Professor Lyon's Project ideas

The following project ideas are not updated frequently. Nor are they the only ideas that are valid for a thesis. They are just topics that seem like fruitful lines of research. Undergraduates can use these projects (with graduate student mentoring)

By looking at some of the recent thesis work you can get a feel for what advisors are interested in.

Teams of undergraduates are available to help you with your project. These students are available for two term senior projects and would be happy to be working with people in industry on your projects.

Typically, taking on a thesis topic already started by someone else is not a bad idea. It probably means the research is deep and needs many contributors. You should review some of the articles that I have posted on the web. These will give you an idea of what I have been up to.

1. We have two students who are working on grid computing. One has finished. The goal is to perform homogenious computing in Java, by using screen savers to volunteer computers into a grid. We are in need of help with this one.
2. Distributed computing in the mercury computing system is a very interesting example of cluster computing. But systems like these are hard to program, particularly, the altivec processor. It would be great to work on developing tools that help with this.
3. One student is working on the vectorization of Java... but he is only interested in MMX/SE/SE2/Intel, not altivec.
4. Stegonography - hidden writing. We seek a program that works to create messages that can be embedded in images. For example, take the Hartley transform of an image, add your message, then take the inverse transform. Is the message hidden? How does this compare with other methods?
5. Java as an HDL - many programmers are skilled at stating algorithms in Java. Is there a way to convert a subset of these algorithms into VHDL? We have a prototype that does this already.
6. We are working on a new rangefinder that is based in diffraction. It would be really interesting to do something in the case of the ambient illumination. Nothing has been done in the area, as far as I know.
7. We are working on Project Initium, the automatic deployment of java programs. Several articles have been written about this already, and they contain several open problems.
8. We are looking for a method for the secure, open-source, signing of Jar files, for deployment of applications on the web. Presently, we make use of Sun's closed-source algorithms.
9. Presently, we have an integer wavelet transform that implements the Haar transform. The use of this for multi-resolution streaming of video is of great interest.
10. We have several algorithms for color quantization. We continue to do research in this field. Areas of work include the creation of better perceptual coding objective functions, more optimized clustering algorithms and image sequence coding algorithms.
11. There is a teaching tool, called video point. The project statement of work, from industry, is available from here
12. We have been working in the area of autonomous land vehicle design. We are interested in programming Lego mindstorm do implement some maneuvers, with control. For example, a car that can dock with a charging station...Like the roomba robot.
13. There is an on-going improvement effort on an image processing program. It would be really nice if we could create a visual programming language for it. I have a prototype already.
14. There is an on-going improvement effort on an Voice and Signal Processing program. It would be really nice if we could create a visual programming language for it. I have a prototype already.
15. We have started a new effort on multi-player network games, using 3D graphics.
16. We are looking for help with embedded face recognition. I have a student working on this already.
17. We are working on new textbooks in the areas of voice and signal processing, image processing and computer graphics. If you are interested in co-authoring, please let me know.