Student Projects

The main focus of the Global Information Systems group is the provision of global information spaces that help users find, organise, access and share all sorts of information needed to support their daily activities in a distributed and mobile world.

We suggest some topics for semester and diploma projects below. If any of these are of interest to you, please contact me (norrie@inf.ethz.ch) or any other member of the group. We will be pleased to discuss our current activities and find a project that matches both your and our interests.

Note that a number of these projects would be suitable for a Master's project under the Distributed Systems or Software Engineering streams.

Moira Norrie

Web Engineering

With the emergence of data-intensive and highly interactive Web sites, Web design has become Web engineering and Web pages have turned into Web applications. Web engineering is concerned with the technologies, tools, and methods to support systematic approaches to the development, deployment, and maintenance of high-quality Web applications. Our work in this field is mainly related to two recent phenomenons: the Web 2.0 and the Adaptive Web. »»

Object Databases

In contrast to the well-known relational databases, object databases store (as the name implies) data in the form of objects instead of relations (tables), a concept proven successful in object-oriented programming languages. Although ODBs have been considered already in the 1980s, they only recently gained some momentum and are therefore offering a vast opportunity to explore an exciting technology in its beginnings. »»

Interactive Information Systems

Many of us use Information Systems on a daily basis to store data of all kinds in tables, structured documents, databases, file systems or clouds. We have literally hundreds of tools available to access this data again in various ways and interact with it. In the field of Interactive Information Systems, we are interested in novel ways of interacting with data. »»

Personal Information Management

The recent phenomenon of Web 2.0 applications that support collaboration and the sharing of user-generated content has had a major impact on the way how users manage their personal data. Web 2.0 applications are increasingly being used not just to share personal information, but also to manage it. A new form of personal information fragmentation is arising due to the rapid growth in Web 2.0 applications and their use for the management of data typically associated with desktop applications. As a result, personal data and its management becomes fragmented, not only across desktop applications, but also between desktop applications and various Web 2.0 applications. We investigate methods to overcome this information fragmentation as well as general support for personal information management in the age of Web 2.0. »»

Office of the Future

A general theme of research within our group is to investigate the potential impact of new technologies such as interactive tabletops, digital pen and paper, ambient displays and tangible interfaces on the ways users can capture and work with information. In particular, we are interested in office settings and want to develop a showcase for the “office of the future”. The goal of this project is to investigate different technologies that could be combined into such a showcase and to design and develop a demonstrator system. »»

Digital Tabletops

Digital tabletops or interactive tables have received considerable attention in the human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) communities in recent years. However, current applications mostly address simple scenarios such as browsing and sharing of digital photographs, interacting with maps and other fairly rudimentary collaborative tasks. It is our observation that dedicated software serving real utilitarian purposes remains largely to be invented. »»

Interactive Paper

Despite the emergence of digital technologies, paper persists as a fundamental resource for many human activities. Nowadays, documents tend to be created and distributed electronically, but paper continues to be a preferred medium for many reading and writing activities. Paper is cheap, light, mobile, easily annotated in various ways and supports forms of collaboration difficult to mimic in digital worlds. »»