Computer Engineering Commons^™

Cloud Workflow Automation, William Crump, Eric Darling, Kyle Hagood, Syed Rizvi

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The goal of our project was to develop an application in the cloud which automates complex business tasks. The application allows users to create configurable events consisting of a trigger followed by an action. Triggers are designed for common tasks such as scanning a directory or email inbox for new files. When a new file is detected, the application triggers the execution of an associated action such as sending an email alerting the user of the changes or processing and moving the files. Users are thus able to automate complex tasks by configuring event sequences, leading to an increase …

Amc Native Webrtc Client, Kellan Childers, Michael Dowling, Sherdil Khawaja

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Traditional call center and telecommunication hardware is being replaced by thin, browser-based, cloud enabled web services. Industry standards for web based communication protocols, such as WebRTC, are being established. AMC needed to address this new technology, while maintaining a hybrid approach of server-based capabilities, taking advantage of the web-based communication channel, while broadcasting events to the Contact Canvas Server. Contact Canvas Agent Palette is the editing platform of the AMC adapter for Salesforce.com, allowing agents to communicate with customers through the AMC adapter/ Softphone. Using Agent Palette, the task was to integrate Video Chat using WebRTC into the AMC toolbar. …

Company Health Dashboard, Zachary Raney, Ahmad Shahir Abdul Satar

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Company Health Dashboard is a web application that serves as a tool to display information in dynamic grid-like modules. This application displays viewer-friendly information on the televisions around the company office using Raspberry Pi devices. In order to benefit different types of users, the application divides the screen into multiple customizable modules, with each module representing different information. Company employees, for example, can view information about company news, upcoming events, or even what’s on tap for that day. Visitors or clients, on the other hand, can see information about the company while waiting for their meeting.

The design of the …

Mapcom Self-Service Portal, Kelsey Bullock, Viet Nguyen, Alvenia Weathers

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Mapcom Systems is a software development firm that primarily serves small, rural telecommunications companies. The company is widely recognized for developing M4 Solutions, a visual operations platform that allows service providers to manage their workforce. Our team was tasked with the design and implementation of a self-service portal to be used by the customers of these telecommunications companies. The application would allow customers to easily manage their accounts, including creating and managing trouble tickets, communicating with their assigned technician, and viewing their scheduled appointments. Additionally, it would be offered across three different platforms: Web, Android, and iOS. In order to …

Richmond Mural Tour, Matthew Mcgee, Paul Mcdonald

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In the past years Richmond has been growing in popularity in the world of street art. This popularity is due in part to the many projects that brought in artists from around the world to create beautiful artwork. There is so much art outside in Richmond as a result of these projects, but no great way to navigate the streets of the city in an efficient manner to see all of it. Richmond Mural Tour is a mobile cross-platform application that allows users to explore all of the amazing outdoor artwork around the city.

This application is built on ionic …

Applied Industrial Augmented Reality, Eric Brown, Riley Hanson, Casey White

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The goal of our project was to create an application that demonstrates the usefulness of augmented reality within an industrial context. In order to align our project goals with those of our sponsor, Newport News Shipbuilding, we created an augmented reality application to supplement a chainsaw’s instruction manual. Using an instruction manual for a Stihl MS361 chainsaw, we adapted the material into a digital context. In the application, we included step-by-step instructions for starting the chainsaw and changing the chain. In addition, we included an augmented part identification mode, where the user can identify parts of the chainsaw by touching …

Digital Analysis Of Heartbeats From Remote Machines, Dewey Mitchem, Devin Dulay, Taylor Kaplan

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The “Bring Out Your Exceptions” project is a robust online automated data collection and aggregation utility. Specifically designed to handle application to application communication so that system health analysis can be performed easily within minutes by both trained and untrained personnel. The utility, once set-up, receives relevant data (be it crash errors or current system health) from remote systems without human interaction being required. This will allow for faster turn-around on patch development and addressing future errors without reliance on a client requesting help.

