Capstone Sequence
Both graduate concentrations require a four-course capstone sequence that consists of a 1-credit research methods course, followed by one of two 3-course sequences, either software development project or thesis.
The software development project is an apprenticeship sequence (team project), where a group of students collaborates on a project for a client. Some recent projects include
- software that helps speech pathologists diagnose and treat children with speech disorders;
- a system to support undergraduate advising;
- tools for the management of distributed systems of large clusters of computers;
- a data model for the ICAO (the UN's airline travel standards organization);
- wind tunnel reliability and interface software for NASA;
- a model for assessing non-technological risks in software development;
- and an implementation of Watts Humphreys' PSP.
The other capstone is the thesis track. Recent theses have been in the areas of data security, aspect oriented programming, data mining, software engineering, and computer graphics.
Current projects
Current Software Capstones
- The ETSU High(er) Performance Computing Projects (Spring 2005-Spring 2008)
The three ETSU HPC Projects, which have been directed by Dr. Phil Pfeiffer, have investigated of strategies for supporting the use of distributed and parallel computing at ETSU.The first, nine-student project ported two computationally intensive, single-processor applications to distributed platforms: a Fortran code from Dr. Richard Ignace of the ETSU physics and astronomy department for simulating interstellar photon transport, and a Fortran code from Dr. Beverly Smith of the ETSU physics and astronomy department for analyzing galactic collisions. The project also studied the use of Condor to parallelize the rendering of animations produced by Digital Media Students.
The second, eight-student project successfully deployed Dr. Smith's codes on her research cluster, and determined that the Condor-Windows environment was too unstable to reliably support rendering in the ETSU environment.
The third project has been tasked with tuning Dr. Smith's codes, investigating the use of BOINC for supporting cycle-scavenging-based rendering, and supporting the deployment of ETSU's new 256-node high-performance computer
- The Faculty Activities System Project (Spring 2006; ongoing)
The goal of the Faculty Activities System project is to produce an electronic data system for recording and reporting required ETSU faculty activities. This project's complexity is due to the following factors:
- the many kinds of activities faculty perform, including instruction; supervision of theses and dissertations; academic advisement; scholarship, research, and creative activity; professional and public service; service; professional development; and academic administration;
- the variety of uses for this data, including annual faculty review, tenure and promotion, departmental and institutional accreditation, and cost studies;
- the need to interface with other ETSU computer applications that manage information related to faculty performance; and
- the difficulty of creating a data entry and tracking system that balances convenience and performance.
