Proposed Projects For Fall 2022
Below is a list of 4080/4088/4480 projects proposed by faculty members. More projects may be added once they come in (normally in August). Please contact the supervisor directly you are in interested in a project. You can also contact faculty members individually to discuss possible projects. Click here to see a list of faculty members, their research areas and their contact information.
Automation of Copyright Takedowns
Course: EECS4070/80/88/90/4480
Supervisor: Prof. James Andrew Smith
Contact: drsmith@yorku.ca
COVID has accelerated the trend for delivering university courses online. This has been a boon to providing accessible learning modes to students. However, it has also made it more likely for course content to be uploaded to and distributed on commercial, for-profit file sharing sites like Chegg and Course Hero, without permission of the content creator.
A copyright takedown process (e.g. DMCA) is in place on these commercial sites but it is cumbersome to use. The objective of this project is to semi-automate the take-down process in one of two ways:
1. Allow a copyright holder to identify a category of course material (e.g. a course name and number) a priori and engage a scheduled process which regularly scans a commercial site (e.g. Course Hero) and automatically submits takedowns on behalf of the copyright holder
2. Submit reports to the copyright holder when an identified category of course material is found on a commercial site (e.g. Course Hero) and asks the copyright holder whether a takedown request should be made on the holder's behalf.
Required skills: General programming skills
Recommended skills: Experience in Python (and perhaps Beautiful Soup) and/or Java and/or equivalent
Visualization of Course Maps at YorkU
Course: EECS4070/80/88/90/4480
Supervisor: Prof. James Andrew Smith
Contact: drsmith@yorku.ca
Students at York have long been missing the ability to visualize the connections between courses when planning or reviewing their progress through their program. We would like to make a web-centric visualization tool available to students that scrapes data from the official online course calendar so that students can better inform the decisions they make while studying at York.
This is a continuation of an existing open-source project written in Python. Interested students will be asked to improve the existing code base so that:
1. A visualization can be produced and displayed on the web
2. Corrections to the existing data set (the University's calendar website) can be submitted to an online repository and reused
Students involved in the project will be required to maintain public-facing documentation. The result of this project will remain open source for further development by students, staff and faculty.
Required skills: General programming skills
Recommended skills: Experience in Python (and perhaps Beautiful Soup) and web-centric tools
Privacy assessment of online services and platforms
Course: EECS4480/4080
Supervisor: Yan Shvartzshnaider
Contact: Please complete this form: https://forms.gle/oVVg6hEConSNf9p28 For any question email: yansh@yorku.ca
This project involves performing privacy assessment of online services and platforms. The student will help design usable-privacy tools that analyze information handling practices of online services.
For prior project, see work https://wiki.eecs.yorku.ca/course_archive/2021-22/F/4080_4088_4090_4480_4070/4088_presentation_schedule
Required skills: Ability to work indepently. Experience in full-stack development and using Jupyter and R notebooks for data analysis.
Recommended skills: Experience with Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing techniques, HCI design. Interest in usable privacy, critical analysis of privacy policies and privacy related regulation.