This page has information for students wishing to do their Master's Thesis under my supervision. Other faculty members will have different requirements. Our department does not yet offer the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, though many of our graduates have gone on to that degree at other institutions.

While primarily a degree that is supposed to be an affidavit of mastery of a wide breadth of computer science, the M.S. degree does require a thesis in which some new ground is broken in some chosen subject area. The thesis is required to be of publishable (or near-publishable) quality, and must demonstrate the student's ability to perform and adequately disseminate research.

Students should not undertake a thesis project in an unfamiliar subject area. If necessary, students are welcome, and encouraged, to take a one semester independent studies course in such an area before undertaking the thesis.

Before you begin, generate a proposal. It needs to contain:

• A proposed title
• The subject area you are working in
• Why it is interesting
• Goals and Objectives
• Any hypotheses you might have now
• What you think you can come up with that we don't know now
• Tools you will use, if any in your research

Discuss the proposal, and your background and qualifications with me.

Initially, generate:

• A reading list, in bibliography format, of 40 or so sources that are important in your area. You do not have to read all of them, but you do have to put together a useful list. I assume you will acquaint yourself with at least some of them. (Don't stuff this list with web sites.)

During the preparation:

• Each week, end me a very short email with a bullet-point summary of what you did all week (a progress report of sorts). If you prefer, you may keep a blog instead, as long as it is updated frequently.
• Meet with me every two weeks to discuss your progress.

Paper Organization

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Abstract
• Section 1 — Introduction, last paragraph says something like "The rest of this thesis is organized as follows...."
• Section 2 — Background (covering Previous Work)
• Section 3 — Theory behind the work you are doing
• Section 4 — Implementation, technical details, measurements, results. etc.
• Section 5 — Conclusions and Future Research
• Appendices, which might contain printouts of selected portions of any code you may have written.(try to keep under 20 pages, 2 up)
• Annotated Bibliography

Number the sections like 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc., and number the appendices like A, A,1, B, etc. Do not number the abstract or bibliography.

This list is not complete. I'm in the process of trying to fill in data from missing semesters. If you know of any I missed, let me know. Thanks.

Fall, 2008

Brian Orr, The Platform Virtualization Threat Environment

Fall, 2006

Joey Barrett, YAKIT: Your Awareness KIT

Spring, 2006

Joephy Hoang, Content-Based Image Retrieval

Raúl Aguilar, Mixed Langauge Spam Detection

Fall, 2005

David Chu, Network Analysis for Distributed DOS Attacks

Spring, 2005

Amit Desai, The Effect of Divergent Implementations on Application Design in Real-Time Environments

Dale Kohler, ?

Sinu Ranasinghe, ?

Fall, 2004

Criag Ward, Implications of Programming Language Selection on the Construction of Secure Software Systems

Akin Ajayi, Insight: A Framework for Shallow Text Mining

Spring, 2004

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 2003

Kholoud Khateeb, Creative Author: A Visual Programming Language for Creative Multimedia Authoring

Ihimu Ukpo, Image Compression Applications of Sector Key Compression

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 2003

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 2002

Still trying to track this down

Spring, 2002

Debbie Spiegel, Comparative Analysis of Peer-to-Peer Systems

Mike Chang, A Refined Design Pattern Classification Scheme

Sanford Weinberg, Solving the Internet Bandwidth Problem

Fall, 2001

Wei Michael Sun, Smart Answering Management System (SAMS)

Dale Raymond P. Borja, Software Reliability: Assessment and Assurance

Spring, 2001

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 2000

Shouki Souri, Design and Implementation of a Framework for Visual Document Scruture Editing

Robert G, Hayes, Real-time Java

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 2000

Ernest Murillo, VRML Storyboarding

(Not sure if this is complete)

Fall, 1999

Arthur F. del Rosario, ?

Herng-Yi Chen, Data Compression

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 1999 (?/1)

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 1998 (?/3)

Cesar A. Atehortua, The Internet Access Bottleneck --- Is DSL the best solution?

Chuang Kuan-Shih, Speech Technology

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 1998 (?/2)

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 1997 (4/4)

Mike A. Malgeri, Specification for the Addition of a Persistent File Replication Service To CORBAservices

Ray A. Bala II, Load Balancing Web Traffic on An Intranet

Neal C. Smith, Animated Application Development Under Direct3D and OpenGL

Robert T. Bauer, Demonstrating the Undecidability and Incompleteness of Peano Arithmetic with a Higher Order Logic Theorem Prover

Spring, 1997 (?/1)

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 1996 (?/3)

Christine Ng, Image Recognition to Detect Cervical Cancer Cells

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 1996 (?/5)

Baha-din Khasawneh, The Utilization of the Arabic Language in Information Systems

Daniel Cowles, An Adaptive Derivation of the LZW Compression Algorithm

Fall, 1995 (?/2)

Still trying to track this down

Spring, 1995

Eric Shulman, Utilizing Ada Code in a Constrained Environment

Revital Elitzur, A Uniform Database Interface for Object and Schema Versioning

David Lacey, Natural Language Interface for Object Oriented Databases

Fall, 1994 (1/1)

Janet Howard, An Implementation of the ART-1 Neural Network of Carpenter and Grossberg

Spring, 1994 (?/3)

David Coca, A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Database Searching

(Not sure if this is complete)

Fall, 1993 (?/4)

Nils Sandoy, Object Oriented Modeling and Design of Fractals

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 1993 (2/2)

Kurt Harms, Interactive Simulator for Quasi-Static Shortest Path Routing Algorithms using Ada Concurrent Tasking

John Ralston, Use of Self-Enhancing Databases for Address Matching Systems

Fall, 1992 (?/6)

Alberto Velez, Real Time System Software for Vector Displays

Robert Greayer, Separate Compilation in Language Design and Program Optimization

Teial Starks, DB++: A Language for Small-Scale Object-Oriented Databases

Dean Allingham, The Design of the Language L

Spring, 1992 (?/6)

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 1991 (?/3)

Mukesh Patel, Intel 80387 Floating Point Emulation

(Not sure if this is complete)

Spring, 1991 (?/6)

Still trying to track this down

Fall, 1990 (?/6)

Still trying to track this down

Prior to Fall, 1990, comprehensive examinations were given in lieu of the thesis requirement.