On March 28, 2019, final-year computer science and software engineering students gathered in the Davis Centre’s Great Hall to participate in the 2019 Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Design Symposium.
In total, 31 teams — from Computer Science and Software Engineering — showcased their capstone projects, weaving together what they learned during their undergraduate program with their co-op experiences to develop new and practical solutions across a variety of areas and sectors.
The 2019 Computer Science / Software Engineering Capstone Design Symposium was sponsored by Microsoft and General Motors.
Research category award winners
Team Calder • Project: Controlling procedural modelling interactively
Software engineering students: Tammy Liu, Abhishek Madan, Paul Bardea, Andrew McBurney, Dave Pagurek
Procedural modelling has been an essential tool in the 3D artist’s toolbox for many years, used in applications such as games and movies. It provides a way to add a level of detail and richness that would be impractical to create by hand. We aim to provide a useful probabilistic search function that can be run at interactive rates to enable the short feedback loops artists require for incremental, exploratory design.
Team Counterpoint • Project: Extracting counterexamples from TCMC
Software engineering students: George Gao, Mitchell Kember, Lynn Tran
Model checking is a technique for verifying software correctness. Rather than testing the software directly, users create a model of the system and describe properties it should satisfy. These properties are then automatically verified by model-checking software.
Transitive-closure-based model checking or TCMC is a model-checking technique that uses first-order logic to view a system as a set of states and transitions connecting them. The goal of our project is to improve the real-world usefulness of TCMC.
Society category award winners
Team SyncUp • Project: Hive — An app for connecting peer mentors
Software engineering students: Adam Klen, Steven Kong, Andrew Codispoti, Wojtek Swiderski
Many students struggle to make the transition from high school to university. A sizeable portion of students lack of social support — students are taken away from their support system and are placed in an unfamiliar environment where the challenges they face are arguably more difficult than any they have experienced previously. Mentorship is a great way to transfer knowledge and wisdom. Hive provides students with a mentor. Hive’s primary mission is to create relationships that help students navigate their university experience.
Team Sana • Project: Medical protocol synching mechanism
Software engineering students: Felix Lam, Justin Kim, Michael Socha
The World Health Organization estimates that around half of the world’s population has poor access to essential healthcare services. Most of this population is in the developing world, and a common obstacle to delivering healthcare lies in distribution to remote areas.
Sana is an MIT-based organization that focuses on improving healthcare access in developing parts of the world. A core part of Sana’s solution lies in its mobile health (mHealth) app Sana Mobile, which allows remote healthcare workers to collect patient data and relay it to clinicians. Remote healthcare workers upload this data by filling out custom input forms built from underlying protocols. However, the Sana Protocol Builder and Sana Mobile remain largely unintegrated.
The goal of this project is to connect the Protocol Builder with Sana Mobile using Sana’s Medical Data Store as an intermediary. This release will be used in Sana’s existing deployments in Lebanon and sub-Saharan Africa.
Team Abode • Project: Learn more about your neighbourhood
Software engineering students: Bilal Akhtar, Saksham Sachdev, Nakul Pathak, Naren Srinivasan
Abode is a web-based data visualization and query tool for data from various public data sets like the Canadian census, city open data sets, etc. We want to give researchers, journalists, and the general public an accurate way to understand their neighbourhood, their community, their city as well as trends about its evolution.
New product category award winners
Team Edacious • Project: A food journaling app
Computer science students: Aishwarya Gupta, Matthew Kwong, Daniel Podlovics, Kokul Subendran, Daniel Tchorni
We’re all born with a natural tendency to provide our opinions and insight into different human experiences. Edacious will allow users to release their inner critic in a private, simple yet detailed approach to restaurant critiquing. We are proposing a mobile app that gives the user a thorough critiquing experience on their restaurant endeavors while keeping their opinion unpublished.
Team CircleChek • Project: Daily inspection log for transport and heavy equipment
Computer science students: Rebecca Brown, Bingxu Hu, Jason Williamson
Canadian law mandates that owners and operators of trucks, construction vehicles and other heavy machinery complete a daily inspection log. These inspections are commonly completed by pen and paper, a method inefficient in communicating vehicle status to management. Transitioning to a digitized format of check-completion offers reduction is physical storage, versatility in completion platform and ability to readily aggregate information to management, and the potential to augment records with new sources of information. Unfortunately, there has yet to be a successful software application to address this need. CircleChek is our solution to this problem.
Team Adrestia • Project: Mobile strategy game
Software engineering students: Dmitri Sclear, Charles Zinn, Jim Zhang
Real-time strategy games like StarCraft are rewarding to play, but require significant time commitment. Mobile games are accessible, but lack strategic depth. Adrestia is a mobile strategy game that we designed in response to these shortcomings. Unlike a real-time strategy game, it is easy to pick up and fast to play, but unlike a mobile game, it has significant strategic depth. We designed Adrestia in such a way that interesting strategy arises naturally from simple mechanics.
Automotive category award winner
Team WatonomoVision • Project: Lane detection
Software engineering students: Anish Chopra, Jason Milasincic
With a majority of new vehicles sold today featuring driver-assistance technologies such as collision avoidance and lane-departure warning systems, the idea of a self-driving car is not far off on the horizon. These systems, particularly in vehicles designed for operation without a driver, require computationally intense calculations and decisions that need to be made instantaneously. WatonomoVision completely redesigned the lane-detection stack by using deep learning to tackle the problem. We trained a deep neural network to generate segmentations from a camera image, labelling each pixel in the image as belonging to a lane line or not.
Honourable mentions
Team VagueRec • Project: X-ray analysis of lithium-ion batteries
Software engineering students: Yassin Zaoui, Tianxiang Liu, Wen Shi
Lithium ion batteries, a type a rechargeable battery, are used widely in electronic devices such as smart phones, laptops and electric cars. An increasing number of Li-ion batteries are exploding or catching fire so it is vital to make sure that batteries rolling out of factories do not contain manufacturing defects that contribute to these safety issues. The goal of our project is to accurately check — using x-ray images and a convolutional neural network — the quality of battery cells before they are packed together and delivered to customers.
Team Zero • Project: OrbitX — Educational spaceflight simulator
Computer science students: Ye Qin Xu, Seun Ho Kim, Kyoung Jeon, Patrick Melanson
OCESS is an Ottawa-area volunteer high school club for spaceflight simulation. It uses a combination of physical astronaut living quarters and a software simulation of spaceship piloting and other aspects of spaceflight. Our project is to rewrite the spaceflight component of this simulation software, faithfully replicating its features while making the software more easily maintainable by students.
Team HoloVision • Project: Breast cancer research with MSHoloLens
Software engineering students: Michael Bahng, Jiaqi Qian, Pranaab Dhawan
Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer among women. Current surgical procedures have complications that result in imperfect treatment; one quarter of women treated for early-stage breast cancer must undergo repeated treatments and mastectomy to remove residual tumours. Improving the accuracy of breast-conserving surgery is an active area of research that spans multiple disciplines.
Our project aims to extend Dr. Oleg Michailovich’s research on breast-conservation surgery to solve this complication, using augmented reality to assist the surgeons in locating tumors. Using proprietary surface projection and reconstruction algorithms in conjunction with the Microsoft HoloLens, which is equipped with various sensors and augmented reality capabilities, we aim to project a 3D hologram of the tumors from a breast MRI, while accounting for changes in anatomical position.
