Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Implementation And Testing Of A Book Lookup System For The Robert E. Kennedy Library, Casey C. Sheehan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project centered around improving the quality of student and teacher experiences when visiting the library. The task of finding a book amongst the shelves is an arduous one, which I felt could be improved upon through implementation and testing of a Book Lookup system for the Cal Poly Robert E. Kennedy Library. Development for this project was done using a Python framework. Testing and earlier designs were also created using JavaScript and PHP. Repeated tests were conducted on the accuracy of the software and its ability to decrease user search-time when compared to conventional methods.

Review Classification, Balraj Aujla

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this project is to find a way to analyze reviews and determine the sentiment of a review. It uses various machine learning techniques in order to achieve its goals such as SVMs and Naive Bayes. Overall the purpose is to learn many different machine learning techniques, determine which ones would be useful for the project, then compare the results. Research is the foremost goal of the project, and it is able to determine the better algorithm for review classification, naive bayes or an SVM. In addition, an SVM which actually gave review’s scores rather than just classifying …

Ios Application For Inventory In Small Retail Stores, Andrea Savage

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Currently, small retail stores with low technology budgets such as those right here in San Luis Obispo are struggling to integrate new technologies into their companies. This mobile application built for iOS with a Firebase backend is seeking to remove their barriers to entry. I built this application to give small retail stores a customizable application that allows them to display products electronically to customers and maintain accurate inventory both in one place. The construction of this application hinged around three major design decisions: UI design of the color management views, organization of the database, and accessing the database with …

Fine-Tuning An Algorithm For Semantic Document Clustering Using A Similarity Graph, Lubomir Stanchev

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this article, we examine an algorithm for document clustering using a similarity graph. The graph stores words and common phrases from the English language as nodes and it can be used to compute the degree of semantic similarity between any two phrases. One application of the similarity graph is semantic document clustering, that is, grouping documents based on the meaning of the words in them. Since our algorithm for semantic document clustering relies on multiple parameters, we examine how fine-tuning these values affects the quality of the result. Specifically, we use the Reuters-21578 benchmark, which contains 11,362 newswire stories …

Leveraging The Final Project To Improve Student Motivation In Introductory Digital Design Courses, Andrew Danowitz

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Student retention rates in engineering, especially among traditionally underrepresented groups, remain an obstacle to training a large, diverse engineering workforce. The NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators 2016 indicate that of students entering college with an intent to major in engineering, only 63% graduate with an engineering degree [1]. With research suggesting that misperceptions or a lack of knowledge about what work in a certain field is like can deter students from studying that discipline [2], [3], it is possible that providing a meaningful project experience at the introductory level could provide a strong positive impact on retention rates. This could …

Creating A Probabilistic Model For Wordnet, Lubomir Stanchev

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We present a probabilistic model for extracting and storing information from WordNet and the British National Corpus. We map the data into a directed probabilistic graph that can be used to compute the conditional probability between a pair of words from the English language. For example, the graph can be used to deduce that there is a 10% probability that someone who is interested in dogs is also interested in the word “canine”. We propose three ways for computing this probability, where the best results are achieved when performing multiple random walks in the graph. Unlike existing approaches that only …

Leveraging New Platforms To Provide Students With A Realistic Soc Design Experience, Andrew Danowitz, Antonio M. Leija

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Recently there have been a slew of digital design products released that promise to simplify the task of giving students a real-world System-on-Chip (SoC) design experience. These “programmable SoCs” from companies such as Xilinx, Cypress, and Altera combine modern multi-core ARM processors connected to an FPGA through a widely used SoC interconnect standard. This paper discusses a Real Time Embedded System Course I designed that uses the Xilinx Zynq platform to give students first-hand experience with modern System-on-Chip design methodologies and the challenges that designers face in both hardware and software bring-up for a modern IP-based design.

The first portion …

Raspberry Pi Radio Scanner Control Web Application, Jackson Marshall Strand

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this senior project I design and develop software for the Raspberry Pi which allows the user to listen to and control a scanner radio anywhere in their home. The solution involves utilizing a Raspberry Pi 2 interfaced with the radio, a software package to communicate directly with the radio, and a web app hosting a web client providing the interface for user control. Audio streaming is achieved through the use of FFmpeg. Listening on the client is achieved by using an external software such as Video Lan (VLC) to open the audio stream. We provide an operable proof-of-concept with …

Raspberry Pi Vpn Travel Router, Daniel S. Pierson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Consumers are increasingly relying on public wireless hotspots to access the internet from a growing number of devices. Usage of these hotspots has expanded from just laptops to everything from iPhones to tablets, which are expected to be internet-connected for full functionality. It has become common for one to check if there’s an open wireless hotspot connection available at places like coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, or even a doctor’s waiting room. The issue that arises is that these public connections present an inherent security risk, as anyone can connect and gain access to the network. For increased security, the use …

Creating A Probabilistic Graph For Wordnet Using Markov Logic Network, Lubomir Stanchev

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The paper shows how to create a probabilistic graph for WordNet. A node is created for every word and phrase in WordNet. An edge between two nodes is labeled with the probability that a user that is interested in the source concept will also be interested in the destination concept. For example, an edge with weight 0.3 between “canine” and “dog” indicates that there is a 30% probability that a user who searches for “canine” will be interested in results that contain the word “dog”. We refer to the graph as probabilistic because we enforce the constraint that the sum …

Accelerating Hash Grid And Screen-Space Photon Mapping In 3d Interactive Applications With Opencl, Nikolai Shkurkin

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Achieving interactive and realistic rendering is only possible with a combination of rendering algorithms, rendering pipelines, multi-core hardware, and parallelization APIs. This project explores and implements two photon mapping pipelines based on the work of Mara et. al [5] and Singh et. al [7] to achieve interactive rendering performance for a set of simple scenes using OpenCL and C++ to work with a GPU. In particular, both a 3D hash grid and a screen-space tiling algorithm are parallelized to accelerate photon lookup in order to compute direct and indirect lighting on visible surfaces in a scene. By using OpenCL with …

Improvements To Digital Democracy's Transcription Tool, Andrew Reinman

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Digital Democracy is a website that hosts legislative court hearings along with their transcripts and other information. The current process for getting these videos onto the website is quite tedious. By improving the tool currently used, I will automate a lot of the current work in order to greatly reduce the time spent getting videos on our website.

Venncafe, Daniel Johnson, Christopher Clark, Jonathan Amireh

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Our senior project involved creating a simple dating application and service. From other dating applications, we observed that the logistics of scheduling a first date are a tedious way to start a conversation with someone you've never met. The main concept of our application was that it would use user schedule availability and their favorite cafes to automatically plan optimal dates.

We started the project with the intent of...

• Working through the entire development cycle of a large project as a team

• Devising techniques for determining overlapping preferences, especially when handling large amounts of location and time data

• Exploring different …

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Semantic Document Clustering Using A Similarity Graph, Lubomir Stanchev

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Document clustering addresses the problem of identifying groups of similar documents without human supervision. Unlike most existing solutions that perform document clustering based on keywords matching, we propose an algorithm that considers the meaning of the terms in the documents. For example, a document that contains the words "dog" and "cat" multiple times may be placed in the same category as a document that contains the word "pet" even if the two documents share only noise words in common. Our semantic clustering algorithm is based on a similarity graph that stores the degree of semantic relationship between terms (extracted from …