Essay topics

In principle, the subject of the presentation and essay can be the consideration of any current research topic or current technological development in Computer Science. A good essay will (i) help the reader to gain an understanding of the concepts involved in the subject area of the essay, (ii) provide an overview of the current state, possibly together with some historical information of the subject area, (iii) cover debates, different points of views, open questions, directions of future research and development in the subject area. Of particular interest are topics where there has been or there currently is a debate between two sides holding opposing views, e.g. pros and cons of software patents. In such a case the essay should present both sides and try to evaluate their arguments.

You should submit your proposal by the Essay Topic assessment for COMP516 in the VITAL system.

The deadline for agreeing a topic is 18:00 Friday 19 October 2012.

To give you some ideas for appropriate topics, here is a list of some of the topics that students have chosen in the past, in alphabetical order:

• Accessible web design for visually impaired people
• Advances in the optimization of network data traffic
• Agent software development
• Algorithmic generation of electronic music
• Application of Game Theory on Internet.
• Artificial intelligence: Alternate to human power?
• Challenges and Future of Open Source Software Development
• Challenges in Natural Language Understanding
• Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing – A Ubiquitous Future?
• Cloud Computing: The Future of the IT Industry
• Collaborative data construction: truth and trust
• Collaborative Online Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
• Competitiveness: The Impact of Web-based Training on The Educational System
• Computer viruses: Are they really a major threat?
• Cyber Warfare
• Data Mining and our Civil Liberties
• Data Mining and Privacy
• Data Mining as a Tool for Fraud Detection
• Data Mining in Finance - trading
• Data mining, privacy and civil liberties
• Data Warehouses and OLAP
• Developement and application of Cloud Computing
• Digital Forensic and Its Future!
• Digital rights management
• Distributed computing
• DNA computing
• Does HTML5 Replace The Plug-in Based RIAs?
• E-Business: Concerns regarding Privacy and Security
• E-learning in higher education
• E-Learning: Future of higher education
• E-Voting
• Encryption algorithms used in Cryptography
• Encryption in DNA computing
• Ethical hacking: How safe is a User?
• Ethical hacking: License to hack?
• Evaluating database designs between traditional database and data warehouse
• Examining the network flow problem, with algorithmic efficiency
• Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems
• Film Piracy: History, Problems and Solutions
• Game theory - An interactive decision theory
• Game Theory - The science behind strategic decision making
• Global Internet Filtering and Government Censorship
• Grid Computing
• How can computers be protected from viruses?
• How does the nervous system contribute to computer science?
• How feasible are autonomous-agent-assisted lifestyles?
• How has E-commerce enabled businesses to penetrate new markets?
• How has the internet affected the music industry?
• How is data warehousing improving business decision support systems?
• How safe the modern encryption methods are?
• How the nervous system has contributed to computer science?
• How will HTML5 impact the web?
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol: A Survey of Security Updates
• Intelligence based security intrusion detection system
• Internet Addiction
• Internet Censorship
• Is it possible for computers to really understand natural language?
• Knowledge management and decision support systems: the missing link
• Level generation in an infinite space
• Machine Learning in Computer Games
• Managing Construction Projects using Decision Support Systems
• Medical record systems
• More accessible web design for user with visual impairments
• Network security
• Network security and authentication
• Online Sponsored Search Auctions: Past, Present and Future
• Open Source Software Development and software engineering
• Pervasive Computing
• Polymorphic Malware: A Comparison of Detection Methods
• Quantum Computing - The Death of Cryptography?
• Reliability and Data Availability in large scale distributed always on systems
• Risk and E-commerce technology
• Security Issues and the Internet
• Service-oriented architectures
• Service-Oriented Computing
• Should the EPC make software patentable?
• Social networking websites
• Solving problems in game balance
• Speech Recognition, What are its problems? How if possible can it be improved?
• Sponsored Search Auctions
• Swarm Intelligence
• The Challenges of Open Source Software Development
• The effect of the information technology on banking
• The effect of the internet on education
• The Evolution of Computing: Nature’s influence on technology
• The Future of Intelligence Based Intrusion Detection
• The GNU General Public License
• The impact of technology on human learning
• The Internet of things：Principle, prospect and tendency
• The Modern GPU
• The Necessity of Computers in The Development of Operations Research
• The New Era for Education starts with Distance Learning
• The Potential of Volunteer Computing
• The Realm of Quantum Computers
• The Risks of having artificially intelligent entities
• The Role of Algorithmic Game Theory in peer-to-peer file-sharing networks
• The Role of computers in medical science
• The Storm Botnet
• The Use Of Data Mining in the Fight Against Crime
• Ubiquitous computing
• Understanding the increasing use of mobile internet
• Understanding the new network “the Internet of things”
• Understanding the Nonlinearity of Artificial Neural Networks
• Understanding Virtualisation
• Vickrey auction and auctions in practice use
• VOIP Phone Security
• What video games can do for education
• Wikis
• Will diagnosis systems based on artificial intelligence replace doctors in the future?
• Will ever a computer be able to understand human language?

That a particular topics has been done before does not prevent you from choosing the same or a similar topic for yourself.