Computer Sciences Commons^™

Object Recognition With Deep Neural Networks In Low-End Systems, Lillian Davis

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Object recognition is an important area in computer vision. Object recognition has been advanced significantly by deep learning that unifies feature extraction and classification. In general, deep neural networks, such as Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs), are trained in high-performance systems. Aiming to extend the reach of deep learning to personal computing, I propose a study of deep learning-based object recognition in low-end systems, such as laptops. This research includes how differing layer configurations and hyperparameter values used in CNNs can either create or resolve the issue of overfitting and affect final accuracy levels of object recognition systems. The main contribution …

Teloportwrapper: A New Tool For Understanding The Dynamic World Of Fungal Telomere Ends, Trey Stansfield

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequence motifs found at eukaryote chromosome ends. Telomeres help protect chromosome ends from DNA damage and promote chromosome stability. Chromosomes play important roles in aging, mutation, and cancer. Eukaryotic pathogens also use telomeres to mutate and manage virulence genes. In response to chromosome end breakage newly formed telomeres, called de novo telomeres, are formed to recreate the lost telomere and sub-telomeric regions.

Magnaporthe oryzae is a fungal pathogen which causes wheat blast, a deadly plant disease in wheat. Magnaporthe oryzae is also known for its highly variable sub-regions which show high amounts of induced variability due …

Simulating The Machine Translation Of Low-Resource Languages By Designing A Translator Between English And An Artificially Constructed Language, Michaela Snyder

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Natural language processing (NLP), or the use of computers to analyze natural language, is a field that relies heavily on syntax. It would seem intuitive that computers would thrive in this area due to their strict syntax requirements, but the syntax of natural languages leaves them unable to properly parse and generate sentences that seem normal to the average speaker. A subfield of NLP, machine translation, works mainly to computerize translation between different languages. Unfortunately, such translation is not without its weaknesses; language documentation is not created equal, and many low-resource languages—languages with relatively few kinds of documentation, most often …

Building Coleus Academy, Janessa Unseld

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Coleus Academy, a nonprofit e-learning platform, has been created to address the deficits left by the de-emphasis and, at times, outright omission of practical skill-centric education in American curriculums. There exists a gap between the degree of knowledge necessary to engage with adult life and the extent of that knowledge that is actually possessed by emerging adults. Prominent legislations are among the numerous efforts to address this issue. However, there is a deeply fractured market where resources are proving too expensive, too sparse, or hyper-specific to the point of limited usability. Compounded with disparities in when, where, and to whom …

Development Of Scent Detection And Categorization Algorithm Using Gas Chromatography And Machine Learning, Alex Driehaus

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

There are many looking to connect human senses to quantifiable data. Scents are categorized by their descriptions into scent families. These include citrus, floral, and woody. Similar descriptors designate similar families, while different descriptors correlate with different families. Dravnieks compiled an Atlas of chemical descriptors [1]. Such descriptors are cinnamon, fruity, and cadaverous. By analyzing the applicability of these descriptors, the chemicals will be sorted into their scent families.

Gas chromatography generates sample-specific signals of voltage over time. Chromatograms of known scents will serve as a basis for a convolutional neural network. This algorithm will be trained on these signals …

Simplification Of Robotics Through Autonomous Navigation, Grant Turner

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

With self-driving vehicles, college campus food delivery, or even automated home vacuuming systems, robotics is undoubtedly becoming more prevalent in everyday society and it can be expected to continue with time. While many people are owners, users, or even just spectators of theses robotic products or services, there seems to be a negative perception of robotics that poses an intimidation factor regarding the attempt to understand the ideas driving technology. This perception tends to view robotics as machines that require rich education to understand the complexity and interworkings of, thus attempts understand the field are neglected.

To combat this line …

A Description Of A Humans Knowledge Using Artificial Intelligence, Dj Price

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

There currently does not exist a way to easily view the relationships between a collection of written items (e.g. sports articles, diary entries, research papers). In recent years, novel machine learning methods have been developed which are very good at extracting semantic relationships from large numbers of documents. One of them is the (unsupervised) machine learning model Doc2Vec which constructs vectors for documents. The research project detailed in this paper uses this and other already existing algorithms to analyze the relationship between pieces of text. We set forth a broader ambition for this project before discussing the use and need …

The Oceans Above Us: An Augmented Reality Experience, Chris Nalani Dimeo

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Augmented reality holds the potential to be the new fabric of our everyday lives.

Also known as AR, augmented reality is any technology that superimposes graphical information over a real-world environment, whether it be through a smartphone screen or visually projected onto the environment. Though it has existed in various forms for decades, augmented reality development is still widely considered the work of experts in technology-related fields.

