Spring & Summer 2006

MCWTF Robot Camp Video Clip
Robofest Summer Camps
Summer Robot Camp at Ann Arbor Trail Magnet School, 7-18
2006 RoboGames video in San Fransisco
2006 Aibo Summer Camp
Oakland Press and the Eccentric newspapers, 7-27
Oakland Press and the Eccentric newspapers, 8-13
2006 Final Aibo Demo
Summer Internship from Academy of Michigan (RoboNova and Alice)
AIBO team on Channel 2 and 7 News on July 24
Detoit News, July 25, on AIBO robots





LTU IGVC team won 3rd place award in Design Competition! Check out the photo album (Jan-June) and a streaming video clip




MCS Department hosted four interns from UCMST (Utica Center for Mathmeatics, Science, and Technolgy) from May 30 to June 15. They worked on game designs, educational technologies, and robotics.



Some pictures of Innovation Showcase on Saturday April 29th.



Robotics presentation and demo for Dossin Elementary School Visit on April 24 in the Lear Auditorium. See pictures.



On Thursday March 23, autonomous robot demo was done for 25 students and 5 chaperones from Chicago Academy and Al-Raby High School in Chicago. Dr. Bindschadler gave welcome remarks in the beginning of the presentation. Dr. Chung introduced LTU's autonomous robot projects. Emily Trudell and Steven Kryskalla demonstrated AIBO robot soccer as well as robot dance. (Sorry, Emily was late for her class due to the demo.) Nathaniel Johnson showed a new RoboNova robot. Brace Stout demonstrated a L2Bot. The students had some good questions and showed interests in the IGVC project. Lori Birman introduced Robofest program for the schools. Brace had dinner with the students, and then went to the field house. He played ping pong with some of them and talked with them about computer science and engineering.




CS Senior Projects

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Room: T221

Team 6: Fault System

Our project consisted of creating an application which will parse firewall log files and present them in a more comprehensive manner. The application can be used easily by all users. However, it was designed for use of a network administrator to ease their responsibilities. In addition we provide statistics for the traffic logged, which is useful in the determination of traffic loads. The project will be presented using all features trough web Graphical User Interface (GUI), which in terms will give remote access capabilities to the user.

Team 3: Golf League System

Our project takes care of everything a golf league would need. It allows any league to add, update or delete all information related to a golf league. The golf league system keeps track of various data including league, course, player, team, match results and schedule information. Using our golf league system will simplify the process of keeping track and constantly updating the leagues information throughout the duration of the season.

Team 9: Restaurant Application System

To develop restaurant application that makes the business more efficient and hence more profitable. The software can installed on your server and has access online. It is user-friendly Restaurant POS software that does not require you to know about computers to use it. The software performs many tasks. For example, a hostess use it to place the customer order, track the orders, show with details each order placed in such as (time , date , method of payment , and price ). The software make the business more efficient and easier to track which give a daily, monthly, yearly reports about profit, worker hours, and restaurant accounting, so you can quickly and easily be in control of your business.

Tuesday, May 2, 2006 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Room: T221

Team 8: SRPG

Current console RPGs (Role-Playing Games) do not provide users with a meaningful variety of actions. A meaningful action is one that has an action that provides an advantage or disadvantage to one side in a conflict. This contributes to dull, repetitive game play, resulting in a game that has limited appeal to the game playing audience.

Team 5: TFH Chat System

Communication is vital in today's work and school environments. One excellent method of communication is the web. Students with web access can chat with other students real time and relay important information and help each other learn. However to do so they need a forum to host this communication. The T.F.H. Chat system is such a forum. It will allow students to chat real time over the web in an easy to use, stable environment.

Team 4: Mental Health Database

There are innumerable ways for mental health professionals to diagnose mental health illnesses. Unfortunately, because there are countless reference manuals, someone could diagnose a person as having one mental health illness, while another person could diagnose the same person with a different mental health illness. In order to combat this, we have designed a centralized mental health database that will assist mental health professionals in diagnosing, researching, and treating mental health illnesses. It utilizes a front end GUI that allows the users perform searches on the database in order to determine the correct mental health illness attributed to the symptoms patients may have. Since it would be centralized, it would lower the chance of incorrect diagnoses and/or treatments. It would also reduce the chance of alternate diagnoses of the same patient.

Tuesday, May 9, 2006 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Room: T221

Team 7: Warranty Return Analysis Database

This project is a web based warranty return analysis database system. Using GUI interfaces, the user will input or update existing vehicle and part information. The information gathered can be searched by individual entry or by using any number of the input fields as constraints. The primary goal was to create an easy to use system that will store the part information and allow for viewing and exporting to Excel. The queried data is used to locate trends in performance and failure modes based on the specific search criteria.

Team 1: Agent Management Database

enCORE is a distributed computation system that allows engineers to perform design optimization simulations using compute agents distributed across workstations. An important design issue in distributed computation systems is configuration and management of individual nodes. Dedicated clusters mandate centralized control, whereas grid systems, like SETI, allow local control and configuration. eCAMS provides enCORE users, both experimenters and the users who host agents, a means to manage and configure agents. The system is comprised of the agentMan application, as well as an API that may be leveraged for development of additional management tools.

