4. Senior Projects 2019
SMUG: A Smart Motion-Based Controller for Smart Home Devices
Project ID = S192004
Smart home systems achieved great popularity in the last decade as they increase comfort and quality of life. Due to the recent hardware improvements, Internet of Things (IoT) have become a great tool to be used in homes. As such, smart devices are becoming part our daily lives. Many consumers use IoT devices without even realizing it. Each smart home device now comes with their own mobile applications, or physical remote-control devices. Thus, the switch to smart home automation devices is now inevitable. To control these devices, companies such as Amazon and Google offer services such as Amazon echo and Google Assistant hubs which offer control over the smart devices mostly via voice-commands. Apart from the advanced technology in these services, voice-commands method have many drawbacks such as the necessity of having a noiseless background in order to work properly and the absence of support for many languages such as Arabic. Consequently, this project aims to introduce a gesture based remote control instead. The developed system eliminates the language barrier that is needed with the voice-command based devices, and act as a universal smart home controller. The system utilizes the power of machine learning to recognize gestures. In addition, it offers a high interoperability between IoT devices in its network. The resulting system consists of three parts: SMUG (Smart Management Upon Gestures) controller, SMUG server and SMUG mobile application. These three components work together to allow the user to customize and control the IoT devices via user defined gestures.
How to Attack a Disconnected Computer
Project ID = S192005
This project presents how a disconnected computer, that has no network access, can be attacked to retrieve data. Air-gapped devices are thought to be an impenetrable setup because the device is disconnected from the network and cannot be reached by an attacker. Therefore, an infected air-gapped computer cannot affect others around it, preventing any potential information leaks. People believe/assume that leaking information from an air-gapped machine is impossible. This project invalidates this assumption by utilizing covert channels to get data from victims’ machines. The project employs a hidden acoustic channel that takes advantage of the computer speakers to communicate sensitive data, in an inaudible near-ultrasonic form, to a small microphone. This method is proven to work successfully, as this will be shown in sections below. Hacking methods and the search for new system exploits are being continuously developed, and new techniques to obtain data unlawfully are on the rise. This project aims to alert organizations regarding potential threats that they typically ignore by assuming that air-gapped systems are safe. Currently security researchers are not investing sufficient time and effort in innovating solutions for such niche but capable attacks. Spreading awareness is a main objective of this project, by demonstrating that data can be stolen from an ‘air-gapped’ computer. A demonstration of this attack will hopefully push security field researchers and developers into exploring this uncommon method of unlawful data acquisition and its prevention. This system differs from others in many ways. It uses an uncommon frequency range, near ultrasonic, to transmit data. This gives the system a huge advantage over others that use an audible and radio frequency ranges. The simplicity of the microcontroller lessens the chance of it being detected in realistic operational environments. This is because the reading device can take many forms and can easily be concealed due to its size.
Stress Detector System
Project ID = S192006
Psychological stress affects everyone. Sometimes, it is beneficial for people to drive themselves to work hard, while at other times, it may be a risk to their health. Having a device alerting people of the high-stress level is something that would benefit their daily life. The proposed project is a system that consists of both hardware and software parts. The hardware design is a small wristband device that collects vital signs data of the user through multiple sensors. The software application will process the combined sensed data to detect the stress level and guide the user on how to relieve and control the level of stress. The mobile application works as a health monitoring alarm, as well as tips and advice provider. This project further integrates the stress monitoring unit with a wireless transmission device to send alerts to an emergency contact such as a health warden or a guardian if the user chosen them as an emergency contact.
UAV Detection of abnormal and emergency events in stadiums (QEDS)
Project ID = S192007
Qatar is becoming one of the most developed countries in the sports field in the region, as it is the first country to host and organize the FIFA World Cup 2022 in the middle east. Stadiums of capacities more than 40 thousand have been created. These stadiums are going to be filled with huge audiences at all matches, due to the high popularity of this competition. Qatar will indeed have the full responsibility of these fans' safety and security. As a result, many organizations in Qatar, under the leadership of the Supreme Committee for delivery and legacy (SC), are now focusing on efficient crowd management solutions that focus on maximizing fans’ satisfaction and safety while following the games. SC has taken the appropriate actions that emphasize the security model of the whole stadium, such as applying sensors and beacons for fire detection. However, these actions may be costly or even inefficient. Our goal in this project is to complement existing security and surveillance system with a state-of-the-art smart drone and computer vision technologies for detecting fire, namely Qatar emergency drone system (QEDS). QEDS focuses on developing a semi-autonomous drone (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), that can be remotely piloted) that is capable of scanning the stadium for adverse events such as fire. This UAV uses autonomous navigation to allow for automatically covering the area within and around the stadium in real-time. The UAV also has built-in smart techniques to detect the specified abnormal events using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. We also develop the command and control system that can control the high-level functions of the drone, while the drone may autonomously scan the stadium for adverse events. Experiments conducted to confirm that the developed machine learning-based technique can detect the fire successfully with high accuracy of 93%. When the adverse event happens, a notification is sent to the command and control system, stating that there is a fire, with the picture and date as a shred of evidence.
