Fall 2000

The intention behind the project is to allow you to apply some of the knowledge you will be gaining about digital technologies to analyzing and evaluating new technologies. You will work in groups of three or four students.

Each group will choose a digital technology that we haven't covered in class, although I expect that the technologies we talk about in class will play a part in operation of the technology that you pick. You are to prepare an oral presentation for the class that covers the following points:

• General description: what does the technology do, what is it's intended application, what population is targeted to use the technology?

• Overall architecture: what role does digital technology play in the complete product, what are the major components of the technology, how are the components related?

• Operation: how does it work, how well does the particular example you've chosen perform?

• Relation to society: what's the benefit of the technology, is there any potential for misuse (if so, what), what has been the impact so far?

The presentation must be prepared using digital presentation tools (PowerPoint, etc.) and may be actually presented on-line (as I do) or using transparencies.

You should make use of electronic information resources (such as the World Wide Web) as part of your search for information. You may, of course, use other resources (books, literature from companies, your uncle who is a design engineer for Microsoft, etc.).

• Wednesday, October 18 - submit list of group members.

• Friday, October 27 - submit topic for presentation. I suggest each group meet with me at a time to be arranged to discuss interests and to define a technology that will be valuable for the group members to understand, but not impossibly difficult to decipher and present.

• Monday, November 13 - written progress report with preliminary list of references (1 - 2 pages).

• Wednesday, November 29 - presentations begin.

There really are no limits on the topics you could choose. Here are some ideas I think might be fun:

cable modems

handwriting recognition

voice recognition systems

compression technologies

encryption technologies

biological or optical computing