MA Computer Science Projects (PROJ-H-402)

The course PROJ-H-402 is managed by Dr. Mauro Birattari. Please refer to the course description page http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/proj-h-402/index.php/Main_Page for the rules concerning the project. What follows is a list of project proposals supervised by academic members of CoDE.

In this project, the student is asked to construct a software system to help manage large collections of scientific papers in digital form. Specifically, the system must be able to:

1. Scan a given filesystem location for given filetypes (PDFs, EPUB, …) containing scientific articles.
2. Extract the metadata from each identified file. Here, the metadata includes the title of the article, its authors, the publishing venue, the publisher, the year of publication, the article's abstract … The development of an intelligent way to retreive this metadata is requried. This could be done, for example by a combination of parsing the file, contacting the internet repositories of known publishers (AMC, Springer, Elsevier) etc to retrieve the data.
3. Offer search capabilities, in order to allow a user to find all indexed articles matching certain criteria (title, author, …)
4. Offer archiving capabilities

Use of semantic web technologies (RDF, SPARQL, …) to store and search the metadata is encouraged.

Contact : Stijn Vansummeren (stijn.vansummeren@ulb.ac.be)

Status: available

In this project, the student is asked to construct a software system that can assist in the revision of teaching curricula (also known as teaching programs). The system should have the following functionalities:

1. It should be able to load existing curricula from the ULB central administration. This could be done, for example, by parsing the webpages available at banner (the Civil Engineering in CS program is available at http://banssbfr.ulb.ac.be/PROD_frFR/bzscrse.p_disp_prog_detail?term_in=201314&prog_in=MA-IRIF&lang=FRENCH, for example).
2. It should allow to make different versions of the teaching programs, much in the same way as version control systems like GIT and subversion offer the possibility to make different “development branches” of a program's source code.
3. It should allow to analyze the modifications proposed in the teaching programs, and summarize the impact that these changes could have on other programs. (For example, if a course is removed from the computer science curriculum, it should also be removed from all curricula that included the course.)

Contact : Stijn Vansummeren (stijn.vansummeren@ulb.ac.be)

Status: available