Find inspiration in UW, CMU, Stanford research.
Artificial Intelligence
- intelligent transport systems
- swarm computing
- automatic image analysis (image search)
- automatic translation
- voice control
- natural language processing
- get ideas from MIT’s CSAIL
Human-Computer Interfaces
- brain-controlled computers
- gesture interfaces (skinput, sixth sense, Natal)
Ubiquitous Computing
- wearable computers
- “Smart grid” (sensors for electrical, power grids; HydroSense)
- RFID applications (“smart tags”, tracking)
Computing law
- laws regulating privacy
- anti-hacking laws
Large-scale computing
- quantum computing
- parallel computing (multi-core, multi-processor)
Computing Concepts
- Moore’s Law
- Agile Software Design
- Cloud Computing (Google docs, GMail, etc)
- Databases (information storage)
- Peer to peer networking (BitTorrent)
- Encryption
Human-based computation …

You will spend this class period completing the flickr exercise and demonstrating what you have learned over the course of the semester.  This is worth 25 project points.  You will do as many of these short programs as you can and will be graded based on completeness, how on-task you are and the appropriateness of the problems you choose to solve.  Aim to demonstrate as much knowledge as you can.
Please make sure there is a comment at the top of your program indicating your name.  Please separate each question with …

This assignment is designed to give you experience with reading and interpreting existing code while learning about the types of applications made possible by access to online information.
You will need to download flickr.py and wallpaper.py.  Make sure to save them in the same folder.  flickr.py is a library that contains functions to make calls to Flickr.  wallpaper.py is an example of a program using that library.
Run wallpaper.py a couple of times and make sure you understand what it’s doing.  READ THROUGH THE CODE ONCE BEFORE STARTING THE QUESTIONS!
Answer the following …

I hope several of you will attempt the Star Map program.  It’s challenging, interesting and hopefully really rewarding so I strongly encourage you to attempt it!
Dictionaries
Dictionaries are used to map values called keys to data or values.   In a “real world” dictionary,  the words are keys and the values are the definitions.  Dictionaries are a lot like lists but can use arbitrary values as indexes rather than being limited to integers.  Here’s how you could visualize a dictionary that maps people’s names to their favorite foods:
—————————————-
|”Anna”    |  “Joe”  | …

Thanks to Nick Parlante and Stuart Reges for the original project idea!

You will write a program that graphs name popularity for each decade since 1900 based on data given by the Social Security Administration (See their website for the latest data).
Details

You will read from two files: names.txt and meanings.txt. You must download them and save them in the same directory as your program.

names.txt: each line includes a name followed by 11 decades’ worth of popularity ranking. Notice that a ranking of 1 means the name is the MOST popular. …

Write a program that reads from the file imdb.txt and searches it for a keyword. The file is organized in the following way:
rank rating votes title (year)
You should ask the user what to search for then display ALL titles that contain that text. Here is a sample run (user input is underlined):
Search word? american
American Beauty (1999) is ranked 35 with a rating of 8.5
American History X (1998) is ranked 41 with a rating of 8.5
American Gangster (2007) is ranked 94 with a rating of 8.2
You should exactly reproduce the format shown above. …

In the coming days, we will be coming back to lists to perform interesting data manipulation. To ease our way back, let’s do a few list exercises involving robots.
Activity 1: Home movie
Get your robot to film and display a “movie” by storing then showing a list of pictures.  I’ll have shown you the basic idea in lecture but it will be up to you to figure out appropriate timing to get about 10 seconds of video without blurring while your robot is moving.
Activity 2: Note list
You all wrote songs using …

Work on these activities in your group.  If you are getting done early, GREAT!  I want to see you continuing to work with the robots in cool ways.  Feel free to skip around and to simply experiment.
Activity 0: song
Write a song function as outlined in the tutorial.
Activity 1: go function
Write a function named go that takes distance as a parameter and makes the robot go that many inches.  To do this, you will need to experiment with how much distance a robot covers over different amounts of time and write …

Robots are one of those things we all think we know something about but that are surprisingly difficult to define.  Broadly, a robot is a program that runs automatically without a human needing to interfere.  Robots have logic of varying complexity that allow it to react to different situations on its own.  Given this definition, a robot doesn’t technically need to be a physical machine like the Wall-Es and Transformers found in movies.  One type of robot all of us depend on without necessarily realizing it is a webcrawler which …

Please take your time going over the list tutorial and the first set of exercises.  Once you are comfortable with those, take a look at the advanced list examples and move on to these.
As usual, please jump around as you wish.
Activity 1: Magic Eight Ball (Jason’s idea!!)
Create a program that prompts the user for a question then gives a magic eight ball answer.  Your program should randomly pick an answer from a list of choices.  Feel free to use the standard answers listed on the Wikipedia article or to make …