Prerequisite: 810:114 or 810:115; permission of instructor.

Note: 'permission of instructor' is a technical prerequisite. Send me email if you want to enroll and the 'permission of instructor' hold will be removed.

The class will meet on the first day of classes. If you cannot come at that time, send me email and arrange to see me in my office. The initial meeting(s) will be to discuss possible topics. You do not need to select a topic immediately.

Also note: if you have another class you want to enroll at the scheduled time, let me know and I will arrange a different time for this class. Other than a few meetings at the beginning and end of the semester, the class will not meet regulary. Instead, you will make individual progress reports.

Students will work alone or in small groups on a project broadly involving information systems. Student groups will meet with me on a weekly basis to discuss projects and progress. Full class meetings will be held the last week of classes to present projects. Grade will be based on final project submitted: a project writeup, description, images, and, if possible, live demo, will be via a web page.

Projects may cover a topic proposed by the student(s) or from a list. A few of the possibilities are listed below but I am open to suggestions for other areas you may be interested in.

1. Adding new functions to the Mumps library

2. Text indexing experiments using ISR techniques. Possible data bases include the medical data base used in 810:114, genetics, the web, etc. This can include extending a project you did in 810:115.

3. Conversion of BioPerl routines to C++/C code using the new C++/Mumps class libraries and macros. Note: no biology required.

   bio.perl.org - Main page
   BioPerl Documentation.

4. Using BLAST, FASTA and similar techniques to index text data bases.

5. Developing additional C/C++ toolkit classes, functions, macros and tools for hierarchical data bases.

6. Developing a toolkit of C/C++ classes, functions and macros for specific application areas such as IS&R, Data Base Management, etc.

7. Porting the hierarchical class library to MS Windows.

8. Experiments in indexing genomic data. Some references are here . Note: no biology required.

9. Modify the Berkeley Data Base RPC facility to incorporate open SSL encryption of network traffic and user authentication.

10. Develop a 64 bit addressed multi-threaded direct access disk I/O access method that can be shared by multiple concurrent local processes.

11. Build or modify a btree file system to incorporate data encryption of file contents with multiple user keys.

12. Devise a Linux shell based on the Mumps interpreter.

13. Modify the Mumps network code developed by Mike Janssen to incorporate user authentication.

14. Experiments in building a distributed data base facility using multiple networked machines to support parallel genomic data base searches. (these are really big (>25GB) files - can you distribute the data across multipel machines and search it in parallel?) This project could involve several people.

15. Debian distribution package for Mumps.