Team 2: Configurable Text Parser

Almost every company today has a computer system that stores data that is somewhat unstructured. Depending on how unstructured the data is, and how many records need to be reviewed, a company will spend an enormous amount of time and money converting this unstructured data to an acceptable format that is usable. One type of unstructured data can be as simple as a note field for a given business transaction, or as complicated as a text field that is utilized for many purposes within a relational data model, and without some data integrity constraints, this text field becomes a maintenance nightmare. This project enables a better way for a company to convert and maintain their unstructured text data by providing the ability to convert an unstructured string of characters into a pre-defined set of words, phrases, and/or sentences. Ultimately, this software project allows an end-user to take a file of unstructured text data and convert it into a file of structured text.



Dr. Bindschadler introduced about Game Development on Tuesday March 21 during the A&S Seminar Series. It was a great sucess and the room S217 needed many additional chairs borrowed from other rooms.




Robot Demo for the Dean's Brunch was held on Sat. March 6, 8:30am-Noon at the atrium. L2Bot, Deep Blue, Thin-Tank, AIBO robot soccer, and Robonova were introduced to high school senior students and their family members. Participants were (from left) David, Steve, Emily, John, Dean Moore, Assoicate Dean Bauer, Maurice, Bill, Marcus, Nate, and Brace. \ Please check out the Thumnail Photo Album and Streaming Video (3min.).




Robotics is a wonderful platform to experiment variety of computer science concepts in a fun way. In order to spark High School students' interest in computer science, Robotics Exploration Day 2006 was held on Feb. 17. Twenty four RETC (Romeo Engineering and Technology Center) students were invited to the hands-on workshop. This year, RidgeSoft company sponsored 4 IntelliBrain Bot to LTU and loaned 5 additional robots together with extra sensors and motors for the class. Dr. Chung introduced basics in programming the robot with Java. After solving in class problems, there was mini competition that is a subset of Robofest 2006 problem. Team No. 6 won the first place award. Students were working during the lunch break! Dr. Bindschadler, Chair of MCS Department gave an opening remarks and admission's office hosted the event. Maurice Tedder, MSCS '05, assisted the class. Check out the Thumnail Photo Album.



The Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), an international team competition, took place for four days from Thursday, 2/2/06, at 8 pm to Monday, 2/6/06, at 8 pm. Six LTU students were competing: Warren Beard, Alec Drobnich, Luke Ewalt, Louis Frederick, Steve Kryskalla, and Lucifer Roberts.





In order to reduce so-called the "digital gap", Robofest has launched Robofest Academy to deliver hands-on robotics programming classes into inner city school classrooms. The first class started at AOM (Academy of Michigan) High School in December. 16 students took 18 hours of NQC programming class with LEGO Mindstorms robots. When we had last class with mini competition on Feb. 8th 2006, Dr. David Bindschadler, Chair of Math and Computer Science Department congratulated students for their achievements. The 1st place winners were: Team #6 - Jamel Hale, Jesse Calmese, and Jordan Reid.
Mission Times were 41, 41, 42 seconds. First place prize for each team member was MP3 player. Every student received a Certificate of Achievement.

Head instructor of the class was Dr. John Miller. Maurice Tedder and CJ Chung administered the class. CS student George Miller assisted the class. Principal Mr. Summers supported the class and Ms. Bonner, a teacher at AOM, coordinated the class. The lecture notes of the class can be found at medicalopensource.net/mcs/robacad.html. Also check out thumbnail photo album of the class.




Dear all: I’d like to share several exciting good news with you. On Thursday Jan. 26, the Board of Trustees granted Dr. Melinda Weinstein tenure in the College of Arts and Sciences. In addition, Dr. Betty Stover and Dr. Melinda Weinstein both received promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. Please join me in congratulating Melinda and Betty for their well deserved awards and recognition!

The Board of Trustees also unanimously and enthusiastically approved the Media Communications Program proposal. Congratulations to all of you who have been involved, especially Professor Kevin Kelch who spearheaded this project from its very inception.

Also, in recognition of the heavy teaching and administrative load in MCS Department, the Provost has approved the conversion of its Department Secretary position to Department Administrative Assistant position. Dr. David Bindschadler has appointed Ms. Aleta Mack for this new position. Congratulations to both Aleta and Dave!

There will be a cake/soft drink celebration party in the Dean’s Office at 12 noon on Monday, January 30th. Please come and join us in celebrating an outstanding start of the new semester.

Happy Chinese New Year!
Hsiao-Ping Moore, Ph.D.
1-30-2006
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

 Some photos from the celebration party are posted here.



Robofest 2006 Team Registration is open. Please go to www.robofest.net



MSDNAA (Microsoft Developer’s Network Academic Alliance) for Computer Science Students and Faculty

Access our library of Microsoft's latest software, including operating systems (XP Professional, Vista, Server 2003), development tools (Visual Studio), technical references (MSDN subscriptions), and more. 
Office: UTLC room T220 (Computer Science Advanced Graphics Lab)

Spring Semester 2006 Hours (January 19th – May 3rd):
 Tuesday 	3:30 – 5:30 pm
 Thursday 	3:30 – 5:30 pm

How to join: Go to the LTU MSDNAA site at ltu164.ltu.edu/msdnaa and click on “Register Now”

Administrator: Steven Kryskalla (email ltu_mcs_msdnaa@hotmail.com)
Faculty Advisor: Dr. CJ Chung




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