In November 2019, however, Adobe unveiled a new augmented reality development platform, Project Aero, along with boasts that the app’s intuitive design and integration with other Adobe programs would place AR creation into …

An Analysis Of The Success Of Farmers Markets In Kentucky Using Logistic Regression And Support Vector Machines, Jeron Russell

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The purpose of this research is to look at the relationship that market-specific, economic, and demographic variables have with the success of farmers markets in Kentucky. It additionally seeks to build a tool for predicting farmers market success that could be used by policy makers to aid in decision-making processes concerning farmers markets. Logistic regression and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used on data acquired from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture and the American Community Survey in order to analyze the data in a traditional statistical approach as well as a machine learning approach. The results included an SVM model …

Development Of An Autonomous Aerial Toolset For Agricultural Applications, Terrance Life

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

According to the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow from its current 7 billion to 9.7 billion by the year 2050. During this time, global food demand is also expected to increase by between 59% and 98% due to the population increase, accompanied by an increasing demand for protein due to a rising standard of living throughout developing countries. [1] Meeting this increase in required food production using present agricultural practices would necessitate a similar increase in farmland; a resource which does not exist in abundance. Therefore, in order to meet growing food demands, new methods will …

Scalable Containerized Security Training Environment, Robert Sauer

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The purpose of this project is to develop a portable application which is hosted on a server that provides an environment to safely conduct security training procedures and protocols. The project will be scalable to handle from a few to a multitude of users concurrently using a single server. For many users to perform security training simultaneously, each user must be directed to a sandbox environment, a container, where one user’s actions do not affect the website or database of other users. Furthermore, such an application should be readily deployable into any environment to provide the widest range of compatibility. …

Communication Goals Of American Universities: A Social Media Content Analysis, Travis Ryan

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Social media is a key communication tool for American universities. This research project is an exploratory look at how universities communicate with stakeholders via social media. In particular, the primary purpose is to explore potential emphasis on academic programs relative to the promotion of athletics as a marketing tool to bolster identity and recruit students. 3000 tweets were collected from 130 NCAA Division 1 American universities. In total, roughly 500,000 tweets have been scraped and classified using an automated script to assess tweet content. Particular emphasis was given to the concept of university rebranding as a broader marketing strategy for …

Game Specific Approaches To Monte Carlo Tree Search For Dots And Boxes, Jared Prince

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In this project, a Monte Carlo tree search player was designed and implemented for the child’s game dots and boxes, the computational burden of which has left traditional artificial intelligence approaches like minimax ineffective. Two potential improvements to this player were implemented using game-specific information about dots and boxes: the lack of information for decision-making provided by the net score and the inherent symmetry in many states. The results of these two approaches are presented, along with details about the design of the Monte Carlo tree search player. The first improvement, removing net score from the state information, was proven …

Toward Autonomous Multi-Rotor Indoor Aerial Vehicles, Connor Brooks

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In this project, we worked to create an indoor autonomous micro aerial vehicle (MAV) using a multi-layer architecture with modular hardware and software components. We required that all computing was done onboard the vehicle during time of flight so that no remote connection of any kind was necessary for successful control of the vehicle, even when flying autonomously. We utilized environmental sensors including ultrasonic sensors, light detection and ranging modules, and inertial measurement units to acquire necessary environment information for autonomous flight. We used a three-layered system that combined a modular control architecture with distributed on-board computing to allow for …

Implementation Of An Inexpensive 3d Scanner, Robert Michael Sivley

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The purpose of this project was to make 3D scanning technology accessible to the general public at an affordable price. To accomplish this, a scanner was designed that utilized structured-light projection. Coupled with triangulation, this provided an inexpensive, image-based modeling technique. Software was developed to analyze the required images and generate a 3D model. Users can edit analysis parameters during runtime to better optimize results for specific images. The 3D models generated are stored according to the .obj standard and can be opened in any commercial 3D modeling software. Results were positive, but several issues exist with the chosen scanning …

Re-Writing The Test, Ron Ryne

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Just as all students have done over the course of their collegiate experience, I have taken an untold number of tests in my classes. 'One of the issues that I have with current testing methods is the lack of interaction between the test taker and the test itself. This lack of interaction became the driving force of my Honor's experience, and it was my intention to develop a more interactive approach to testing that is both easy to use by the test taker as well as the professors that will develop the program for their specific testing requirements.

Back-Up Server For Computer Science Department, Victoria Gaylord

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Because Western Kentucky University does not maintain a back-up system for its departments, the Computer Science Department has implemented its own. Using Bacula software on a Unix server, files from faculty desktop computers and servers are backed up to a tape drive on a daily basis. The server is protected from outside threats with a carefully configured firewall script. This paper explains how both the firewall and the back-up software were implemented and how successful that implementation has been.

Chimes In April, Samuel Stinson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Benefits Of Using Team Choice For Windows As A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Group Decision Support System, Eddie Goggans

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Various experiments have been conducted over the past ten years using several different types of group decision support systems (GDSSs). Many previous GDSS designs have had success in these experiments with brainstorming but have been limited in providing judgment and choice support. TeamChoice for Windows is a multi-criteria decision making GDSS that is currently under development in an effort to overcome the limitations of previous systems and to significantly advance the capabilities of GDSSs. This paper discusses some of the general aspects of GDSSs, existing limitations, and explains the developments and use of TeamChoice for Windows as a multi-criteria decision …

Computer Science Education At Wku, Malcolm Stallings

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

A Philosophical Critique Of Artificial Intelligence, David Miller

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The term "Artificial Intelligence" creates fantastic images of robots and omniscient machines. Of all the technological pursuits, Artificial Intelligence best epitomizes man's thirst for technology. The science of making machines think stands at the apex of man's mission, reflecting not only his desire for control over his world but also his quest to control himself. To create a machine capable of thought -- rational life -- would mean that man would have achieved a dream as old as technology itself.