Last Updated on 21 August 2009

Objectives

Your objectives are what you want to accomplish in this project or your purpose for doing the project. In this section, you need to state in general terms how you plan to accomplish your goals. 

This section should also identify (in the proposal) or what problems you actually faced (in the progress report and final report)

For your proposal, the objectives will probably be less than one A4 page long, simply stating what you plan to do and problems or complications you expect to face.  For your progress report and final report, you will amend your objectives to describe what you actually did and what problems and complications you encountered.  Thus, this section will probably be longer for your progress report and/or final report.

For further information, you can read Writing a Research Paper by Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL).

OWL suggests that you think about the following when defining the purpose of your report:

Sample Objectives From Previous Final Reports

Room-Level Indoor Localization

Indoor localization researchers have come to a consensus that indoor localization systems should at least provide room-level accuracy, and it should occur continuously and imperceptibly. Current room-level localization technology is accurate to about two meters, but it tends to be either inaccurate or require such a large amount of data processing that it is accompanied by significant time delays.

WALRUS, Active Bat and Cricket are popular technologies for room-level indoor localization, but they are sometimes inaccurate or require significant time delays. Thus, we are going to try to study and understand their methodologies and the concepts related to indoor localization. If we can figure these out and overcome the associated technical hurdles, then we can go deeper to discover and develop an improved method for room-level indoor localization.

Intelligent Location-Based Friend Finding Services

Our project contains two main parts: location estimation and location-based services. Ice Breaker has been implemented by first estimating the location of all users, sending the information to a database and providing services via a client-server-based service. The main function of Ice Breaker lets users enter some search criteria to find other users who are using the service and within certain walking distance.

The system requires simple one-time user registration to acquire some basic information from the user, and the amount of information is small, as the system is designed for spontaneous use providing immediate information. User information and location data are stored in a database server, so the user just needs a mobile device, a wireless Internet connection and our software to use the service. Our software provides users a friendly graphical interface to manipulate with. Although users can run our software in any location in Hong Kong with Wi-Fi, we have decided that the scope of the application is restricted to Lan Kwai Fong in Central (To find people with similar interests and who want to talk and perhaps become friends.)

After Ice Breaker has located the online users, it displays some basic information about them and help them in find each other. If users want to meet at a certain place, such as a restaurant within the map area, Ice Breaker would recommend some places for the users to choose from and show the shortest path to selected destinations. Moreover, the software gives users the flexibility and freedom to define their relationships with other users. For example, they can add someone to be a friend who can always locate them if they logged in. Alternatively, they can blacklist users they want to block.

From a technical point of view, the place we have chosen for this project has strong and numerous Wi-Fi signals, so identifying user location shouldn’t be a problem. However, the client-server connection is a challenge in an outdoor environment, because internet connection may be lost when users walk from one place to another. We have figured out ways to deal with this matter during our project.

Flood Prediction by Using Optimized Flood Accumulation Algorithms

Flow accumulation and flow routing are the two key factors in terrain analysis. A typical geographic region of over 100 square kilometers requires about 10 terabytes (i.e. 10,000 gigabytes) of data for the analysis. So, the running time of existing algorithms may take weeks! We will try to write a new algorithm that will reduce the computation time required to predict flood accumulation and routing.

In this project, we will achieve the following goals:

  1. Import a real terrain data set and rearrange it into a format readable by our software
  2. Write a more efficient algorithm to simulate how the water accumulates when different amounts of rainfall occur
  3. Show the results using a 3D graphical user interface

To achieve the first goal, we will perform some sample data manipulations. The most challenging goals are 2 and 3. To achieve the second goal, we will need to get more information about how computations are done and then write a new and improved algorithm that will provide a reasonably accurate simulation in 10 to 15 minutes. To achieve the third goal, we need to learn to use some software to create 3D graphs. None of us have experience with this kind of software, so we need time to learn.

A HKUST Adventure Game for a Personal Digital Assistant

PDA games tend to be small in scope and often rely on good game-play rather than flashy graphics because of PDAs’ weak processing power ( e.g. CPU speed).

To make our game different from other mobile games in the market, we are going to design a PDA RPG which contains a variety of mini-games. We will fully use of the PDA’s touch screen and also work around the PDA’s weaknesses.

Our game mainly focuses on the following objectives:

  1. To make a connective story by providing an interesting and smooth storyline for the game with good graphic and sound effect.
  2. To address different gamer interests by implementing different styles of mini-games in one adventure game.
  3. To provide a convenient game system by dividing the game into many small tasks that can be finished within a short time.

For the connective storyline, we will design the games so that all tasks are related to the storyline. The player needs to walk through HKUST and finish mini-games at different check points. He will learn the story of the game by interacting with various characters and complete the game by getting information through his conversations.

Based on different players’ interests, we will combine many games styles into one adventure game. Different game styles can satisfy the gaming requirements of different types of players, and players can get a new RPG experience!

We have divided the game into many small tasks in order to let players finish their mini-games within short periods of time. Along with the RPG storyline, there are many different style mini-games. All of these games are simple and do no need a lot of time. Examples are fishing, cooking and hunting. Also, we provide a save and load function for players to record the progress of the game. Players can save their game progress, stop and continue the game again later from the same point by loading the saved game back into the RAM memory.

The biggest challenges we face are working around the PDA’s limited CPU speed and small memory size. How to develop a user-friendly game system is also an important concern. To address these challenges, we will choose a suitable platform and programming languages for the game development. We will do this by comparing different game engines and programming languages.