Created using a combination of tools and languages such as Javascript, GoLang, Node.JS, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB, …

Martin Agency Freelancer Onboarding, Brian Simoni, Christopher Calhoun, Perry Stephenson

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Onboarding new employees is a necessary but often a lengthy process at any company, but it can be especially challenging for companies like The Martin Agency. An advertising firm based in Richmond, Virginia. The nature of their work channels the need for many of their employees to be freelancers or short term contractors. At the time the project began, the process to request a new freelancer would start as a paper form submitted by a department supervisor. It would then require approval from members of different departments within agency, and the data had to be converted into an electronic form …

Vcu Pathfinder, Chris Carpenter, Christian Merk, Syed Shahriyar

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Imagine this, you are planning to enroll in an institution of higher learning. However, your schedule can't possibly match your institutions recommended path. Maybe you're transferring from a different institution, maybe you just picked up additional hours on the job, or maybe you just want to change to a different major. Getting all the information you need in one place to plan a personalized schedule can be a difficult proposition, especially if you don't have easy access to an on-site adviser. VCU Pathfinder is here to make this process considerably less stressful and more efficient. Pathfinder is a schedule assistance …

Automatic Parking Application, Corey Gates, Huy Nguyen, John Steiner

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The purpose of this utility application is to automatically remind the users where their vehicle is parked. Using many sensors and features of the Apple iPhone, we can track changes in users’ behaviors and their surrounding such as air pressure, physical movement, connection proximity, and coordinate position. These allow for detecting not just the parking position, but also altitude and interior approximation within parking structures. Using a periodic assessment loop, this application silently waits for changes, remaining out of sight of common user activity. During an assessment, nearby connections, user position, and activity readings are evaluated. If a significant event, …

Droidnet: An Android Application Security Framework Through Crowdsourcing, Pulkit Rustgi, Bilal Ahmed, Mansi Shah

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In the current Android architecture, users have to decide whether an app is safe to use or not by themselves. Savvy users can make correct decisions to avoid unnecessary privacy breaches, however most users are not capable or do not care to make impactful decisions. To assist those users, we propose DroidNet, an Android permission control framework based on crowdsourcing. In this framework, DroidNet runs new apps and their permissions initially, and then collects data based on each individual user’s settings in regards to each permission unique to every installed app. After collecting each user’s data, DroidNet provides recommendations on …

Stackintheflow: Stackoverflow Search Engine, John Coogle, Jeet Gajjar, Chase Greco

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Programmers increasing rely on an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which offers capabilities for writing, debugging and testing code. Most developers, ranging from novices to pros, reference outside sources when developing, such as the popular Q&A site StackOverflow. In the 2016 StackOverflow Developer Survey it was observed that 78% of survey participants visited StackOverflow at least once a day, with 58% visiting multiple times a day. The purpose of the StackInTheFlow software development tool is to reduce the amount of time and interruption necessary to gather external information during development. This enables the developer to remain in-the-flow of solving software engineering …

Real-Time Face Recognition Drone Surveillance System, Jacob Segal, Asa Kaplan, Christopher Butler

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Drones are becoming more relevant and could potentially become a part of everyday life. From Amazon delivering packages to light displays used in the Super Bowl half-time show, drones are taking the place of people and inefficient systems. They are being used by military forces for scouting and relaying information from a distance, and by normal people every day to get an aerial view of a park or just for the entertainment of flying. This project develops a system for identifying and recognizing faces in real-time using a drone, specifically a Parrot ‘Bebop’, which is flying autonomously. The drone company, …

C.A.R.E (Cohort Assessment & Retrieval Environment), Kyle Ellis, Payal Shah, Jordan Tang

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The purpose of clinical trials is to explore whether a medical treatment is safe and effective for humans or to enhance preexisting methods. The identification of patients who satisfy a set of predefined criteria for the trial is instrumental. However, the process of distinguishing these patients on the basis of their clinical records is a challenging task since it can have structured (ex: precise measurements) and unstructured data (ex: physician notes). One difficulty with this is data normalization; there are many ways to describe a single concept. For example, “heart attack” and “myocardial infarction” both refer to the death of …

Gyrus Higher Learning Management System, Nicholas Turnquist, Bailey Kingsley, Ryan Schnarre

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our project was to develop a prototype learning management system for use of higher education for our sponsor, Gyrus Systems. This consisted of creating a MySQL relational database to store user and class information, to design and code a user interface that emphasized user experience, and to implement functionalities for each user role.

Early in the design phase we outlined which features were must haves, in order to demonstrate an adequate prototype, and had this list approved by our sponsor. They were then divided into two roles. The role of “student” has the ability to submit assignments, get information from …

Active/Active Cloud Infrastructure, Charles Bradshaw, Edwin Lobo, Curtis Jackson

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Determining a stable implementation of an Active/Active system has been a topic of great interest to those maintaining multi-datacenter cloud-based services. This type of infrastructure is highly valued because it allows for services and applications to remain continuously available, even during planned and unplanned downtimes. Before implementing an Active/Active system, one must first determine the most effective ways to satisfy its two key constraints: maintaining fast and reliable cross-datacenter replication, as well as determining efficient disaster recovery options. Based upon these two constraints, we had determined that the problem could be addressed at the database level using the NoSQL database …

