UIUC Senior Design Projects
The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science Senior Design Project program engages students in the solution of real-world, technical problems for corporate and not-for-profit clients. It provides a unique capstone experience in which computer science students provide work products of genuine value to external clients based on their needs. This experience provides a transition between learning within the academy and practical experience in industry or a research laboratory. The department actively solicits the submission of project proposals that draw upon the unique talents of our students and faculty advisors.
Students work in groups of four or five under the guidance of a student project manager, a faculty advisor, and a liaison from the sponsoring organization. Projects begin in September, involve about 1000 work hours and are completed the following April. The liaison outlines the project requirements, approves the team's proposal for accomplishing the work, and receives weekly progress reports. In most cases the student team visits the sponsoring company for a midyear project review and typically provides a summary presentation to senior officials at the end of the project. Senior Design teams present their research during public forums held on-campus and submit final written reports to the corporate customer upon completion of the project.
Overview
The primary goals of the Senior Design Project are:
- to give advanced students the opportunity to solve real-world problems in computer science, and
- to provide value to the sponsoring corporation or research organization in return for funding the project.
Working as a team, three to five advanced students, overseen by a faculty advisor, attack a problem or set of related problems posed by the client. The work is done over the span of one academic year, with formal presentations and reporting procedures for disseminating the results. A company-designated liaison acts on behalf of the client to provide regular feedback and to monitor the work effort. The liaison also often functions as a source of domain expertise on the specific problem addressed.
The success rate of our program has been very high and
while a complete solution cannot always be guaranteed, the Senior
Design Project team invariably brings fresh insight.
Form of Computer Science Senior Design Projects
The duration of Senior Design Projects is one academic year, from September through April.
The process begins over the summer during a period in which the sponsor and the department finalize the organization's commitment to sponsoring the project, and the actual details of the problem to be attacked. This generally begins with the sponsor providing a short problem statement. This is followed by one or two cycles of revision, with input from the department on the suitability of the project based on issues of student background and time allocation. It is generally during this phase that the sponsor designates a person from within the organization to operate as the liaison for the project. The department makes an initial designation of faculty supervisor for the project at the same time.
At the beginning of the fall term, the projects for that year are presented to the students taking Senior Design and they express their preferences for which project they wish to work on. The faculty then meet to finalize the assignment of supervisors, form the actual teams (based on the students' expressed preferences), and designate project managers for each team.
Each Senior Design team will contact their corporate liaison to learn about the project. The team then constructs a proposal which specifies, as precisely as possible, the work to be done and the schedule on which it is to be accomplished. Once the details have been agreed upon by the sponsor and the team, problem-solving work begins. The faculty advisor provides advice to the students, monitors their progress, and helps them to solve technical problems that are new to them.
We have found that it is helpful to have the team visit the sponsor's site for a day early in the term. The students inevitably return from the visit with a better sense of the goals and purpose of the project. It is clear that they return more solidly invested in those goals. After that, ideally, the liaison meets with the team on a regular basis In the case of distant sponsors, it is typical to have a conference call instead.
The team presents its ideas and progress to the Senior Design community three times during the year, and presents its final results at the IDCSA Conference in the spring. Formal mid-year and final progress reports are required.
Possible Project Areas
Computer Science majors are equipped for a wide domain of problems in areas related to computers, information, networking, and automation. The following are some areas that will be of interest to clients and to which Illinois DCS students are able to contribute:
Software Development
- Object-oriented software architecture
- Compilers and operating systems components
- Specification tools, such as for real-time systems
- Databases and expert systems
Computer Networking
- Client-server systems
- Performance monitoring
- Distributed information bases
- Protocol analysis
Business Intelligence
- Data mining
- Information integration
- Natural language processing
- Data security
Interface Design
- Software for hand-helds
- Interactive systems
- Multimedia
Web Systems
- Transaction processing
- Collaboration
- Social systems
Clinic Fee and Ownership of Intellectual Property
Funding of projects is based on a fixed-fee set by the department of $12,000. University policy states that students own any work they produce as part of a class, and the Senior Design project is a class. However, if clients want exclusive ownership of the results, they can ask that the students assigned to the team completing their project sign an agreement to transfer intellectual property rights to the client organization.
Similarly, reports detailing Senior Design project results are normally made public immediately. They can, however, be kept confidential if, for example, the project includes proprietary information or the client wants to apply for patent protection.
Although every effort is made to protect proprietary information shared by the sponsor with the Senior Design team, departmental enforcement of strict confidentiality is not feasible within the college environment. Accordingly, non-disclosure arrangements must be made between corporate clients and the individual students participating on that client's project.
For further information on the University of Illinois
Department of Computer Science Senior Design Project Program
please contact:
- Professor Ralph Johnson, Director
- Senior Design Project Program
- Computer Science Department
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- 210 N. Goodwin Avenue
- Urbana, IL 61801
--
Last Modified January 03 2008 09:23:45.
