Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Kodysynth, Ryan Kody

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

KodySynth is a VST digital synthesizer that can be loaded into any digital audio workstation such as FL Studio, Ableton, or Garageband. The program was made using the JUCE library which helped with streamlining the process and making it easier to create clean and intuitive looking graphics. The project also needs the Maximilian Library of sounds to create the sound waves that listeners will hear when playing the synthesizer. Users will also be able to plug in a MIDI keyboard to play KodySynth. The functionalities include a choice of 5 oscillator wave types, as well as an attack, decay, sustain, …

Characteristics Of Different Deep Neural Networks And Application Of Pre-Trained Model Without Transfer Learning, Zhiqi Peng

Theses

Deep neural networks have been successful in many areas, some of them even surpass human performances. The goal of this thesis is using data simulations to present different characteristics of three deep neural networks: fully connected deep neural network, convolutional neural network, recurrent neural network, which will perform best when dealing with different feature patterns. By using these characteristics to design a deep neural network on top of an adopted pre-trained model with untrainable layers, achieved an averagely 11.1% improvement than a model with transfer learning method.

Gaze-Contingent Displays For Interactive Text Enhancement, Divya Bajaj

Graduate Masters Theses

Eye trackers are used for measuring a person’s eye movements, for example, while reading text on a screen. This information can be used by scientists to study the human visual system during object recognition or text comprehension. Moreover, engineers can build gaze-controlled interfaces that trigger a variety of actions when the user looks at pre-specified icons on a screen. In my research, I studied how gaze-contingent displays can be used to enhance the information that is provided by texts. First, I implemented a simple scripting language that allows even users without programming experience to set up gaze-contingent text displays. The …

Looping Predictive Method To Improve Accuracy Of A Machine Learning Model, Subramanyam Reddy Pogili

Theses

The topic of this project is an analysis of drug-related tweets. The goal is to build a Machine Learning Model that can distinguish between tweets that indicate drug abuse and other tweets that also contain the name of a drug but do not describe abuse. Drugs can be illegal, such as heroin, or legal drugs with a potential of abuse, such as painkillers. However, building a good Machine Learning Model requires a large amount of training data. For each training tweet, a human expert has determined whether it indicates drug abuse or not. This is difficult work for humans. …

On The Extended Hensel Construction And Its Application To The Computation Of Real Limit Points, Masoud Ataei Jaliseh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Extended Hensel Construction (EHC) is a procedure which, for an input bivariate polyno- mial with complex coefficients, can serve the same purpose as the Newton-Puiseux algorithm. We show that the EHC requires only linear algebra and univariate polynomial arithmetic. We deduce complexity estimates and report on a software implementation together with experimental results. This work is motivated and illustrated by two applications. The first one is the computation of real branches of space curves. The second one is the computation of limits of real multivariate rational function. For the latter, we present an algorithm for determining the existence of …

Underwater Acoustic Signal Analysis Toolkit, Kirk Bienvenu Jr

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This project started early in the summer of 2016 when it became evident there was a need for an effective and efficient signal analysis toolkit for the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center Gulf Ecological Monitoring and Modeling (LADC-GEMM) Research Consortium. LADC-GEMM collected underwater acoustic data in the northern Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2015 using Environmental Acoustic Recording Systems (EARS) buoys. Much of the visualization of data was handled through short scripts and executed through terminal commands, each time requiring the data to be loaded into memory and parameters to be fed through arguments. The vision was to develop …

Automated Species Classification Methods For Passive Acoustic Monitoring Of Beaked Whales, John Lebien

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center has collected passive acoustic monitoring data in the northern Gulf of Mexico since 2001. Recordings were made in 2007 near the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that provide a baseline for an extensive study of regional marine mammal populations in response to the disaster. Animal density estimates can be derived from detections of echolocation signals in the acoustic data. Beaked whales are of particular interest as they remain one of the least understood groups of marine mammals, and relatively few abundance estimates exist. Efficient methods for classifying detected echolocation transients are essential for mining long-term passive …

The Official Rulebook For Choice In Video Games: An Examination Of Choice In Modern Narrative Games, Tyler Paulley

Undergraduate Theses

Film, drama, and novels are each capable of telling stories in a specialized way. This thesis makes the claim that video games are the newest means of storytelling and that they can tell stories in unique and engaging ways by using choice. The first goal of this thesis is to determine how and why choice is being used by game developers by examining several modern narrative games. After this examination, it is determined that the increase of choice-driven and narrative games have had an impact on the expectations of players, the goals of video games, and on game culture itself. …

