The first generation of this system was designed and built by two of last year's 4th year students. At its peak, the unused computing power of approximately 200 of the Department's machines was harnessed and we were averaging 3 'Pentium years' of computation per week. Important discoveries were made about the tuberculosis bacterium that are currently under review for publication in the Journal of Bioinformatics.

New functionality and further enhancements are required for the second generation of our system. These include scheduling and load-balancing at the server to improve efficiency, encryption and compression of transmitted data, a secure remote interface (possibly web-based) to configure the server and submit new jobs, a client that installs itself automatically as a low-priority thread over multiple platforms, and advanced bioinformatics algorithms for the analysis of the Human Genome. It is envisioned that more than one student could work on this multidisciplinary project. Depending on their interests, each student could tailor their project to lean more towards operating systems, parallel computing, algorithm analysis, or bioinformatics aspects. The student would benefit from the support of, and would be expected to contribute to, our active research group. We are also working closely with the Bioinformatics group at the Department of Biology, NUIM, who intend to use our results for the understanding of disease and the improvement of quality of life. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at tom.naughton@may.ie

A student is required to built such a (preferably web-based) automated teaching tool. It will consist of (i) a subject-independent teaching architecture, and (ii) a completely separate "web of knowledge" of computer theory questions, solutions, short tutorials, and course note page numbers, all of which are suitably linked together. I will make available my set of 150 computer theory multiple choice questions. This set could be increased in size by designing a random choice generator. If successful, this teaching tool could be employed during computer theory lab sessions at NUIM. At the student's discretion, this project could also allow scope for an investigation into the relationship between the limits of artificial intelligence and the limits of automated teaching. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at tom.naughton@may.ie

A digital holograpic 'camera' has already been built and we have a small database of 3D frames and video clips. The next step is to look at networking issues. We have experimented with coding and compression of digital holograms and want to extend this to video. One or two creative, imaginative, and highly-technical students are required to join our group in the development of the first MPEG-style codec (compressor-decompressor) for digital holographic video. It is hoped that by the end of the project, Internet transmission of holographic video could be demonstrated. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at tom.naughton@may.ie

Optical computing laboratories are expensive to maintain and too few students get the opportunity to experiment with the technology. In this project, the student will be exposed to the world of computing with light, will be shown how to build some basic optical computer architectures, and will be required to design graphical demonstrations that will be used to explain the functionality of the architectures to other students. They could be animated to explain how light performs the computation. The demonstrations should act as a virtual optical computing laboratory, allowing users a small degree of freedom to adjust parameters in the architectures and observe the results. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at tom.naughton@may.ie