Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Dynamic Paint For Maya: Creation And Use In The Animation Short "Color Clash", Christopher Wallis

Computer Science

This write-up describes the creation and utilization of a paint effect from both the perspective of the programmer and the animator. The paint effect simulates a 2D fluid using the algorithm described in Jos Stam's ``Real-time Fluid Dynamics for Games'' \cite{stam}, bakes the results into an image sequence, and then wraps the sequence around a 3D mesh. The second half of this paper describes how the effect was integrated into the animation short, ``Color Clash'' and the animation pipeline that was used.

Weighted Feature Classification, Mohammad Hadi Soudkhah

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Most existing classification algorithms either consider all features as equally important (equal weights), or do not analyze consistency of weights assigned to features. When features are not equally important, assigning consistent weights is a not obvious task. In general we have two cases. The first case assumes that a given sample of data does not contain any clue about the importance of features, so the weights are provided by a pool of experts and they are usually inconsistent. The second case assumes that the given sample contains some information about features importance, hence we can derive the weights directly from ...

A Window Of Opportunity: Assessing Behavioural Scoring, Kenneth Kennedy, Brian Macnamee, Sarah Jane Delany, Michael O'Sullivan, Neil Watson

Articles

After credit has been granted, lenders use behavioural scoring to assess the likelihood of default occurring during some specific outcome period. This assessment is based on customers’ repayment performance over a given fixed period. Often the outcome period and fixed performance period are arbitrarily selected, causing instability in making predictions. Behavioural scoring has failed to receive the same attention from researchers as application scoring. The bias for application scoring research can be attributed, in part, to the large volume of data required for behavioural scoring studies. Furthermore, the commercial sensitivities associated with such a large pool of customer data often ...

Automatic Performance Level Assessment In Minimally Invasive Surgery Using Coordinated Sensors And Composite Metrics, Sami Taha Abu Snaineh

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Skills assessment in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has been a challenge for training centers for a long time. The emerging maturity of camera-based systems has the potential to transform problems into solutions in many different areas, including MIS. The current evaluation techniques for assessing the performance of surgeons and trainees are direct observation, global assessments, and checklists. These techniques are mostly subjective and can, therefore, involve a margin of bias.

The current automated approaches are all implemented using mechanical or electromagnetic sensors, which suffer limitations and influence the surgeon’s motion. Thus, evaluating the skills of the MIS surgeons and ...

Electronic Medical Record Ipad Application, Mischa Symmone Buckler, Dwayne Wiliam Flaherty, John Thomas Cotham, Mark Bellott

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Extending Structural Learning Paradigms For High-Dimensional Machine Learning And Analysis, Christopher Todd Symons

Doctoral Dissertations

Structure-based machine-learning techniques are frequently used in extensions of supervised learning, such as active, semi-supervised, multi-modal, and multi-task learning. A common step in many successful methods is a structure-discovery process that is made possible through the addition of new information, which can be user feedback, unlabeled data, data from similar tasks, alternate views of the problem, etc. Learning paradigms developed in the above-mentioned fields have led to some extremely flexible, scalable, and successful multivariate analysis approaches. This success and flexibility offer opportunities to expand the use of machine learning paradigms to more complex analyses. In particular, while information is often ...

Mickey's Memory Game: A Children's Memory Game Designed For Sifteo Cubes, Anjelica Concepcion

Computer Engineering

Mickey’s Memory Game is a children’s memory game developed on the Sifteo platform. Sifteo cubes are small, interactive devices, which can display colored images and sense neighboring cubes or detect user actions, such as clicking, shaking, or tilting the cubes. Although many classic video games or mobile games can be recreated on the Sifteo cubes, the goal of this project was to utilize capabilities that are unique to the Sifteo gaming platform, while also creating a useful game for child development.

Repeated Selfish Routing With Incomplete Information, He Yu

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Selfish routing is frequently discussed. The general framework of a system of non-cooperative users can be used to model many different optimization problems such as network routing, traffic or transportation problems.

It is well known that the Wardrop user equilibria (i.e. the user optima) generally do not optimize the overall system cost in a traffic routing problem.

In order to induce the equilibrium flow to be as close to the optimal flow as possible, the term “toll” is introduced. With the addition of tolls, a traffic system does not show the actual cost to the users but the displayed ...

The Quickiecomposer Android Application, Brigit Elizabeth Hawley

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

The QuickieComposer application is a program intended for use on Android Devices. Designed for the composer on the go, the QuickieComposer app is perfect for those “in the moment” compositions. In the following document, the functionality and development of the first version of the QuickieComposer application is explained.