Student-Centric Course Registration System
Project ID = S192008
For our senior project, we will be designing a registration system for Qatar University (QU) based on the system they currently use, myBanner, with having a major focus on convenience and keeping it student centric. Keeping the project student-centric means that a student’s registration options will be based on the information that Qatar University currently have on the student such as their college and major, and the courses they are yet to take and have already taken. Using these data along with the college-provided study plan of each major, students will only be given the option to register courses relevant to their current state, for example, a first-year engineering student will not be able to register or even see courses they do not meet the pre-requisite course for nor can they see courses from other colleges that do not fit in their assigned study plan, such as a business major course. Along with this feature, Essentially, students will be given more freedom in creating a personalized study plan based on their own requirements. In addition, one of our core goals is to implement a User Interface (UI) that will reduce excessive navigation by bringing together core registration features to just a single screen, such as being able to see your current registered courses, In addition to bringing together convenience, we also want our platform to be used as an offline resource tool for students to refer to regarding their academic profile, such as seeing their schedule for the week or analyzing their current performance in their courses. This project will greatly benefit current and future QU students by simplifying the registration process and eliminating any unnecessary difficulties that current students are facing.
Smart Scooter
Project ID = S192009
Traffic problem is a serious issue in most of the countries around the world. Qatar university with its huge area and numerous buildings faces transportation problems almost every day. This project aims for a solution to this problem inside Qatar university by developing alternative transportation service. The scooter will reduce the transportation and traffic problem inside the campus by using it to travel from one building to another inside the premises. Some sensors and some other hardware components will be used to accomplish the goal of this project. An app for users will be available in order to access these transportation services. Additionally, a survey was also done in order to gather the feedback of the students and people in general, and to understand their needs as well as demands on these types of services.
Synthesizing ARM-7 processor with encrypted instructions
Project ID = S192010
Computer security is a very important aspect that all systems in different fields aim for. It is the concept of protecting the users’ information and programs from theft, damage, and spying caused by attackers. ARM7 processors are among the most used processors in embedded systems. However, at the hardware level, there is no instruction and data memory security implemented. In this project, the "Logisim" electronic simulation package will be used to implement the internal CPU content of ARM7 processor, including the necessary digital circuits that are needed for proper ARM7 execution, such as 16 general registers, ALU unit, and control unit. This package has been used earlier in the CMPE 363 course to build electronically the Basic Computer of Mano's book [1]. ARM-CPU design was upgraded into two secured versions: one uses 32/64 XTEA cryptography block, and the other implements 4-round 32/64 SIMON cryptography block. Both versions assume that the instructions are already encrypted in the memory and hence they will decrypt the instructions that are fetched before execution. Also, in both versions, data Encrypt/Decrypt instruction were implemented. After that, this electronic designing format of Logisim was converted to VHDL and synthesized into Cyclone III 3C16 FPGA chip. The testing results of the encrypted program execution and the Encrypt/Decrypt instructions proved 100% accuracy. The accuracy is defined by answering two questions: i) do all encrypted testing programs get decrypted and executed correctly and give the exact expected results? and ii) do all encrypted testing data set get decrypted to their original form correctly? The answers to both questions are yes and yes. And that guarantees the confidentiality of the user’s program and data.
An intelligent drowning detection system
Project ID = S192011
Drowning is still a leading cause of death across the world. The researches about preventing drowning cases in terms of education, swimming lessons, and pool safety could not reduce drowning incidents much. Moreover, the studies on reducing drowning cases were not implementable solutions. However, few implemented projects use a rigorous method and high-level impact of an intervention designed to reduce drowning, but it could not reach the expected outcomes. Thus, this intelligent detection system was proposed. The purpose of this intelligent drowning detection system is to come with the best and most efficient result to detect and prevent drowning incidents as much as possible using signal processing and machine learning approach.