Feasible Computation In Symbolic And Numeric Integration, Robert H.C. Moir

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Two central concerns in scientific computing are the reliability and efficiency of algorithms. We introduce the term feasible computation to describe algorithms that are reliable and efficient given the contextual constraints imposed in practice. The main focus of this dissertation then, is to bring greater clarity to the forms of error introduced in computation and modeling, and in the limited context of symbolic and numeric integration, to contribute to integration algorithms that better account for error while providing results efficiently.

Chapter 2 considers the problem of spurious discontinuities in the symbolic integration problem, proposing a new method to restore continuity …

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

A Spatio-Temporal Approach To Mitigate Automotive Radar Spoofing Attacks, Prateek Kapoor

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Cyber-physical system (CPS) has become an integral part of human life, ranging from aircraft to health care systems. The security of these critical components ensures its wider acceptability. Traditionally, many works to secure cyber-physical system (CPS) has been done in the cyber domain, like securing inter/intra CPS communication, securing the exposed software, rebuilding control input derived from sensor data post-digitization, using sensor fusion. All of this security software suffers from a basic attack wherein an attacker compromises the physical/analog sensing system. Researchers have made some progress in mitigating such attacks on physical/analog signals of CPS, the current state of the …

Locality-Aware Concurrency Platforms, Jordyn Chrystopher Raymond Maglalang

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Modern computing systems from all domains are becoming increasingly more parallel. Manufacturers are taking advantage of the increasing number of available transistors by packaging more and more computing resources together on a single chip or within a single system. These platforms generally contain many levels of private and shared caches in addition to physically distributed main memory. Therefore, some memory is more expensive to access than other and high-performance software must consider memory locality as one of the first level considerations.

Memory locality is often difficult for application developers to consider directly, however, since many of these NUMA affects are …

Accurate Determination And Application Of Local Strain For Studying Tissues With Gradients In Mechanical Properties, John Boyle

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Determination of the mechanical behavior of materials requires an understanding of deformation during loading. While this is traditionally accomplished in engineering by examining a force displacement curve for a whole sample, these techniques implicitly ignore local geometric complexities and local material inhomogeneities commonly found in biologic tissues. Techniques such as normalized cross correlation have been classically applied to address this issue and resolve deformation at the local level; however, these techniques have proven unreliable when deformations become large, if the sample undergoes a rotation, and/or if strain fields become incompatible (e.g. at or near failure).

Presented here is a toolbox …

Best Practices For Test Driven Development, Timothy Tacker

All Student Theses

In his award-winning book, Test-driven Development By Example, Kent Beck wrote, "Clean code that works...is the goal of Test-driven Development (TDD)." TDD is a style of software development that first begins with the creation of tests and then makes use short, iterative development cycles until all test requirements are fulfilled. In order to provide the reader with sufficient background to understand the concepts discussed, this thesis begins by presenting a detailed description of this style of development. TDD is then contrasted with other popular styles, with a focus toward highlighting the many benefits this style offers over the others. This …

Knowledge Driven Approaches And Machine Learning Improve The Identification Of Clinically Relevant Somatic Mutations In Cancer Genomics, Benjamin John Ainscough

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For cancer genomics to fully expand its utility from research discovery to clinical adoption, somatic variant detection pipelines must be optimized and standardized to ensure identification of clinically relevant mutations and to reduce laborious and error-prone post-processing steps. To address the need for improved catalogues of clinically and biologically important somatic mutations, we developed DoCM, a Database of Curated Mutations in Cancer (http://docm.info), as described in Chapter 2. DoCM is an open source, openly licensed resource to enable the cancer research community to aggregate, store and track biologically and clinically important cancer variants. DoCM is currently comprised of 1,364 variants …

Designing In-Headset Authoring Tools For Virtual Reality Video, Cuong Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses

Virtual Reality (VR) video is emerging as a new art form. Viewing VR video requires wearing the VR headset to fully experience the immersive surrounding of the content. However, the novel viewing experience of VR video creates new challenges and requirements for conventional video authoring tools, which were designed mainly for working with normal video on a desktop display. Designing effective authoring tools for VR video requires intuitive video interfaces specific to VR.

