://llvm.org">LLVM</A> compiler
+ used a supposedly more efficient method, called the linear scan allocation method
+ (described
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/course/cs132/linearscan.pdf">here</A>).
+ However, it was later decided to abandon this method in favour of
+ a <A HREF="http://blog.llvm.org/2011/09/greedy-register-allocation-in-llvm-30.html">
+ greedy register allocation</A> method. It would be nice if this project can find out
+ what the issues are with these methods and implement at least one of them for the
+ simple compiler referenced in [CU3].
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <B>Literature:</B>
+ The graph colouring method is described in Andrew Appel's
+ <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/java/">book</A> on compilers
+ (I can give you my copy of this book, if it is not available in the library).
+ There is also a survey
+ <A HREF="http://compilers.cs.ucla.edu/fernando/publications/drafts/survey.pdf">article</A>
+ about register allocation algorithms with further pointers.
+ </p>
+
+ <p><B>Skills:</B>
+ Same skills as [CU3].
+ </p>
+
+<li> <H4>[CU5] A Student Polling 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 questions is to not
+ receive an 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 “real-world” lectures, the department has some
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response">clickers</A>
+ (these are little devices 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 questions 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/PHP">PHP</A>,
+ Java, <A HREF="http://www.python.org">Python</A>, <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)">Go</A>, <A HREF="http://www.scala-lang.org/">Scala</A>,
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)">Ruby</A>)
+ and possibly a cloud application platform (for example
+ <A HREF="https://developers.google.com/appengine/">Google App Engine</a> or
+ <A HREF="http://www.heroku.com">Heroku</A>).
+ 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>.
+
+ </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>
+
+</ul>
+</TD>
+</TR>
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--- a/index.html Tue Aug 21 13:00:03 2012 +0100
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<B>Address</B>
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk">Department of Informatics</A>,
<A HREF="http://www.kcl.ac.uk">King's College London</A>,
-Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. My office is S6.30 on the 6th floor of the Strand Building.
+Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. My office is S61.24 on the 1st floor of the Strand Building.
<BR><BR>
<B>Fax</B> +44 20 7848 2851