2024 Software Engineering Capstone Designs

Our project is an invasive plant species identifier which leverages AI to identify invasive Phragmites australis from satellite imagery. Phragmites australis is one of Ontario's worst invasive species and a massive threat to biodiversity. Currently, conservationists are limited to manual field exploration to find and remove this invasive species. We hope our tool will optimize their workflow by allowing them to predict the locations of Phragmites patches. We developed an application as an interface through which conservationists can access our AI model and extract insights.

Audiobooks are a convenient alternative to standard books, allowing listeners to enjoy a novel completely hands-free. However, with over 48.5 million books on Amazon but only 200,000 audiobooks on Audible, fewer than 1% of books have an Audiobook format. Audiogen makes audiobook creation more accessible, integrating state-of-the-art large language models and speech synthesizers to generate audiobooks on demand. We bring books to life, incorporating natural sounding narration and dialogue infused with emotion to form a compelling narrative where each character speaks in their own voice.

The redesigned SE 464 course emphasizes modern software architecture, focusing on scalable, performance-driven designs suited for today's complex systems. This curriculum, meticulously crafted to bridge the gap in performance-focused architecture, aims to equip students with vital industry-relevant skills for developing robust, scalable systems. Including comprehensive labs for practical application, the course seeks student feedback for continuous improvement. This strategic approach ensures students are well-prepared for real-world system design challenges and to engineer reliable, high-performance software systems.

Going on exchange is a remarkable opportunity, which many students consider but do not pursue. It is difficult for students to be well-informed about the living environment of potential schools, and challenging for students and advisors alike to identify foreign course sequences satisfying UW academic plans. XChange eases these difficulties by providing a web-service allowing users to query schools and previously approved course equivalencies. Students can also post about their experiences on exchange, informing others about crucial topics related to safety, housing, finances, and more.

Creating synthesizer presets is a difficult process that requires skill and effort - until now. MicroMusic creates a synthesizer (Vital) preset from a WAV file automatically. The presets are generated within 1 second, and the overall model error is 2%. This model was created through daily trains on 500000 unique data points, using a customized Resnet architecure. Public release of the model has attracted over 3000 users with over 12000 downloads.

The pandemic has shifted lots of workplaces and schools to be remote. With remote jobs and studies, the problem arises that it is difficult for people to work efficiently with their teammates for collaboration such as pair programming and school projects. Our tool, Mira Screen Share, is designed to make remote collaboration more seamless by allowing not only sharing the screen but also concurrent viewing and remote controlling from multiple users. The use cases includes pair programming, co-authoring documents, troubleshooting, and more.

Chasm is a learning platform that gives students access to problems that will help them build skills to excel in their exams. Often, students struggle to find problems relevant to their course material and can't collaborate on these problems to fill gaps in their knowledge. Chasm allows users to submit and vote on questions to trickle the highest quality problems to the top, and after attemping post and comment on solutions from their peers to truly solidify their understanding.

Code review is critical for identifying bugs and maintaining code quality, but current tooling presents code snippets in an unintelligent order (e.g. alphabetical), which makes reviewing them more time consuming and error prone. We proposed a new code review system that enables authors to organize their code snippets into different sections and to include annotations that walk reviewers through their changes. We both developed a GitHub-integrated web application and implemented these changes directly in GitLab.

In Canada, the immigration system grants asylum to politically persecuted refugees. In 2022, 68% of 94,246 asylum applications were approved. To ensure transparency, supporting documents are released publicly after redaction due to personal information concerns. Manual redaction by government court redactors is time-consuming and prone to errors, leading to high turnover. Our solution, NewBloom, utilizes machine learning to suggest redactions, improving speed, accuracy, and redactor confidence. Through ergonomic UI and redaction abstractions, we combat biases, enhance accountability, and streamline the process. Initial testing with student volunteers showed significant improvements over manual methods.

Modern software applications generate logs, requiring parsing for analysis. The PILAR parser algorithm, notable for its design simplicity, enhances log processing but is not optimized for industrial-scale applications. Our project integrates PILAR into Logstash as a plugin, enabling parser deployment at scale. By addressing challenges like streaming log compatibility, thread safety, scalability, and compliance with Logstash standards, our plugin achieves high accuracy and processes logs rapidly with minimal latency. Published on RubyGems, it's under review for official Logstash integration and submitted to FSE 2024.

Novelty is a software system that facilitates graphic novel creation using natural language processing and generative AI. First, users upload a text file to Novelty. An initial rendering of the graphic novel is created, and users can customize the style and contents of the illustration with prompts. Once the user is satisfied, Novelty returns a PDF of their generated graphic novel. Novelty accelerates the process of creating graphic novels and is accessible to everyone. 

S4DGE - Some 4D Game Extension - is an open-source plugin for Unity which provides a base for developers to build games with a 4th spatial dimension as a core gameplay component. S4DGE can render any 4D object and offers tooling to generate such objects. Users can add arbitrary 4D shapes into any Unity scene, and manipulate them as they would in a typical Unity workflow, allowing them to seamlessly integrate 4D ideas into their games.