SFH: Start From Home
Project ID = S192012
In Qatar, it is quite difficult to find out the right product and services when needed by customers. Most of the time, a person needs to spend a good amount of time searching the web and social network apps to find a good provider for a specific service. At the same time, a lot of products and services providers have difficulty to find their customers. By creating an application that contains most of the needed services and products by people in Qatar would help both customers and entrepreneurs. The aim of this project is to build an Android mobile application that will serve the customers by offering services and products solutions to their desired location in Qatar. In addition, it acts as a platform for any entrepreneur and small business owner who can register to this app to offer their products and services. When it comes to entrepreneurship, most of the people step back because of the huge cost they must spend on marketing. An application like this would be a great relief and solution for major problems that are faced by organizations. The application will be simple, flexible and easily accessible for the users with a secured interface. The application will be in two languages, Arabic and English.
Embedded Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System for Operation Technology (OT) Network
Project ID = S192013
Nowadays, not only information security is a concern, but also operational technology (OT). The interconnection of the industrial control system (ICS) with the outside world puts industrial plants such as nuclear or power plants under various dangerous cyberattacks. The most cyber-attacks motivations could be derived from financial gain, terrorist acts, or cyberwars among countries. Thus, intrusion detection systems (IDS) are the key components of defense-in-depth strategies for the OT network to ensure that each ICS will be capable of defending against growing new threats. In this project, the main objective is to design an anomaly-based intrusion detection (AIDS) system for OT networks in the form of an embedded device. The purpose of having AIDS as an embedded device is to add an extra layer of security between control systems such as Niagara or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), and sensors. AIDS is going to alert the OT administrators once it detects any sort of abnormal behavior over the network
Robotic Lighting Control for Operation Table
Project ID = S192014
Surgical lights are important in surgeries and require to be of the best quality since it revolves around human lives. However, despite advancement in all fields of science due to technology, surgical lights have remained with relatively similar models throughout the years that involves a form of manual labor during surgical operations. This leads to issues such as reduced accuracy, delays, in addition to extra personnel needed for the sole purpose of controlling the light’s directions and intensity. Therefore, this project aims to enhance the movement of the surgical lights by shifting from a manual to a semi-automatic system through the use of servo motors, push buttons, and NodeMCU microcontrollers. The idea is implemented by having four poles, each equipped with two servo motors that are connected to provide gimbal movement. Furthermore, a remote controller with push buttons is used in order to control the motors' movement and direct the lights at the desired position, thereby removing the need for the manual movement of lights.
IoT-Based Healthcare Monitoring System: Bedsores Prevention
Project ID = S192015
Pressure ulcers, also known as bedsores, are severe complications in patients who have a low level of sensation with limited mobility such as people with quadriplegia, broken limbs, coma, broken spine, high obesity, and elderly. Bedsores can be critical; they can affect the muscles and the bones. Moreover, once a bedsore grows, it becomes very complicated and slow to recover. Depending on the severity of bedsores wounds, the healing may take days, months, or even years. The aim of this project is to provide a solution that reduces the possibility of developing bedsores for long term patients. Internet of Things (IoT) has a crucial role in healthcare monitoring applications due to the ability to provide a continuous monitoring system, which helps making efficient decisions for patients in real-time, that reduce errors, wasted time, and costs. For these reasons, the proposed system of pressure ulcers prevention is based on IoT. The system will monitor the patient's conditions depending on body temperature, skin humidity, and body immobility duration, which are the main factors of bedsores occurrence. The system also provides an action towards the patients' measured signs. The system releases gentle air with suitable temperature through vents from the mattress of the patient’s bed. Moreover, the system has a mobile application in order to maintain the ability to monitor the patients by the concerned parties remotely.
Using Machine Learning to Identify Arabic Political Trolls on Twitter
Project ID = S192016
Twitter as a social media platform is supposed to be a place for connecting people`s together. However, it has been misused to spread hatred and alter people opinions. Nowadays, there is a rely on bots to replace humans in specific tasks by posting and replying to inquiries. Those bots, as well as trolls, have been used to spread fake news and impersonate public figures which in turn manipulate people’s perception in favor of malicious intent. This can have disastrous effects on people and countries. Defending against these types of problems has been the focus of social media companies and countries. There is a lot of success in this field, but every advancement is correlated to a specific language, therefore this research focuses on detecting such bots in Arabic content. This study aims to detect Arabic language political trolls on twitter using machine learning supervised learning techniques. Two classification methods were tested in order to choose which is better in detecting malicious accounts, the two models are: the SVM model and ANN model. the SVM gave better results when it was tested later on with 60 accounts compared to the ANN, even though both models were around 91% accurate when they were built. Therefore, we used the SVM model as the model we propose in this project. Moreover, a website with a domain was built in order to launch our program that detects malicious accounts along with an API for people to use.
