Project Options

Last updated August 12, 2024

There will be a total of 4 options for the entire class. Every team must choose one option. Because we have such a big class, it will be too hard to manage a different project for every team. Instead, we will have these options available acting more like project "themes", and each team can propose their own solution.

To maintain a reasonable client load, we will manage to try have about the same number of teams signed up for each project.

Three of the options are open-source and the fourth one requires an IP agreement. These projects are described below.

1. Image Learning

Clients: Michael McGuffin and Adrien Gruson from École de technologie supérieure - ÉTS Montréal

Project goal: Develop an open-source web application with a database of images. Users are presented with a pair of images and asked which image is more esthetically more pleasing. Questions and answers are logged, users are tracked, the system produces reports on the images. Machine learning can be applied to understand which images are more esthetically pleasing, and generative AI can be used to create questions for pairs of images. The web application can potentially be customizable and adapted for asking questions involving other pairs, such as pairs of words, pairs of sentences, pairs of sounds, pairs of code snippets, etc.
Target users: An administrative user for setting up the database and questions and viewing reports on answers collected. An average adult user who answers questions presented by the system.
Technology Stack Requirement: None, but a modern web framework is expected.

2. Charity Donation

Client: Laura Ross from Kelowna Software

Project goal: Develop a web application to facilitate vendor and attendee interaction at conventions. Rather than giving out swag, vendors would ideally have a tablet application that lets attendees sign up and make a donation to a designated charity. At the end of the convention, the vendor could use the app to compile reports on the attendees and charity donations made and email custom notifications to the attendees the impact of their donations. Electronic payment must be setup as part of this project. Since this app is envisioned to be used at conventions, the app must be fully responsive and tested on various phone and tablet sizes.
Target users: Vendors who has a booth at a convention and want to manipulate the list of charities, various payment account settings, or view information about the donations. Visitors to those booths who attend conventions and have a valid email address. Both vendors and visitors may or may not have much experience using technology.
Technology Stack Requirement: Specified technologies include the latest Angular for frontend development, Kendo UI components, backend ASP.NET core, ORM to an MS SQL server. The client will provide a code template to start and projects need to conform with the specified coding standards.

3. Insurance Policy Checks

Client: Christopher O'Sullivan from BFL Canada

Project goal: Develop a web application that helps with creating new insurance policies for customers. The app should analyze an existing insurance policy document and highlight differences between the existing policy and a newly developed policy. Various text extraction and analysis methods can be used to compare two policy documents. These differences should be presented in the app in an interface that allows the user to easily review, validate, confirm, or modify. Policy changes requested by the customer through an email thread should also be identified and incorporated into the new policy. Any discrepancies should be flagged. The focus of this project is developing a simple workflow and a good user experience. The app could potentially log the positive and negative cases found through the interaction and apply machine learning to improve the recognition of those changes in the future.
Target users: An employee of an insurance company helping a customer who has to renew or change an existing insurance policy for an asset. A manager at the company who is reviewing policy changes.
Technology Stack Requirement: Teams can choose an appropriate framework for web development. All projects need to be deployed on Microsoft Azure.

4. Transactions Querying

Client: Osahon Osemwegie from ClearJar

Project goal: Develop a web application that mines transaction data so users can ask the app questions about previous spendings and patterns. Example questions include "How much did I spend on coffee last month?", "Which store did I buy the battery charger from?", "Where can I cut down on my spendings?". The app should consider the user's querying experience, possibly by allowing both voice and text querying.
Target users: Any adult with online access to a bank account.
Technology Stack Requirement: This project requires various technologies to be used, including: NextJS React web development, plaid API https://plaid.com/ for connecting to bank transactions, pinecone https://www.pinecone.io/ for vector database, and openAI API (not chatGPT) or something similar for text processing.