Capital One Mobile Directory, Nicholas Bellucci, Ricky Lee, Austin Mccracken

Capstone Design Expo Posters

One issue that large companies struggle with is the ability for employees to find contact information and communicate with other employees. Capital One has had a mobile directory iOS application in the past, but their information was static and difficult to change, and the interface left much to be desired. Instead of refactoring the app, Capital One requested us to scrap the previous application entirely, and start from scratch, keeping just the basic principle of it being a mobile directory app. The purpose of the new application is to be able to easily access information and communicate with other members …

Proam Sports, Shruti Patel, Haseeb Niazi, Neelam Jhurani

Capstone Design Expo Posters

ProAm Sports takes fitness one step further by designing a tournament-based program, where members can sign up to participate in matches as individuals or teams in various sports and win actual cash prizes accumulated from a portion of their membership fees. Our project required implementing a database which stores information on players, teams, and games as well as a website that offers the ability for players to sign up, view information on events, pay for membership, and communicate with other players. There are three levels of paid membership, where each offers different benefits including discounts on event registration. After registering …

Mining Sequences Of Developer Interactions In Visual Studio For Usage Smells, Kostadin Damevski, David C. Shepherd, Johannes Schneider, Lori Pollock

Computer Science Publications

In this paper, we present a semi-automatic approach for mining a large-scale dataset of IDE interactions to extract usage smells, i.e., inefficient IDE usage patterns exhibited by developers in the field. The approach outlined in this paper first mines frequent IDE usage patterns, filtered via a set of thresholds and by the authors, that are subsequently supported (or disputed) using a developer survey, in order to form usage smells. In contrast with conventional mining of IDE usage data, our approach identifies time-ordered sequences of developer actions that are exhibited by many developers in the field. This pattern mining workflow is …

An Android-Based Mechanism For Energy Efficient Localization Depending On Indoor/Outdoor Context, Nicholas Capurso, Tianyi Song, Wei Cheng, Jiguo Yu, Xiuzhen Cheng

Computer Science Publications

Today, there is widespread use of mobile applications that take advantage of a user's location. Popular usages of location information include geotagging on social media websites, driver assistance and navigation, and querying nearby locations of interest. However, the average user may not realize the high energy costs of using location services (namely the GPS) or may not make smart decisions regarding when to enable or disable location services-for example, when indoors. As a result, a mechanism that can make these decisions on the user's behalf can significantly improve a smartphone's battery life. In this paper, we present an energy consumption …

Fdetect Webserver: Fast Predictor Of Propensity For Protein Production, Purification, And Crystallization, Fanchi Meng, Chen Wang, Lukasz Kurgan

Computer Science Publications

Background: Development of predictors of propensity of protein sequences for successful crystallization has been actively pursued for over a decade. A few novel methods that expanded the scope of these predictions to address additional steps of protein production and structure determination pipelines were released in recent years. The predictive performance of the current methods is modest. This is because the only input that they use is the protein sequence and since the experimental annotations of these data might be inconsistent given that they were collected across many laboratories and centers. However, even these modest levels of predictive quality are still …

Parsing Metamap Files In Hadoop, Amy Olex, Alberto Cano, Bridget T. Mcinnes

Computer Science Publications

The UMLS::Association CUICollector module identifies UMLS Concept Unique Identifier bigrams and their frequencies in a biomedical text corpus. CUICollector was re-implemented in Hadoop MapReduce to improve algorithm speed, flexibility, and scalability. Evaluation of the Hadoop implementation compared to the serial module produced equivalent results and achieved a 28x speedup on a single-node Hadoop system.

Sotxtstream: Density-Based Self-Organizing Clustering Of Text Streams, Avory C. Bryant, Krzysztof J. Cios

Computer Science Publications

A streaming data clustering algorithm is presented building upon the density-based selforganizing stream clustering algorithm SOSTREAM. Many density-based clustering algorithms are limited by their inability to identify clusters with heterogeneous density. SOSTREAM addresses this limitation through the use of local (nearest neighbor-based) density determinations. Additionally, many stream clustering algorithms use a two-phase clustering approach. In the first phase, a micro-clustering solution is maintained online, while in the second phase, the micro-clustering solution is clustered offline to produce a macro solution. By performing self-organization techniques on micro-clusters in the online phase, SOSTREAM is able to maintain a macro clustering solution in …

Ensemble Learning For Data Stream Analysis: A Survey, Bartosz Krawczyk, Leandro L. Minku, João Gama, Jerzy Stefanowski, Michał Wozniak