This dissertation develops new workflows and systems that enable filmmakers to create and improve VR video while fully immersed in a VR headset. We introduce a series …

Rendering Real-Time Dashboards Using A Graphql-Based Ui Architecture, Naresh Eeda

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the increase in the complexity of the systems being built and demand in the quality of service by the customers, developing and providing highly efficient real-time systems is one of the biggest challenges today for software enterprises. Bluemix^TM ─ IBM’s cloud offering implemented on Cloud Foundry, an open source “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), is an example of such a system. Currently, there are approx. 26 infrastructural services running in the background from where the data is fetched and is rendered on different dashboards of the system. However, the system suffers from performance issues.

This thesis explores the …

Statistical Analysis Of Momentum In Basketball, Mackenzi Stump

Honors Projects

The “hot hand” in sports has been debated for as long as sports have been around. The debate involves whether streaks and slumps in sports are true phenomena or just simply perceptions in the mind of the human viewer. This statistical analysis of momentum in basketball analyzes the distribution of time between scoring events for the BGSU Women’s Basketball team from 2011-2017. We discuss how the distribution of time between scoring events changes with normal game factors such as location of the game, game outcome, and several other factors. If scoring events during a game were always randomly distributed, or …

Self-Assembly Of Tiles: Theoretical Models, The Power Of Signals, And Local Computing, Amirhossein Simjour

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

DNA-based self-assembly is an autonomous process whereby a disordered system of DNA sequences forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of Watson-Crick complementarity of DNA sequences, without external direction.

Here, we propose self-assembly (SA) hypergraph automata as an automata-theoretic model for patterned self-assembly. We investigate the computational power of SA-hypergraph automata and show that for every recognizable picture language, there exists an SA-hypergraph automaton that accepts this language. Conversely, we prove that for any restricted SA-hypergraph automaton, there exists a Wang Tile System, a model for recognizable picture languages, that accepts the same language.

Moreover, we investigate the …

A Complete Coverage Algorithm For 3d Structural Inspection Using An Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Venkat Ramana Reddy Garlapati

Student Work

This thesis presents a novel algorithm for complete coverage of three-dimensional structures to address the problem of autonomous structural inspection using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The proposed approach uses a technique of cellular decomposition based on Morse decomposition to decompose the 3D target structure into 2D coverable faces that are subsequently connected using a graph-based representation. We then use graph traversal techniques such as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) to generate a flight coverage path through the decomposed faces for a UAV to completely cover the target structure, while reducing the coverage time and distance. To test the validity …

Optimal Layout For A Component Grid, Michael W. Ebert

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Several puzzle games include a specific type of optimization problem: given components that produce and consume different resources and a grid of squares, find the optimal way to place the components to maximize output. I developed a method to evaluate potential solutions quickly and automated the solving of the problem using a genetic algorithm.

Noteit Ios App, Waylin W. Wang, Gurjeevan Bains

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Miscommunication is a common struggle that many students face in today’s world, despite the significant technological progress that we have made. With NoteIt, we aimed to solve this issue, by allowing students to join groups based off of the courses that they are enrolled in during the current quarter. Within the app, they can send and receive messages and events from everyone else in the group, or post private reminders to themselves. Communication can range from assignment clarification to exam preparation tips. Overall the development of the application went relatively well, despite some roadblocks along the way. We were satisfied …

Popularity Prediction, Andrew Furgiuele

Computer Science

With the rise in popularity of the Internet, data describing unique types of items has been collected into easy to access sources. Using this newly acquired data, is it possible to predict if an item will become a bestseller while another fade away with time? Popularity prediction is a problem that has attracted a great deal of research recently, and for good reason. The ability to predict an items future rise to popularity or fall to obscurity is a possibly priceless skill and sought out in many different industries such as sales, investments, and marketing. This report enumerates and analyzes …

Canines For Disabled Kids, Erin Jerrett, Margarita Mnatsakanyan, Colleen Reynolds, Yin Wang

School of Professional Studies

Canines for Disabled Kids have been working on behalf of children and their families to educate communities and promote service dog partnerships for almost twenty years. Their advocacy with local legislatures, business owners, and community leaders highlighted the difficulties encountered when differentiating service dogs from emotional support/comfort dogs. Service dogs are entitled to access by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), while emotional support/comfort dogs are not protected under the federal statute or to the same rights. Canines for Disabled Kids proposed a study to obtain a current count of licensed service dogs in the Commonwealth and investigate the feasibility …

