I will be happy to guide any one on these projects virtually. What does “guide” mean? I can expand the description of the project, answer any questions and will be happy to look at the project and provide feedback.

The projects are divided into two broad categories - Technical and Non-technical. I will list the technical topics in this post. We will do the non-technical one in another.

Technical Categories

GUI Projects

Simple user interface widgets using HTML, CSS, AJAX and Simple Animations. Typically these projects are Javascript and HTML. They may use JSON or XML for access to common APIs from an open backend service.
Game Projects

Game projects are fun. Games can be written in C, Python, Java, Lua and other languages. We can develop a few Text Games or Simple Graphic Games or Animation based Games.

Firefox Extensions

It is possible to provide useful extensions to Firefox browser.  Many of these enhance the browser in small incremental ways. In this category, we will try out several ideas for extending Firefox Browser.
Facebook Applications

Facebook is one of the fastest growing social applications. Facebook provides an API ( a programming interface) to build very powerful social applications. In this category, we will try different facebook projects.

Open Social Applications

Open Social, like Facebook is a way to build social applications across several social networks. These include Ning, MySpace, Orkut. In this category, we will try several projects using Google’s Open Social API.
Mobile Applications

There are several mobile operating systems. These inlcude Symbian (used by Nokia phones and several others) and  Android - Google’s mobile operating system. In this category we will build mobile applications. These may include games, learning tools and other aids. These mobile applications can be built using Java (J2ME), Python (Nokia provides an API), or C.

Sofware Agents

Sotware agents are a powerful class of applications to perform a variety of automated tasks. These include spiders, bots, software extraction agents. Software agents can also be used for intertactive dialog (like Alicebot) and tutoring, coaching and entertainment. In this category, we will build several software agents and experiment with some useful ideas.

Database Projects

Most of the database projects I outlined so far in this blog are simple database applications. In this category we will cover two types of database projects - Database tools, Database Applications. While Database Applications are specific to a certain class of application, the tools are generic and can be used with any relational database. These include import/export utilities, database visualization tools, query builders and others.

Web 2.0 Applications

In this category we will build several social applications (without social networks) interlink existing Web 2.0 apps (like wikis and blogs) and build Web 2.0 widgets. There will be some overlap of these projects with AJAX, Mashups, Social Applications etc.

Semantic Web Applications

Projects in this category push the envelope and build the (possibly) next generation web applications. We use technologies like RDF, OWL and explore the semantic web space. Since this space is still being developed, this may be more experimental in nature.

Collaboration and Collective Intelligence Applications

This is an interesting class of applications where mulitple people can collaborate on buidling documents, learning content, mind maps, argument maps and several classes of applications for harvesting the collective intelligence of a large number of people.

We will add more to this list of categories. Let us know if we missed anything big. If you like this list, let us knwo which ones you want to participate in.
Mashups

Mashup projects are fun to write. They may vary from a few hours to a few days to build and leverage the growing number of publicly available APIs. A mashup is a way to combine, extend existing applications like Google maps, Google search and other powerful Web Applications in any language of your choice.

Animation Projects

In this category we will build simple animations. The goal would be to teach. So many of these may turn out to be simple simulations or learning tools. We may use Adobe Flash or Microsoft WPF to build these animations.

Artificial Intelligence

In this category we will build fun and useful projects. There are many interesting subject areas in AI. One of my next steps, is to collect various AI related efforts and put them in a separate blog post with links. Ideas for projects will come later.

Functionality

1. User specifies a database
2. The ERD lists a set of tables
3. User picks - All or a set of tables
4. User specifies the ERD options - Overview, Detailed
5. An ER diagram is generated with the following:
   1. Tables
   2. Columns for each table
   3. Index items marked
   4. Foreign Key relationships

Extensions:

1. Convert the diagram to PDF format
2. Convert the diagram to FLV or SWF format
3. Save the diagram as SVG

Jobs database describes a set of jobs. It consists of:

1. Jobs Table

Todo:

1. Create the table.
2. Create indexes
3. Add/Delete/Change Form - Create a form
4. Enter at least 10 meaningful (not aaa, bbb etc.) records in the table
5. View Form - View the list of records as a list (in a table)
6. When a user clicks on one of the records in the list, they can see the details and change or delete them. Try to reuse the ADC Form.

Version-2

Repeat steps 1-6 for each table given below.

1. Skills Table
2. JobSkills Table
3. Organizations Table

Describes various types of events both physical and non-physical. Consists of:

1. Events Table

Todo:

1. Create the table.
2. Create indexes
3. Add/Delete/Change Form - Create a form
4. Enter at least 10 meaningful (not aaa, bbb etc.) records in the table
5. View Form - View the list of records as a list (in a table)
6. When a user clicks on one of the records in the list, they can see the details and change or delete them. Try to reuse the ADC Form.

