Dr. Kenneth A. Williams
Computer Science Department
North Carolina A&T State University
The following ideas might provide good MS project or thesis topics
Signed executables - To prevent the modification of executable programs by viruses and to keep unauthorized programs from being executed, the operating system could be modified to require that all programs have a digital signature. The OS could check the digital signature and a checksum of the executable upon program load. Programs without a digital signature or an invalid checksum would not be executed.
Secure Web Server - Can we build a simple web server that is extremely secure? Starting from a simple Unix system, can we remove all features that do not apply to the web server functionality, craft a limited protocol stack and build a web server that is invulnerable?
Scheduling Assistant - After a student has determined which courses they want to take, creating a schedule of specific sections can be a challenging task, particularly for freshman who have the largest number of choices and the least experience. This server system would extract scheduling information from the University "Web for Students" site and create schedules based on the students preferences.
Compressing HTML pages before transmission has the potential for reducing the time required to load a page. The HTTP standard supports compression, major browsers support it, but most servers do not use it. Early results show that compressing HTML pages is particularly effective when the page is over 1K in size.
Distributed Alpha-Beta search algorithms would allow min-max searches to be carried out efficiently using multiple processors. Multiple processors should speed the computation of financial planning systems and two player games.
last updated on January 02, 2004