Diabetes Alert System
Project ID = S192017
Diabetes is a serious, chronic condition that affects Millions of people around the world. According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the condition is the seventh leading cause of death worldwide. While diabetes itself is manageable, its complications can severely impact the patients’ lives and can be fatal if not treated immediately. Those people who are diagnosed with this chronic disease face many health challenges because even though there are many treatments. For example, Insulin is injected when the sugar level is high and high sugar contained foods should be taken when the sugar level is low. People with diabetes these days are mostly using a sensor to keep track of their blood sugar. But if the patient is home alone and his/her sugar level is far from normal levels, they may not be able to call for help on time. To the best of our knowledge, there is good system that could efficiently be used in such a critical situation to alert the medical personnel. The objective of this senior design project is to build such a device (Diabetes Alert System) and make it available to those affected patients in Qatar. In making this system, we will need to make sure that it should be cheap, easy to use and save lives in many cases. We plan to build it from off-the-shelf hardware and software. The purpose is when a significant increase or decrease in the blood sugar is detected, an alert is sent to family members and/or nearby friends to provide immediate help to the patient. If none of family members and friends is available, the nearest emergency medical personnel will get the alert and will be able to help the patient in due time.
Smarvise - Roadmap for Advising Engineering Students Towards Their Graduation
Project ID = S192018
Qatar University’s advising office is becoming overcrowded with students especially during the add/drop week. Many students do not get the chance to meet their advisors, which might lead to graduation delay because of the unawareness of the course registration process. As students enter the university, they do not have a full picture of the whole process towards graduation. Specifically, in the college of engineering (CENG), some courses are not offered every semester and many students are not aware of that. Some students do not know even what the right courses are to register based on their progress. Also, some students are not aware of the difficulty level for the courses which may lead them registering many difficult courses all at once and mostly suffering to properly handle such situation. In the hopes of solving this issue, we propose a system that currently can process the advising services of Qatar University students merely by guiding them with their course registration and academic progress. Each student has their own RoadMap, which is updated every semester depending on their academic progress and guides them on which courses they should register every semester. The system offers student reviews about the difficulty level for each course. The system enables students to easily communicate with their advisors and take their advice regarding the study plan that they choose or if they have any other questions. This helps reduce the pressure and administrative work on the academic advisors while guiding the students towards a successful graduation.
QU BUDDY: SMART University Information System
Project ID = S192019
An increasingly high consensus comprised of students, faculty, staff and visitors at Qatar University face difficulties reaching a desired location efficiently due to the vast architecture and layout of the campus. Contending to this issue a campus wide survey conducted in October 2019, shown that out of 163 respondents approximately 80% required some sort of guidance to their destination. As of currently the university is working on a navigation feature for those individuals that need assistance in reaching their designated area but have yet to come up with a viable solution. The current issue at hand seems even more problematic for foreign exchange students, incoming freshman, and increasing number of visitors that come and go from the campus where a map provided in a university pamphlet is unsuitable for most individuals nowadays. In addition to this, the same consensus of individuals face other issues that involve a lack of communication between students and faculty/staff. This gap in effective communication have students unable to relate a certain message or status in due time when the respective faculty member is not present in his or her office. To provide an overall solution regarding the mentioned issues, a proposed android based information system software navigating users over various parts of the campus as well as providing the communication interface needed by different users to communicate with the respective members in a timely manner.
Full Duplex Data Exchange through Visible Light Communications
Project ID = S192020
A key aspect in the future of wireless communication is indoor wireless communication. The amount of people using indoor communication systems and the number of devices associated with this technology are escalating therefore, causing a strain on its capacity and its frequency spectrum to efficiently facilitate future users and devices. Service providers would also face complications in supplying fast communication which users can trust. Thus, this limitation of indoor communication systems can be overcome via indoor communication systems based on Li-Fi. Li-Fi is a type of optical wireless communication network which is on the rise and has a plethora of future applications. Li-Fi promises faster data transmission as well as a high facilitation room for users as it has a spectrum bandwidth which is larger as compared to that of radio spectrum. This project report discusses previous research that has been conducted on Li-Fi. Moreover, this report discuses localization in terms of exploiting visible light communication technology. This project implements indoor navigation, since GPS signals cannot penetrate solid walls.
