sagar_fall_assessment

> Note: The project has since been changed to political orientation prediction


# Fall Assessment - Sagar Panwar

The proposed project is an online skill development application that leverages BCI(Brain-Computer Interface) technology to help individuals with the special needs to interact with a computer so that they can learn some skills like website designing, simple programming, etc. The project will involve the use of signal processing, machine learning, data analysis, and web application development tools - HTML5, CSS, javascript.

Relating my computer science curriculum to this project, many courses proved to be instrumental in shaping up this idea. The very first CS course - Computer Science(CS 1021C) was the first time in college when I worked on a project that required problem-solving, critical thinking and good programming skills. For CS 1021C project I made a tic-tac-toe game. Even though it can be considered as the simplest programming project possible, for me it was a great learning experience. After spending some time at several companies as a co-op, I started changing my career directory. Throughout the academic and co-op semesters I have been working on the languages like C#, JAVA, Groovy, javascript which were all about web application development, desktop-based software development which helped me aggrandize my programming skills. But, now I wanted to work with algorithms just pure mathematical algorithms to improve my problem-solving skills. After my third co-op when I took a course - CS 4071 Design and Analysis fo Algorithms where I learned different searching and sorting techniques, worked on problems like finding the shortest path, removing redundant words and many other CS algorithms. In the same semester, I took the EECE 3093C - Software Engineering class that helped me to understand the overview of software development projects. Now I can apply these skills for making backend algorithms and managing the senior design project.

In addition to these academic semesters, I learned many different skills from my co-op experiences as well. I started working as a co-op at a textile company where I worked on web application development using VB.Net and SQL Server. For me, it was one big package of skills that prepared me to work at the industry level. Before this co-op, I was simply writing a couple of helper functions, but now I was supposed to write a function to develop a fully functioning library. After this, I joined Medpace, a CRO that also worked on web application development. I had a similar experience here as my previous co-op, but I had some additional responsibilities like QA and software migration. I am also sure that I would use these experiences in testing my senior design project application and its data analysis. 

From my experiences, one thing was sure that the IT industry is expanding with a pace faster than ever and rigorous than ever. However, I also saw that some people wanted to work in this industry, but because of some injuries were unable to do so. Once I was talking to my research advisor and asked her if there is any final project idea. She suggested me to work on BCI to help users with the special needs to interact with the computer, which I thought was a good opportunity to make something very useful. That is why I finalized this project.

My approach would be something as follows - build a suite of software applications that can use brain signals generated by the electrical activity of the brain to help users with the special needs to interact with a computer in different settings and learn a new skill. The whole project would involve the use of hardware - EEG Caps with electrodes and wires to transfer the brain activity data to the computer and software - MATLAB Toolbox for training and analyzing the collected data. Once the data is collected, a knowledge base can be prepared for a specific user that can teach different things to the user just like an instructor using only the electrical activity of the brain. The expectations are to design this project in such a way so that it can be in real life, and can also be used as a benchmark for further development in this field. Since this project is being done only by me, the evaluation will be based on whether everything originally stated is completed on time or not. If completed on time, how well are different components of the application are functioning?