Introduction
A fun and rewarding way to engage in the computing disciplines is to work on useful software and hardware projects through Research and Development (R&D) experiences. Having this type of experience can be beneficial when applying to career positions and graduate schools. It is also possible to earn academic credit for working on R&D projects, allowing the experiential work to replace some of the coursework in your degree program.
Any interested Coastal Carolina University student enrolled in an academic program offered by the Department of Computing Sciences is welcome to participate. I have opportunities available for all class levels, from freshmen through graduate students. In addition, most of these projects can be done remotely, so students in our fully online programs are just as welcome to participate as students on campus.
Overall Theme
The overall theme of my R&D projects is to develop sustainable and resilient systems that limit power consumption, maintain user freedom and privacy, promote accessibility, emphasize security, and are capable of performing useful work offline (without Internet access). Too many computer and consumer electronics systems today are built without regard to these principles, creating environments that are "locked down" against the user's own interests. These devices often contain (or consist of) spyware directly out of the box, recording and reporting on the user's activities. In addition, mandatory Internet and cloud service connectivity is finding its way into devices that have no legitimate need for such functionality, such as home dishwashers. In situations where the Internet is not available, or when the manufacturer has discontinued the supporting cloud service, these systems degrade or even become useless.
My long-term objective is to develop a set of software applications that are each highly cohesive and loosely coupled, so that they can be easily reused in sustainable and resilient systems. In addition, I am also experimenting with hardware systems that can be used for field data collection, emergency response, and disaster preparation.