Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Powersearch: Augmenting Mobile Phone Search Through Personalization, Xiangyu Liu

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cell phone has become a fundamental element of people's life. People use it to call each other, browse websites, send text messages, etc. Among all the functionalities, the most important and frequently used is the search functionality. Based on ComScore, in July 2008, Google was estimated to host 235 millions searches per day. However, unlike the search on desktop, the search on cell phone has one critical constrain: battery. Cell phone performing a normal Google search, the battery drains very fast. The reason is that when sending a query to and fetching the results from Google, cell phone keeps communicating …

Defining, Executing And Visualizing Representative Workflows In A Retail Domain, May Zeineldin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Our lives are filled with routine activities that we do more or less on auto-pilot such as driving to work and cooking. This thesis explores a workflow representation as a way to represent such activities of daily living. The domain of a retail store environment is used. Workflows are initially expressed in a structured English representation, then translated into a Petri net notation and implemented in mix of Petri nets, Lua, and C so that the resulting workflows can be displayed as the actions of collections of avatarbots (avatars controlled by programs) in a 3D virtual world, Second Life. One …

Webtailor: Internet Service For Salient And Automatic User Interest Profiles, John Anderson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Website personalization systems seek to give users unique, tailored content and experiences on the Internet. A key feature of these systems is a user profile that represents each user in a way that distinguishes them from others. In current personalization systems, the data used to create these profiles is extremely limited, which leads to a host of problems and ineffectual personalization. The main goal of this thesis is to improve these personalization systems by addressing their lack of data and its poor quality, breadth, and depth. This is accomplished by analyzing and classifying the content of each user's Internet browsing …

Making An Impact On The Obesity Epidemic By Deploying A Mobile Fitness Suite On The Android Market, Chad Richards

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Mobile Fitness Suite aims to make an impact on the obesity epidemic by deploying a set of mobile fitness applications on the Android Market. The thesis details the health and financial issues with the obesity epidemic, along with its causes, and how a set of fitness applications can aid with the obesity epidemic. It also explains the reasons for releasing the program on the Android Market and details each step in the process of deploying a mobile application to the Android Market. Further, it discusses the design and architecture that went into the development of the Mobile Fitness Suite …

A Representation Of Selected Nonmanual Signals In American Sign Language, Jerry C. Schnepp

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but believable by members of the Deaf community. Animation poses several challenges stemming from the massive amounts of data necessary to specify the movement of three-dimensional geometry, and there is no current system that facilitates the synthesis of nonmanual signals. However, the linguistics of ASL can aid in surmounting the challenge by providing structure and rules for organizing the data.

This work presents a first method for representing ASL linguistic and extralinguistic processes that involve the face. Any such representation must …

Classic Mosaics And Visual Correspondence Via Graph-Cut Based Energy Optimization, Yu Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Computer graphics and computer vision were traditionally two distinct research fields focusing on opposite topics. Lately, they have been increasingly borrowing ideas and tools from each other. In this thesis, we investigate two problems in computer vision and graphics that rely on the same tool, namely energy optimization with graph cuts.

In the area of computer graphics, we address the problem of generating artificial classic mosaics, still and animated. The main purpose of artificial mosaics is to help a user to create digital art. First we reformulate our previous static mosaic work in a more principled global optimization framework. Then, …

Improving Brain-Computer Interface Performance: Giving The P300 Speller Some Color., David B. Ryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Individuals who suffer from severe motor disabilities face the possibility of the loss of speech. A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) can provide a means for communication through non-muscular control. Current BCI systems use characters that flash from gray to white (GW), making adjacent character difficult to distinguish from the target. The current study implements two types of color stimulus (grey to color [GC] and color intensification [CI]) and I hypotheses that color stimuli will; (1) reduce distraction of nontargets (2) enhance target response (3) reduce eye strain. Online results (n=21) show that GC has increased information transfer rate over CI. Mean …

A Case Study Of The Effects Of A Web Interface Redesign Based On Usability Guidelines., Paromita Bhattacharya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Usability guidelines for user interface (UI) design formulated by Nielsen and other authorities were used to redesign the web interface for a web based distance education course. The website's original UI, as judged by a group of web design professionals, violated standard guidelines for usability, readability, learnability, consistency, efficiency of use and flexibility. The original and redesigned UIs were tested using thinking aloud testing, a user satisfaction survey, and usability inspection. The results of user testing and heuristic evaluation suggest that the use of these guidelines in website redesign had a positive impact on user performance. A more conclusive result …

Trends In Web Typography, Heather Mcintosh

Graphic Communication

No abstract provided.

Developing Digital Field Guides For Plants: A Study From The Perspective Of Users, Emily Roseanne Schwarz

Master's Theses

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guides
cover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world.

At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computer
technologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesis
examines the state …

Pedagogical Tool For Usability Science Final Project Report, Daniel D. Mendelsohn

Honors Theses

A Sophomore Research Seminar (SRS) at Union College teaches about usability science, the study of designing interfaces that allow the user to accomplish a given task with less time and frustration. In this context, an interface can be anything that allows interaction with a physical or virtual device such as a web browser or the knobs on a stove. In this SRS, students design interface mockups, called prototypes, out of inexpensive material such as cardboard. Students use these prototypes to test their interfaces on real people, who are asked to perform a task that would be performed on a real …

Point-Based Color Bleeding With Volumes, Christopher J. Gibson

Master's Theses

The interaction of light in our world is immensely complex, but with mod-

ern computers and advanced rendering algorithms, we are beginning to reach

the point where photo-realistic renders are truly difficult to separate from real

photographs. Achieving realistic or believable global illumination in scenes with

participating media is exponentially more expensive compared to our traditional

polygonal methods. Light interacts with the particles of a volume, creating com-

plex radiance patterns.

In this thesis, we introduce an extension to the commonly used point-based

color bleeding (PCB) technique, implementing volume scatter contributions. With

the addition of this PCB algorithm extension, we …

Animation And Visualization Of 3d Underwater Sensor Networks, Matthew T. Tran

Master's Theses

Simulation and visualization are critical for the development of new systems and protocols in the area of computer networking. As real-world field testing is expensive and time-consuming, simulations are often preferred as they can be performed repeatedly and inexpensively while still reflecting the outcome of field tests to an extent. Visualizations of the simulation and field test results often follow to provide researchers with a vivid animation of the events, allowing for a much more intuitive understanding of the system than tediously reading through trace files. While there are currently a multitude of simulators and animators for land-based networks, few …

Evaluation Of Interfaces For Senior Citizens: Bigscreenlive, Eldy And Pointerware, Bella Manoim

Senior Projects Spring 2011

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing of Bard College.

A Secure Behavior Modification Sensor System For Physical Activity Improvement, Alan Price

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Today, advances in wireless sensor networks are making it possible to capture large amounts of information about a person and their interaction within their home environment. However, what is missing is how to ensure the security of the collected data and its use to alter human behavior for positive benefit.

In this research, exploration was conducted involving the "infrastructure" and "intelligence" aspects of a wireless sensor network through a Behavior Modification Sensor System. First was to understand how a secure wireless sensor network could be established through the symmetric distribution of keys (the securing of the infrastructure), and it involves …