Mentoring Undergraduate Senior Projects 2023

A Senior Project is a two-quarter class sequence where students work on a large project and are advised by a professor. Students have complete control over the process, and there is a lot of flexibility in what they work on and how they organize it. Students can work on a solo project or in a team. Moreover, students can work on a project they come up with, a project for a professor, or one for an external sponsor. It can be design-oriented or more research-based. It can be entrepreneurial in nature. This is designed for students to pursue a project independently rather than in a faculty-led team-based format. 

I am mentoring the following projects this year:

Eve: A Mobile/Web Chatbot for Event Scheduling

This project provides a solution to manually insert events/tasks into Google Calendar by automating the process using a virtual assistant. Events will be scheduled and processed in a fashion similar to Google Calendar. In addition to scheduling events from a text-messaging platform directly into the calendar, the application allows users to save personal notes, daily tasks, as well as goals/objectives. User progress on goals/objectives will be tracked and updated based on relevant calendar input. If the user asks, “Eve, is there anything scheduled for tomorrow?”, “What events do I have scheduled this week” or “Show me my saved notes”, Eve will provide an appropriate, human-like response. To create a more flexible application, this project will respond to both voice and textual input through a chatbot. This project involves the creation of a new web and mobile application (Android).

VirtualReallity Microcontroller API for Haptics

Modern VR games and activities are getting more and more complex. To match this, companies are coming out with haptic feedback to give the user a more immersive experience. However, these haptics are often expensive and sometimes come at a cost, like no audio. This project would involve trying to communicate with an external microcontroller. Creating and publishing this API would allow anyone with an Arduino and a headset to create whatever VR haptics they want.