Engineering Commons^™

Iot Greenhouse Monitoring System, Raj Basnet

Honors Theses

Our project is a greenhouse monitoring system. The customer states that they need a complete monitoring system for their greenhouse. There are a lot of items within the greenhouse that need to be watered at the right time and kept at a certain temperature. The customer is not always around to check the status of these items due to their busy lifestyle. They would like a system to monitor all these items so they can check it on their smartphone no matter how far away they are from the greenhouse. The customer wants this to be a low-cost and energyefficient …

Iot Garden Frost Alarm, Andrew James

Honors Theses

Home gardeners are faced with yearly challenges due to spring frosts harming young plants. This is frequently mitigated by covering crops with frost blankets, but only on nights when a frost is predicted. In areas with less predictable climate, an unexpected frost can kill vulnerable plants, reducing the amount of food produced. A system is proposed and designed here to use internet of things (IoT) technology to enable a small weather station in the home garden to report current climate data and predict frosts, then alert the gardener in time for them to cover their plants.

The system as designed …

Wearables And Wearable Data In Tele-Health Applications, Jack Mazza

Honors Theses

With the sudden emergence of Covid-19, Tele-Health has been forced into the forefront of healthcare. With no human contact, regular in-person doctor or clinic visits could not be made. Unfortunately, there is a gap in patient data for healthcare professionals when making diagnoses remotely. Fortunately, many users are constantly collecting some primary health data through wearables that have become commonplace in users' homes. Tapping into this unused data could provide healthcare professionals with a better picture of patients' health remotely. In this thesis, I will determine whether this wearable data can be a viable addition to Tele-Health applications, providing additional …

A Study Of Deep Reinforcement Learning In Autonomous Racing Using Deepracer Car, Mukesh Ghimire

Honors Theses

Reinforcement learning is thought to be a promising branch of machine learning that has the potential to help us develop an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) machine. Among the machine learning algorithms, primarily, supervised, semi supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning is different in a sense that it explores the environment without prior knowledge, and determines the optimal action. This study attempts to understand the concept behind reinforcement learning, the mathematics behind it and see it in action by deploying the trained model in Amazon's DeepRacer car. DeepRacer, a 1/18^th scaled autonomous car, is the agent which is trained …

Evaluation Of State-Of-The-Art Nlp Deep Learning Architectures On Commonsense Reasoning Task, Guo Rui (Justin) Lee

Honors Theses

The goal of this project was to explore modern neural network technology in the application of discerning and generating statements that are ‘reasonable’, in what is known as commonsense reasoning. We built off of the work of Saeedi et al. In their work on the 2020 SemEval task, Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE). SemEval is a workshop that creates a variety of semantic evaluation tasks to examine the state of the art in the practical application of natural language processing. This particular task involved three sections: task A, Validation, in which a program tries to select which of two statements …

Non-Linear Dimensionality Reduction Using Auto-Encoder For Optimized Malaria Infected Blood Cell Classifier, Aayush Dhakal

Honors Theses

Neural Networks have been widely used in the problem of Medical Image Analysis. However, when dealing with large images, deep networks easily exhaust computer resources, which in turn hinders training. This paper shows the efficacy of using Auto-Encoders as a dimensionality reduction tool to increase the efficiency of a Malaria Infected Blood Cell Image classifier. We show that using an autoencoder, we can reduce the dimensionality of large blood cell images effectively such that the features in the new space retain all the essential information from the original input. Then we show that the new features obtained from the autoencoder …

Effective Gamification Within Educational Virtual Reality Environments, Adrian Pilkington

Honors Theses

With the advent and now widespread use of mobile phones and computers in educational settings, exploring effective and new ways of using technology in the classroom is important for educating the next generation of students. Innovative technology, like Virtual Reality, has started being discussed and researched for its potential benefits in educational settings. This paper presents a brief history of VR, game theory, and examines two VR educational games from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Nursing’s (UNMC) Senior Design teams. The two games will be used to replace lecture-style classes and to go out and educate the community. We …

The Exploration And Analysis Of Mancala From An Ai Perspective, Trevon J. Hunter

Honors Theses

Through the study of popular games such as Chess and Go, countless artificial intelligence (AI) research has been conducted in an attempt to create algorithms equipped for adversarial search problems. However, there are still a plethora of avenues that offer insight into further development. Mancala is traditionally a two-player board game that originated in the East and offers a unique opponent-based playing experience. This thesis not only attempts to create a competitive AI algorithm for mancala games by analyzing the performance of several different algorithms on this classic board game, but it also attempts to extract applications that may have …

Ez-Translate, Mason D. Beattie

Honors Theses

This report describes the EZ-Translate Software that was designed and developed by Mason Beattie for the CSCI495-D1 Honors Capstone Project and Course at Coastal Carolina University. This project is built from Java and is designed for the Windows 10 operating system. While running it displays or hides a translation menu when the designated key binds are pressed. Translations supported include select phrases from English, German, and Russian. The application also provides localization support for these three languages. The overall goal of this project to provide translation services while within another application was successfully achieved. The application utilizes an open-source Java …

Determination Of Hydrogel Degradation By Passive Mechanical Testing, Avery Rosh-Gorsky

Honors Theses

This paper details a new technique to measure the mechanical properties of ETTMP PEGDA hydrogels using Hertz Contact Theory and simultaneously analyze both the model drug release and gel erosion in situ. This method involves curing a drug loaded hydrogel in a standard cuvette and placing a glass bead and phosphate buffer solution (PBS). Over time, the cross-linked network of the hydrogel breaks down, and, as a result, the ball sinks into the hydrogel. This method provides a macroscopic and inexpensive way to continuously and passively measure properties of the hydrogel as the hydrogel degrades. By plotting both the …