Computer Science Publications

In many applications of information systems learning algorithms have to act in dynamic environments where data are collected in the form of transient data streams. Compared to static data mining, processing streams imposes new computational requirements for algorithms to incrementally process incoming examples while using limited memory and time. Furthermore, due to the non-stationary characteristics of streaming data, prediction models are often also required to adapt to concept drifts. Out of several new proposed stream algorithms, ensembles play an important role, in particular for non-stationary environments. This paper surveys research on ensembles for data stream classification as well as regression …

Quadmutex: Quadratic Driver Mutation Explorer, Bokhari Yahya, Tomasz Jakub Arodz

Computer Science Publications

Background

Somatic mutations accumulate in human cells throughout life. Some may have no adverse consequences, but some of them may lead to cancer. A cancer genome is typically unstable, and thus more mutations can accumulate in the DNA of cancer cells. An ongoing problem is to figure out which mutations are drivers - play a role in oncogenesis, and which are passengers - do not play a role. One way of addressing this question is through inspection of somatic mutations in DNA of cancer samples from a cohort of patients and detection of patterns that differentiate driver from passenger mutations. …

An Integrative In-Silico Approach For Therapeutic Target Identification In The Human Pathogen Corynebacterium Diphtheriae, Syed Babar Jamal, Syed Shah Hassan, Sandeep Tiwari, Marcus V. Viana, Leandro De Jesus Benevides, Asad Ullah, Adrián G. Turjanski, Debmalya Barh, Preetam Ghosh, Daniela Arruda Costa, Artur Silva, Richard Röttger, Jan Baumbach, Vasco A.C. Azevedo

Computer Science Publications

Corynebacterium diphtheriae (Cd) is a Gram-positive human pathogen responsible for diphtheria infection and once regarded for high mortalities worldwide. The fatality gradually decreased with improved living standards and further alleviated when many immunization programs were introduced. However, numerous drug-resistant strains emerged recently that consequently decreased the efficacy of current therapeutics and vaccines, thereby obliging the scientific community to start investigating new therapeutic targets in pathogenic microorganisms. In this study, our contributions include the prediction of modelome of 13 C. diphtheriae strains, using the MHOLline workflow. A set of 463 conserved proteins were identified by combining the results of pangenomics …

Crosstalk And The Dynamical Modularity Of Feed-Forward Loops In Transcriptional Regulatory Networks, Michael A. Rowland, Ahmed Abdelzaher, Preetam Ghosh, Michael L. Mayo

Computer Science Publications

Network motifs, such as the feed-forward loop (FFL), introduce a range of complex behaviors to transcriptional regulatory networks, yet such properties are typically determined from their isolated study. We characterize the effects of crosstalk on FFL dynamics by modeling the cross regulation between two different FFLs and evaluate the extent to which these patterns occur in vivo. Analytical modeling suggests that crosstalk should overwhelmingly affect individual protein-expression dynamics. Counter to this expectation we find that entire FFLs are more likely than expected to resist the effects of crosstalk (approximate to 20% for one crosstalk interaction) and remain dynamically modular. The …

Spirit Of Broad Street Station, Rhey Igou, Allyson Yohe, Kyle Sutherland

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The Science Museum of Virginia used to be an active train station, known as Broad Street Station. The building itself has since been radically renovated and contains a vast history of important visitors and events. The Science Museum has hundreds of beautiful photos from throughout the building’s lifespan, however the average visitor to the museum might not even realize that the museum was once a train station. The goal of this project was to present these photographs in a “story” format as the user is traveling through the museum. This is accomplished with Bluetooth beacons (Estimotes), placed in relevant locations …

Conference Registration System, Pooja Krishnan

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The main purpose of our project was the creation of a persistent conference registration management system. The Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF) is an organization aiming to foster research and education in computational complexity theory. The main activity of the organization is its annual conference, the Computational Complexity Conference (CCC). Dr. Sevag Gharibian, member of the Board of Governors for the CCF and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Engineering Computer Science Department, wished for our team to design a user-friendly fully-integrated conference registration system for the CCC. Dr. Gharibian wanted our product to have the following functionalities: creation/management …

Picshare, Kyle Crane, Emily Klein, Ben Wunschel

Capstone Design Expo Posters

PicShare is an app that allows companies to easily manage their social media presence without having to dedicate large amounts of time to the process. Your social media department can now extend their reach with the help of all of your other employees.

Our platform allows users to upload images/text from a mobile application or directly from the web. Administrators have the ability to take their own or user's image/text uploads and prepare for a social media post.

Employees attending events can get content to your social media staff much faster and with more variety. Our application is a great …