A Selection of the 2003 Final Year Projects

"BROKER POKER" - Patrick Clifford

'BROKER POKER' is a virtual online share banking system. The system incorporates all aspects necessary to efficiently manage and maintain an E-Banking system. The system is targeted at users whom wish to learn about the stock exchange or who are interested in purchasing shares but would like an initial risk free trial.

The system is implemented as an ASP.NET web application. It is developed on a three-tier design structure. The three tiers are comprised of a presentation layer(ASP.NET), a business logic layer(C#) and a data layer(ADO.NET).

"REAL-TIME DETECTION AND MIMICKING OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS" - Elaine Clancy & Ian O'Brien

Our project implemented a system for real-time mimicking of facial expressions.

The aim of the project was to process live frames from a webcam, detect and segment a face from the image and then classify its facial expression. The techniques that we used for detection and segmentation of the face were skin colour segmentation, shape detection, template matching using the cross correlation, and face statistics. To recognize the facial expression we focused on the Eigenface technique. We implemented the face recognition system using Matlab and then using C++ to make use of the real-time ultra fast response which C++ provides for faster processing of the live images.

"ALGORITHM PROFILER" - Stanley Nolan, Chris Pender

The Algorithm Profiler is a graphics-based educational tool aimed for use by 1st and 2nd year computer applications students. It is a highly interactive, applet based java program, which allows users to profile seven different complex algorithms. The following algorithms may be simulated through the Algorithm Profiler: Merge Sort, Insertion Sort, Quick Sort, Digit Sort, Bucket Sort, Binary Search Trees a solution to the Travelling Sales Man through Simulated Annealing. The profiler utilizes both two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphical domains to generate an animation of the
sequence of steps involved in the implementation of the afore-mentioned algorithms. Users can directly control and manipulate the speed and sequencing of these algorithms. We hope this project distils a high level of educational value among fellow students.

"SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TOOL - LFI, THE LINUX FAULT INJECT" - Mark Campbell

LFI, the Linux Fault Injection tool is a C programmer development tool to aid test error handling routines and programs in adverse environments. Quite often developers fail to write functions to handle extreme environment conditions, this tool simulates these errors which otherwise would not be feasible in many cases. Common occurring errors such as a hard-disk drive being full is something which would be hard to test how your program would react without having file space to write to. Obviously the developer could simply fill their hard drive however this is less than practical. This tool
could be used to simulate a range of hardware errors from memory allocation errors, hard disk failure, network errors to mention but a few. Simulating these errors in a protected environment is a safe way to test how these type of errors effect the developers programs and how their error handling routines deal with adverse conditions.