Intraneti Dhe Pagesat Elektronike Ne Komunen E Istogut, Faton Bytyçi

Theses and Dissertations

Shfrytëzimi i përparësive të teknologjisë informative është bërë pjesë e pandashme e jetës tonë për të punuar, informuar, argëtuar etj. Një sferë e veçantë e përdorimit të teknologjisë informative është edhe e-Qeverisja e cila po gjënë vend çdo ditë në administratë për të ofruar shërbime të shpejta, të lehta e të sakta për ata që punojnë dhe për ata që i marrin shërbimet nga administrata.

Komuna e Istogut në dhjetë vitet e fundit ka avancuar në masë të madhe përdorimin e teknologjisë informative dhe i ka bërë modernizimin e shërbimeve. Një prej shërbimeve elektronike në këtë komunë është edhe Sistemi …

Building An Albanian Knowledge Graph From Unstructured Text, Hakan Shehu

Theses and Dissertations

We live in the golden area of information. The World Wide web contains a vast amount of unstructured text in different digital formats, including newswire, blogs, email communications, governmental documents, chat logs, and so on. Some of the biggest companies and organizations have created knowledge bases which represent a semantic network of facts, entities and relations between them. Even though this area has been well researched for a considerable time, there is a lack of implementation of such a knowledge extraction for Albanian language. In this thesis we will try to create an Albanian general knowledge graph from unstructured text. …

Vlerësimi I Karakteristikave Të Rrjetit Në Testimin E Aplikacioneve Përmes Rrjetit Të Virtualizuar, Redon Berisha

Theses and Dissertations

Aplikacionet rrjetëzuese janë bërë pjesë e rëndësishme e përdorimit personal dhe biznesor duke mundësar shkëmbim dhe menaxhim të informacioneve nga të gjitha vendet ku ndodhemi, ndërsa rëndësia e testimit të aplikacioneve është pikë kyçe në ofrimin e eksperiencës së shfrytëzuesit dhe performancës së saj. Qëllimi i këtij studimi është përdorimi i Rrjetit të Virtualizuar në krijimin e mjedisit testues, për emulimin e trafikut në të cilin aplikacionet pranojnë të dhënat. Punimi ka dy qëllime, që të shërbejë si udhërrefyes për virtualizimin e rrjetit dhe për te testuar performancat e rrjetit në kushte të ndryshme. Në këtë drejtim janë formuluar tre …

Proactive Sequential Resource (Re)Distribution For Improving Efficiency In Urban Environments, Supriyo Ghosh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Due to the increasing population and lack of coordination, there is a mismatch in supply and demand of common resources (e.g., shared bikes, ambulances, taxis) in urban environments, which has deteriorated a wide variety of quality of life metrics such as success rate in issuing shared bikes, response times for emergency needs, waiting times in queues etc. Thus, in my thesis, I propose efficient algorithms that optimise the quality of life metrics by proactively redistributing the resources using intelligent operational (day-to-day) and strategic (long-term) decisions in the context of urban transportation and health & safety. For urban transportation, Bike Sharing …

Altering The Expression Of Artemisinin Through Osmotic Manipulation, Tyler Friesen

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Artemisinin is an anti-malarial drug used in combination therapy to treat all malarial parasites in the blood stage. The expression of artemisinin within the plant Artemisia annua is only 1% of the dry weight. Methods for increasing the level of artemisinin within the plant were proposed. This paper looks into finding homologous enzymes across multiple species in order to find species where genetic manipulations will be useful. The second part of this paper looks at the use of osmotic stress to increase the reactive oxygen species in order to increase the amount of artemisinin within the plant. The database portion …

Ethics And Bias In Machine Learning: A Technical Study Of What Makes Us “Good”, Ashley Nicole Shadowen

Student Theses

The topic of machine ethics is growing in recognition and energy, but bias in machine learning algorithms outpaces it to date. Bias is a complicated term with good and bad connotations in the field of algorithmic prediction making. Especially in circumstances with legal and ethical consequences, we must study the results of these machines to ensure fairness. This paper attempts to address ethics at the algorithmic level of autonomous machines. There is no one solution to solving machine bias, it depends on the context of the given system and the most reasonable way to avoid biased decisions while maintaining the …