Snowflake helps users bypass internet censorship in highly restrictive regions by disguising their online activities as video or voice calls. To accomplish this, the system needs a rendezvous mechanism to connect censored users to the rest of the world. Our work focuses on improving Snowflake's resilience by developing and testing new methods for rendezvous. We successfully implemented and deployed our AWS SQS-powered rendezvous method and are actively researching additional techniques, such as DNS over HTTPS, to further enhance Snowflake's efficacy in the future.

Team Goose has built You, a voice-based assistant that can hold natural and convincing conversations.
You combines the technologies of voice activity detection, echo cancellation, speech recognition, large language models, and text to speech. It utilizes multiprocessing and streaming in order to meet real-time performance goals and deliver a convincing conversational experience.

Online sports betting is forecasted to grow from $36 billion in 2022 to $116 billion by 2032, fueled by legalization in various regions. Currently, states like California, Texas, and Florida are poised to legalize it within five years, despite 1 in 5 Americans already participating in private betting. Retail sports bettors face significant losses, averaging 3-10% per dollar wagered. Omega Odds addresses this by offering a platform that identifies statistically profitable wagers from major sportsbooks in real-time, enhancing bettor profitability. Our service provides unparalleled transparency, showing all recommendation histories. This helps bettors avoid the typical losses associated with hidden fees, potentially saving thousands annually. Our performance is measured by user interaction and the success of our recommendation algorithm, which has demonstrated a 1.85% daily return, equating to a monthly profit of 73.31%.

Pursuit reimagines hide and seek for the digital age, merging geolocation with physical activity to enhance social connections. This mobile web app allows players to "ping" their location, adding real-time excitement to traditional gameplay. It targets a wide audience seeking active, social games, leveraging technology to revitalize a classic, fostering adult engagement through competitive, scalable play. Anticipating private lobbies and a basic mode by January 2024, our objective is 50 weekly active users, aiming for feedback-driven enhancements. This project underscores technology's role in transforming social interaction and physical activity.

Maintaining closeness in long-distance relationships is challenging. Digital communication, while crucial, often falls short. Tether fills this gap by offering a shared space for couples to connect despite distance. Research into cognitive psychology reveals that relationship satisfaction depends on partners feeling they share the same reality. This involves integrating your partner into the daily details of your life, aligning on goals, and creating a shared space. Tether embodies this principle by providing a platform for photos, thoughts, and memories, exclusive to you and your partner. It encourages engagement through daily prompts, helping partners to learn about each other and grow closer. Additionally, by sharing locations and virtual pets, Tether helps partners inhabit each other's worlds, reinforcing a unified reality. Now available on the iOS app store, Tether continues to evolve, guided by user feedback and growth metrics.

Spacewalk is a web application enabling users to create cinematic 3D presentations. It allows for constructing 3D environments and setting camera keyframes, acting as "slides." Users can customize transitions to create a walkthrough. Unlike traditional slideshow software, which excels in 2D effects, Spacewalk bridges the gap to 3D visual effects, combining the ease of presentation tools with the impact of 3D VFX. Targeting users without art or motion graphics experience, Spacewalk offers an intuitive interface, minimizing fine-tuning controls for a cleaner experience. Starting with a Google Slides-like base, it introduces 3D tools and layman's terms, easing the transition for 2D users. User studies confirm Spacewalk's usability across skill levels, emphasizing its potential for frequent use and highlighting its intuitive, easy-to-learn nature for creating professional 3D presentations.

Electricity Maps is an open-sourced start-up who provides vital data that tells the world how electricity is produced and used. Over the course of a year, our team has touched upon the vast majority of the project's pipeline: from the data collection phase to the API and display phase. This term, our team focused on the development of a package that allowed users to calculate temporal and locality schedules for their data jobs that maximized the effectiveness of the energy being used.

In CS452 Real-time programming, a problem students must overcome is estimating where and how fast a train is on the track so they can stop at a specific point on the track or avoid collisions. Students traditionally have trouble combining a kinematic model with live sensor information as most have no control theory knowledge. This project combined them by designing a Kalman Filter that accurately tracks the kinematics of a train. The process to create it is documented so future students can easily follow.

Wave is a companion app to the University of Waterloo's co-op job board, WaterlooWorks. Students can browse co-op jobs and organize multiple shortlists in a modern interface with fast and flexible search and filter tools. Additionally, students can browse and share salaries and reviews on co-op jobs and interviews. Wave uses a web scraper integrated into a web application to keep all job data local to the student's device.

UWTrade provides a trusted, streamlined platform designed specifically for university students to buy and sell used goods (i.e. textbooks, i-clickers) in a simpler way. By implementing verification through school email addresses, and an AI-assisted system & platforms, we ensure a trust, secure and legal trading environment. Our platform simplifies the trading process, significantly reducing the hassle associated with buying and selling used items. Our vision is to cultivate a large user base, incentivizing both buyers and sellers to utilize UWTrade for savings and sustainability.