Digital Commons Network^™

The Implementation Of Augmented Reality And Low Latency Protocols In Musical Instrumental Collaborations, Qixiao Zhu

Honors Theses

Past projects involving musical software have been completely virtual, while these software do well in entertainment and education, there is the question of whether these software are playable to the same extent as physical musical instruments. The software presented in this paper, "AR Jam", utilizes various software and hardware tools to form a networked mixed reality system for the users to play music on. The intention of this project is to seek new ways to explore more playable musical instruments in the digital world. The paper presents the software's implementation, challenges such as optimization problems of the synthesizer, and the …

Perceptually Improved Medical Image Translations Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, Anurag Vaidya

Honors Theses

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can help visualize various brain regions. Typical MRI sequences consist of T1-weighted sequence (favorable for observing large brain structures), T2-weighted sequence (useful for pathology), and T2-FLAIR scan (useful for pathology with suppression of signal from water). While these different scans provide complementary information, acquiring them leads to acquisition times of ~1 hour and an average cost of $2,600, presenting significant barriers. To reduce these costs associated with brain MRIs, we present pTransGAN, a generative adversarial network capable of translating both healthy and unhealthy T1 scans into T2 scans. We show that the addition of non-adversarial …

Ethics, Privacy And Data Collection: A Complex Intersection, Matthew S. Brown

Honors Theses

The technology around us enables incredible abilities such as high-resolution video calls and the ability to stay connected with everyone we care about through social media. This technology also comes with a hidden cost in the form of data collection.

This work explores what privacy means and how users understand what data social media companies collect and monetize. This thesis also proposes a more ethical business model that addresses privacy concerns from an individual perspective.

Contextualizing Sexual Assault Data Collection On College Campuses: A Socio-Technical Approach, Anushikha Sharma

Honors Theses

Sexual assault is a rampant issue on college campuses in the United States. Colleges and universities use a variety of survey instruments to collect data regarding sexual assault as a means to improve campus culture, policies, and resources. These instruments contain a wealth of associated information in the form of metadata, that is, data about data.

This project takes a human-centered socio-technical approach to understanding the data collection processes associated with sexual assault, specifically, on the campus of Bucknell University. By identifying the underlying metadata within the data collection processes, this research contextualizes and critiques the process of data collection, …

Bridging Act-R And Project Malmo, Developing Models Of Behavior In Complex Environments, David M. Schwartz

Honors Theses

Cognitive architectures such as ACT-R provide a system for simulating the mind and human behavior. On their own they model decision making of an isolated agent. However, applying a cognitive architecture to a complex environment yields more interesting results about how people make decisions in more realistic scenarios. Furthermore, cognitive architectures enable researchers to study human behavior in dangerous tasks which cannot be tested because they would harm participants. Nonetheless, these architectures aren’t commonly applied to such environments as they don’t come with one. It is left to the researcher to develop a task environment for their model. The difficulty …

Extensions Of The Morse-Hedlund Theorem, Eben Blaisdell

Honors Theses

Bi-infinite words are sequences of characters that are infinite forwards and backwards; for example "...ababababab...". The Morse-Hedlund theorem says that a bi-infinite word f repeats itself, in at most n letters, if and only if the number of distinct subwords of length n is at most n. Using the example, "...ababababab...", there are 2 subwords of length 3, namely "aba" and "bab". Since 2 is less than 3, we must have that "...ababababab..." repeats itself after at most 3 letters. In fact it does repeat itself every two letters. …

Utilization Of Probabilistic Models In Short Read Assembly From Second-Generation Sequencing, Matthew W. Segar

Honors Theses

With the advent of cheaper and faster DNA sequencing technologies, assembly methods have greatly changed. Instead of outputting reads that are thousands of base pairs long, new sequencers parallelize the task by producing read lengths between 35 and 400 base pairs. Reconstructing an organism’s genome from these millions of reads is a computationally expensive task. Our algorithm solves this problem by organizing and indexing the reads using n-grams, which are short, fixed-length DNA sequences of length n. These n-grams are used to efficiently locate putative read joins, thereby eliminating the need to perform an exhaustive search over all possible read …

A Framework For The Automation Of Discrete-Event Simulation Experiments, Bryan Ward

Honors Theses

Simulation is an important resource for researchers in diverse fields. However, many researchers have found flaws in the methodology of published simulation studies and have described the state of the simulation community as being in a crisis of credibility. This work describes the project of the Simulation Automation Framework for Experiments (SAFE), which addresses the issues that undermine credibility by automating the workflow in the execution of simulation studies. Automation reduces the number of opportunities for users to introduce error in the scientific process thereby improvingthe credibility of the final results. Automation also eases the job of simulation users and …

The Design Of Xml-Based Model And Experiment Description Languages For Network Simulation, Andy Hallagan

Honors Theses

The Simulation Automation Framework for Experiments (SAFE) is a project created to raise the level of abstraction in network simulation tools and thereby address issues that undermine credibility. SAFE incorporates best practices in network simulationto automate the experimental process and to guide users in the development of sound scientific studies using the popular ns-3 network simulator. My contributions to the SAFE project: the design of two XML-based languages called NEDL (ns-3 Experiment Description Language) and NSTL (ns-3 Script Templating Language), which facilitate the description of experiments and network simulationmodels, respectively. The languages provide a foundation for the construction of better …