Amaethon - A Web Application For Farm Management And An Assessment Of Its Utility, Tyler Yero

Master's Theses and Project Reports

Amaethon is a web application that is designed for enterprise farm management. It takes a job typically performed with spreadsheets, paper, or custom software and puts it on the web. Farm administration personnel may use it to schedule farm operations and manage their resources and equipment. A survey was con- ducted to assess Amaethon’s user interface design. Participants in the survey were two groups of students and a small group of agriculture professionals. Among other results, the survey indicated that a calendar interface inside Amaethon was preferred, and statistically no less effective, than a map interface. This is despite ...

Using Player Profiling To Enhance Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment In Video Games, Aaron Burke

Computer Engineering

Video games have certainly come a long way since the days of pong. From humble beginnings of the first arcade machines they have bloomed into a multi-billion dollar industry and a global force to be reckoned with. Just like with movies there are enough genres out there to fit any demographic of gamer, and that’s not even just the game’s content but also the gameplay.

Unlike other types of media though, games are meant to be interacted with and played, which brings up new issues with accessibility and keeping things interesting for different levels of skill. Dynamic game ...

Hard And Soft Error Resilience For One-Sided Dense Linear Algebra Algorithms, Peng Du

Doctoral Dissertations

Dense matrix factorizations, such as LU, Cholesky and QR, are widely used by scientific applications that require solving systems of linear equations, eigenvalues and linear least squares problems. Such computations are normally carried out on supercomputers, whose ever-growing scale induces a fast decline of the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF). This dissertation develops fault tolerance algorithms for one-sided dense matrix factorizations, which handles Both hard and soft errors.

For hard errors, we propose methods based on diskless checkpointing and Algorithm Based Fault Tolerance (ABFT) to provide full matrix protection, including the left and right factor that are normally seen in ...

Artificial Intelligence In Simulations, David Hynes

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Simulator systems are becoming increasingly popular within the automotive industry. Driving simulations are used to train new drivers, and to research and improve automobile related technologies. While recent technological advances have made simulators more affordable, they have also made simulators more complex. At McMaster's motion simulator laboratory, we wished to create a system to analyze how drivers behave when behind the wheel in a variety of situations. To accomodate this, we have created a complex, robust system capable of presenting the driver with customized scenarios, and measuring their reactions to those scenarios using a variety of standard psychology techniques ...

Modelling Fault Tolerance Using Deontic Logic: A Case Study, Jamil Ahmed Khan

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Many computer systems in our daily life require highly available applications (such as medical equipment) and some others run on difficult to access places (such as satellites). These systems are subject to a variety of potential failures that may degrade their performance. Therefore, being able to reason about faults and their impact on systems is gaining considerable attention. Existing work on fault tolerance is mostly focused on addressing faults at the programming language level. In the recent past, significant efforts have been made to use formal methods to specify and verify fault tolerant systems to provide more reliable software. Related ...

Is Tech M&A Value-Additive?, Ani Deshmukh

Undergraduate Economic Review

Given rising M&A deal volume across all high-tech subsectors, the ability to measure post-acquisition performance becomes critical. Despite this growth, the relevant academic literature is severely lacking (Kohers and Kohers 2000). Using an event-study approach, I find that acquirers and targets both realize statistically significant day-0 abnormal returns (1.23% [p<0.1] and 8.1% [p<0.01], respectively). As positive stock returns signal positive growth prospects in a semi-strong efficient market, AR regressions found that firms' technological relatedness, deal financing, purchase price premiums, and the relative book to market ratio, explained most variance. Overall, high-tech transactions are value-additive for both targets and acquirers.

Intersection State Visualization For Realtime Simulations, Justin L. Roth

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Driving simulators have existed since the beginning of the $20^th century. From its roots, it has been a technology used primarily to train drivers, test and prototype new technology, and improve the safety of automobile users. As technology has progressed, so has the quality of the driving simulation, and along side it, the complexity of experiments performed. The McMaster motion simulation system combines the latest software with state of the art psychology techniques, to analyze the driving experience in new and unique ways. To accommodate the wide range of plausible experiments, a robust software system was developed that allows ...

A Comparative Study Of User Preferences Of A Personalized Academic Website, Dipti U. Desai

College of Technology Masters Theses

ABSTRACT

There has been a growing concern over the enrollment by American students into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic (STEM) fields of study. Following globalization there is a direct competition for jobs in the United States with lower-wage workers around the globe and the US, thereby, is on the verge of losing its global technological competitiveness (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, 2007). Governmental as well as non-profit organizations are constantly searching for ideas, programs and initiatives ...

Symbolic Generation Of Parallel Solvers For Unconstrained Optimization, Jessica L. M. Pavlin

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis we consider the need to generate efficient solvers for inverse imaging problems in a way that supports both quality and performance in software, as well as flexibility in the underlying mathematical models. Many problem domains involve large data sizes and rates, and changes in mathematical modelling are limited only by researcher ingenuity and driven by the value of the application. We use a problem in Magnetic Resonance Imaging to illustrate this situation, motivate the need for better software tools and test the tools we develop. The problem is the determination of velocity profiles, think blood-flow patterns, using ...