Project Idea #1: Library Book Tracker

This idea came about as a suggestion from one of the members of ACM@UIC. Within their organization, they have a library of computer books, currently shared by students on the honor code. Many members of ACM donate their books to the library for the benefit of everyone else to read. After a few checkouts, though, these books have a habit of disappearing. This isn’t necessarily intentional, but many members just forget to return the books when they’re done. This application would keep track of the books with a check-in, check out system. It could possibly send email reminders to members when their books are overdue. During brainstorming, we discussed the possibility of consuming a web service from a provider like Amazon to gather book information. We could also potentially provide a mechanism for members to review the books upon check-in.

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Project Idea #2: Petition Portal

This idea was also brought to us by a member of the ACM. In the past couple months, UIC has switched dining service providers from Aramark to Sodexho. The move has received a mixed reaction from many students, as many of the a la carte menu choices are no longer available. Students have planned a petition to protest the changes, and this project seeks to provide an online portal for this petition. Users would provide their email address privately and any comments they have on the issue. The application would verify email addresses and potentially pre-filter them so that only users with a specific domain name (such as uic.edu) are allowed, much like Facebook. This application could be made generic so that others can use it to drive their petitions, as well.

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Project Idea #3: Grades via SMS

This idea was proposed as a mechanism to deliver student’s grades via text message (SMS). The use case is that a teacher would be able to use this application as an alternative to email to contact students when their exams or course final grades are determined. One consideration with this project is that, currently, most SMS services charge per message. Thus, we would either have to find a free SMS gateway or build some sort of payment mechanism to handle the messaging costs. We also discussed the possibility of integrating this tool into a student portals such as Blackboard. Of course, due to the sensitivity of grades, security concerns will likely need to be addressed as well.

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Project Idea #4: Family Tree Application

This idea is for an application that allows users to establish and maintain a family tree via a web application. Users would be able to provide rich information about each member of the tree, potentially merging multiple trees together when there is a common connection. This functionality might involve sophisticated graph theory and data mesh technology. We would also need to create a nice-looking presentation layer to display the trees (possibly AJAX-based?). Someone also suggested that we provide mechanism for hosting family photos (and videos?). This could be done through linking to existing services such as YouTube or by creating our own media modules within the application itself (though these features would likely be added past the timeline of the next three months).

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Project Idea #5: JEE Wiki Engine

The final suggestion from the brainstorming session was to create a Java-based wiki portal utilizing the features of the Java Enterprise Edition spec. While there are a few existing Java-based wiki engines out there, there might be room for another one. One of the frustrations with many Wiki engines is that there are very few modular, AJAX-driven WYSIWYG editors for wiki code. This feature might be worth exploring, but it would require an extensive knowledge of JavaScript and one or multiple AJAX frameworks. It might also be useful to create a “watch” feature which allows users to be notified via email when changes are made to a particular wiki page.

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