Sharing Information on Graduate Student Research Projects

I don’t think that there are many sites that encourage graduate students interested in research projects in information technology or computer science to communicate among themselves. If you know of any, please tell me. I have occasionally done a search for such sites and have not found any.

On a related note, it is good for graduate students to know about dissertations that have been written in their own areas and to get copies of them. The worldwide trend of universities maintaining an open archive to share their dissertation collections provides one opportunity. A number of US universities do that. The Australian have a national arrangement to pool information on the dissertation collections from as many as 20 universities. You might wish to look at this site: http://adt.caul.edu.au/

I found a number of theses that are very interesting, on the basis of my own interests (there are many more in CS and IT). I could read them from the document file, except in one case – the first one. Some provide a copy of the document in one pdf file, and others have different files for different chapters. The common search facilities provided by the above-mentioned website will locate information on any of the following theses that I found noteworthy:

By Jijoong Kim, Automatic Aircraft Recognition and Identification, 2005, University of Wollongong

By Joe Cronin, Design, construction and control of an industrial scale biped robot, 2005, University of New South Wales.
(This is a 500 Kg monster! From the pages I have read so far, it looks like it has not been built. But it has been designed and the designs have been tested by simulation)

By Penny Baillie, The Synthesis Of Emotions In Artificial Intelligences, 2002, The University Of Southern Queensland

By Peter Krebs, 2002, Turing Machines, Computers and Artificial Intelligence, University of New South Wales (This thesis argues that an artificial intelligence can transcend the limitations of a formal system because it can interact with the real world)

By Keven Weber, Visually guided Autonomous Robot Navigation: An insect based Approach, 1998, Curtin University of Technology (This thesis argues that a parsimonious, but robust guidance mechanism can be developed to handle two problems: corridor guidance and visual homing).

Coming back to my initial question: do we have a wiki like mechanism for graduate students to announce what problems they are working on? If not, why not? If the student does not wish to announce his approach, that is all right. He/she can merely announce the title of the proposed thesis. Students looking at a common area could at least share information, news about tools, relevant publications etc., and send each other preprints of their publications.

Srinivasan Ramani