Q-Search: Topical search engine for Quraan
Project ID = S192021
Part of basic human nature is to search for answers to big questions. And one of the main sources for this kind of knowledge is the Quran. Quran is the holy book of all Muslims around the world, it also has a strong relation to Sunnah and Q-Search is a search engine that enables users to search for specific topics in the Holy Quran. Muslims considered the Quran as the most important miracle of the Prophet Mohammed. Quran is important for ordinary Muslims to do their Islamic rituals that include reading the Quran. Quran is also important for Islamic science as it’s considered one of the main sources of the Fiqh. According to Shariah Quran is the cumulation of different divine messages starting from Adam till the prophet and Quran is summery for most of the holly books including Torah, The Zabur, and the Gospel. Globalization, cultural and political changes in addition to the communication revolution are leading to an increased number of Questions, doubt and arguments which includes life and religion. The problem that faces most of Muslims when finding the answer to a specific question from the Quran is the difficulty to find the required topic using a free text-Search. Using the information retrieval techniques to match user queries written as free text in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with the verses (Ayas) of the Quran, and finds verses that are most relevant to the user's topic/query, and optimized list of ayahs makes the results more accurate and efficient to the user-Search. Therefore Q-Search helps various users find specific verses like an ordinary user who wants to know more about a subject or Islamic research who wants to get some information regarding a specific topic or even non-Arab Muslims who needs to make sure of a specific topic. Using Q-search will make finding any topic easier and it might result in evolving of new insights related to Quranic concepts.
AdviseBot: Chatbot based Application for the Engineering Advising Department in QU
Project ID = S192022
This project is about building a chatbot that provides a service by answering students’ common advising-related queries. This service is made through using key pre-calculated user phrases and auditory or text-based signals. The chatbot to be built is an AI application that uses an intelligent agent to simulate an interactive conversation with the user through a mobile application that can be accessed anytime. It targets Qatar University Engineering students that have questions for the advising department by answering common questions without taking the time to meet the advisor. Thus, saving time and effort for both parties.
Augmented Reality Indoor and Outdoor Navigation
Project ID = S192023
The aim of this project is to create an application that helps users on a day-to-day basis. By partnering up with Msheireb, we implemented three features that aim to help users and make their experience in exploring Msheireb a more engaging. The project provides many features, the first one is parking finder that saves the user’s parking location, so they do not have to spend time finding their car in the massive underground parking areas. The second feature is a quest game that invites users to explore and interact with certain locations around them, rewarding them for their exploration and activity. The third feature is the utilization of augmented reality to provide rich information and help. The camera is used as an educational tool by offering a portal to an establishment’s information and history when the user scans an establishment’s specific feature such as a sign or logo. These features provide the basic framework for a community application that rewards both residents and guests for exploring the town and visiting the many establishments and landmarks found in the town. The results showed that the technology is very promising performance wise and has the potential to be very interactive and useful, especially in the targeted industry
PHD-Band: A Wearable Solution for People with Hearing Disability (PHD)
Project ID = S192024
People with Hearing Disability (PHD) are estimated to be over 5% of the world's population – or 466 million. They often face social withdrawal due to reduced access to services in society and difficulties in communicating with others. They may also have trouble responding to warnings, and hearing doorbells and alarms. When you think about the case of crises in situations that can mean life or death, you do not automatically think about hearing loss as a factor. On the other hands, advancements in technologies such as wireless sensors and internet of things (IoT) have reached levels beyond imagination. IoT is estimated to control every part of our lives, integrating automation, and remote monitoring, which can potentially help integrate PHDs more efficiently in the society. In this project, we are trying to help PHDs to integrate and protect themselves in life threatening situations as well as day-to-day activities. Hearing plays an important role in survival and reaction. That is why, in this project we are working on a few sub-systems that will aid PHD in different aspects in life. Our project aims to develop a wearable solution for PHD, which is a more affordable, easy and compact solution that notifies the PHD in case of fire, doorbell ringing or time alarm. Each of the sub-system is modified slightly to be able to interact with the wearable solution.</p
Pharmacia
Project ID = S192025
We aim to create a pharmacy website that offers medicine and other over-the-counteritems for customers. The idea is that this website collaborates with many pharmacies fromdifferent areas in the country to provide a wide variety of options for the customer to choosefrom. As we know, not all medication can be bought without a written prescription from a Doctor, so customers will be able to upload their prescription for the pharmacist to check and approve or decline. The website will offer tracking and consulting with pharmacists as options for the customer. The customer does not have to register to chat with a pharmacist or giveout any personal information. To upload a prescription or buy an item, the customer will have to register with their own personal details, this way they can keep track of their order and check it is status. When it came to implementing the features that we wanted for our website, we didimplement what we thought were important, even though there is still some features that wedid not implement but hopefully will be implemented in the future. The feature that we didnot implemented is chat with the pharmacists through the website.For testing we did different type of testing for each requirement, since we have functional requirements and non-functional requirement. Each requirement needed a specific set of testing. For functional requirement, we did component testing and system testing.Whereas for non-functional requirements, we did performance testing, availability testing and usability testing. The results of these t esting were very satisfactory and matched what wewanted for the website.