NJIT Vector

Issue date: 4/29/08 Section: News

The Spring 2008 College of Computing Sciences Capstone Showcase took place in the Campus Center Atrium last Wednesday. The Showcase was an opportunity for CCS students to present the projects they had done over the past semester for their Capstone class. Capstone was founded by Professor Osama Eljabiri in 2002 as a way to help students connect with the world after college.

Projects topics ranged from web programming to information technology to human computer interaction. Students typically worked in teams of three to four students, although in some cases as few as two or as many as half a dozen or more might comprise one team. Students would then choose a sponsor and project, usually in the private sector but with some representatives from the public sector as well.

Opinions on the Capstone concept were generally quite positive.
"Students get a taste of what the real world can bring, and how to apply their skills," said Richard Thompson, who served as chief technical officer (CTO) for the Capstone program. "The Capstone program makes them bring everything they learned together to use in their project. It also forces them to learn new things, mostly new technologies they have never used before, so that they can do their project."

In his work as chief technical officer, Thompson helped founder Osama Eljabiri coordinate the Capstone program as a whole.

"My job as CTO has allowed me to do a multitude of things. The showcase was one of my major accomplishments…I brought everyone together and made sure that all the necessary technology was there," said Thompson about his role. "I was also the project manager of all the project managers. I supervised their projects and made sure they were going well. I helped them technologically when they asked."

Thompson was awarded the most hours put in of any Capstone participant this spring, and was commended highly at the showcase.

Team project managers also had positive feedback about the program. "Students get to work on real world projects that mirror what they will be doing outside once they graduate," said Daniel Boland, a project manager and developer for the Speakery group, which developed a novel content aggregation system that searches blogs and other internet postings and assembles the results into an easily accessible database.

The project, which featured a large degree of technical innovation, was charged with building an "ecosystem" focusing on a core topic. The ecosystem was formed by indexing social media sources with their location and the number and frequency of their postings. Each post was rated on a scale that indicated how positive or negative it was about the topic in question. The person sitting behind the database was able to respond to the comments. This essentially created an all-in-one "feelings management system" for corporate clients to keep track of internet sentiment on their products.

"Unlike in a normal class project where you can just write something the day before and hand it in regardless of if it's working, this class forces students to get the project done right and on time for the sponsors," says Boland.

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