Version-2

Repeat steps 1-6 for each table given below.

First modify event table, to replace event type by event type id.

1. Event Types Table
2. Physical Events Table
3. Virtual Events Table
4. Tags Table

This db consists of a set of tables that describe an organization.

Tables:

1. Organizations Table

Todo:

1. Create the table.
2. Create indexes
3. Add/Delete/Change Form - Create a form
4. Enter at least 10 meaningful (not aaa, bbb etc.) records in the table
5. View Form - View the list of records as a list (in a table)
6. When a user clicks on one of the records in the list, they can see the details and change or delete them. Try to reuse the ADC Form.

Version-2

Repeat steps 1-6 for each table given below.

1. Industry Segments Table
2. Partners Table
3. Tags Table

users table

• userid
• name
• email

Bookmarks table

• UserId
• Title
• URL
• tags ( a list of comma separated tags)
• Share (boolean - Yes or No)

This can be a desktop application or a web application:

0. User logs in (uses email and password previously assigned)

1. Application displays a text box with a browse button

2. User can locate the bookmark and upload it

3. All the bookmarks are displayed in a table

4. Each bookmark has two check boxes - one to import another to share

5. User marks the bookmarks to be imported (and a subset of them to be shared with others) and chooses Store in database

6. These bookmarks are written to the database with the user id. If it can be shared, the shared column is set to true

References:

1. Netscape bookmarks file format

2. Exporting Favorites/Bookmarks from Internet Explorer

3. Locating bookmarks file in Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox

* The program takes text file and performs an analysis of sentences

Rules for detecting the first word of a sentence.

1. First word in a paragraph (how do you find a paragraph in a document independent format)?
2. First word in a sentence (any word following - period, ? or ! etc.)

Components:

* A simple text parser
* First word detector
* Associative table (automatically updates count for duplicate words)

Follow on projects:

1. Analyze n words at the beginning of a sentence
2. Analyze sentence lengths
3. Domain specific implementations - for different fields/industries

Applications:

* Concept extraction
* Fact database for AIML
* Analysis of writing
* Signature detection

Link Summary:

http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme/proceedings/html/2007/Freese01/EML2007Freese01.html

Skills required for the project:

• Java Programming
  • JDBC API
• SQL (create table, insert, delete, update, select, parameterized queries)
• For Web Cleint
  • JSP Development
  • HTML Forms
  • Servlet Programming
• For Desktop Client
  • Swing

Here is what you need.

1. A database engine (MySQL, Postgres SQL or any other open source relational database)
2. JDBC driver for the database you select
3. A simple command line or GUI front end for creating/dropping/altering tables, views
4. A simple tool for query (may be same as 3)
5. A servlet engine (Tomcat acts as both a web server and servlet engine)

We can do this in four simple milestones.

Contacts Milestone-1

1. Create one table with the following columns:

• Name
• emailid
• phone

2. Create a simple Java application to

• Add a record using a Form
• View a set of records, select one and update any of the fields
• Sort the list of contact by name

3. Create a simple web application with the same functionality as 2.

• In this web application, the swing form will be replaced by a HTML form
• Events will be replaced by JavaScript events
• Use JSP for the server side

Contacts: Milestone2

Modify the contacts table to add the following:

1. imtype (instant messenger type - yahoo, skype, gtalk, aim, irc, msn messenger)
2. imid (the userid for instant messenger)
3. Street-1
4. Street-2
5. City
6. State
7. Pin-Code

Now you have a full contacts table with all the details

Create both the Spring and HTML interface to this extended table to incorporate all the new columns added

Contacts: Milestone3

In this milestone, we will add another table called relationships. Let us assume the emailid of a contact as the unique id.

Change the contacts table to include a password field (right now we will keep the password visible)

Here is the list of columns for Relationships:

• emailid-1 (contact’s unique identifier)
• emailid-2 (second contact’s unique identifier)
• relationship (friend, family, teacher, other)

This table is used to specify a relationship of contact to another.

Additional User Interface Forms:

1. Create a login form

2. Let a user login with emailid and password

3. Create these menu items - View Contacts, MyProfile, Manage Relationships

4. View contacts lets you browse through contacts

5. My Profile displays your information (using the emailid at the time of login) and update any values (except email)

6. Manage Relationships allows you to display a list of contacts and specify a relation ship (you can do this by creating three checkboxes one for each type of relationship). If you want to restrict it to only one relationship, you can use radio buttons instead.

7. Modify MyProfile to display both your contact details and the list of relationships in a table below.