Computer Engineering Commons^™

3d Immersive Visualization: Expanding Human Sensation, Megan Davis, Francisco Gonzalez, Connor Waters

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Unmet Need: The constant push for better and more interactive data visualization aids: the Oculus Rift replaced a two-dimensional fixed monitor with head tracking and a three-dimensional virtual space to explore; the Novint Falcon replaces two-dimensional pointing tools with a haptic sensor with force feedback and three degrees of axial freedom.

Deliverables: A demonstration of the technologies involved, in the form of an Oculus- and Falconenabled physical simulation of a room containing several objects that can be handled and manipulated in three dimensions.

Constraints: The hardware is expensive and difficult to acquire, and it requires a beefy computer to run. …

Data Network Visualization, Marcangelo Dilinila, Carl Miranda, Chase Keech

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Data visualization is an essential component of any data analysis. A visual image can aid in more in-depth analysis of any researched data. Although there are data visualization products that already exist on the market, such as Gephi, yEd Graph editor, and OmniGraffle, they are platform-dependent and can be difficult for novice users to install and get started. Data Network Visualization eliminates these weaknesses by being fully accessible through the web, while having a less cluttered user interface. This allows a user to take advantage of a variety of visualization tools without the need to download a program.

To achieve …

Cryptocurrency: Proof Of Purchase, Adam Johnson, Robert Breckenridge, Kara Lucord

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The original purpose of this project was to research the capabilities of a relatively new cryptocurrency platform known as Ethereum. Extensive research brought to light Ethereum’s wide range of developmental capabilities and shifted our focus to the consideration of how the features that Ethereum offers can be used to improve some of the flaws within the world of cryptocurrency. Some cryptocurrency users find these systems useful, because it gives them a means of anonymity. This makes it pretty easy to launder money, make illegal purchases, and double spend. Our solution solves all of these issues, by tying a digital currency …

Will Wade’S Team Camp: An Online Registration Service For Will Wade’S Basketball Team Camp At Vcu, William Slattum, Melissa Nierle

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Virginia Commonwealth University(VCU) has made a name for its self on the national stage of NCAA Men’s Basketball. Success on the court has brought attention to the many programs VCU has to offer. One of these popular programs is Will Wade’s summer basketball camp. Teams come from all over the Atlantic region to attend the daylong team camp. With such wide-spread interest in the camp and about 50 teams signing up to participate annually and growing, how can VCU Athletics best handle and keep all of the information organized? The project deliverable was an online system that both registers teams …

Restful Api Framework: Golang Proof Of Concept, Gerard Briones, David Igou, Aaron Throckmorton

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Capital One has embarked on a journey of exposing useful services as RESTful APIs that can be utilized seamlessly by applications and clients. The purpose of this project was to develop an API framework that can be easily molded and deployed to reinforce this endeavor, standardizing the access and use of these services for every developer. This framework was built with a modern programming language, Golang, and excels in performance, scalability, and efficiency. A working prototype and proof of concept serve as the deliverables for this project, with notable constraints in the type of architecture (REST) used for the framework …

Welcome To Willowtree: Come Take A Closer Look, Shahim-Abdul Satar, Kent White, Ayesha Zafar

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The demand for more workers in tech related fields has given students the opportunity of choosing between multiple job offers and students can now be more deliberate about the jobs that they accept. Because of this employers also need to set themselves apart from other companies. Many companies do this is by sending out brochures, PDFs, and other information that may be outdated by the time it goes out. Our solution to this problem was to make an application which would provide relevant data to the user as well as provide insight into the company. The end result is a …

Integration Of Attributes From Non-Linear Characterization Of Cardiovascular Time-Series For Prediction Of Defibrillation Outcomes, Sharad Shandilya, Michael C. Kurz, Kevin R. Ward, Kayvan Najarian

Computer Science Publications

Objective

The timing of defibrillation is mostly at arbitrary intervals during cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), rather than during intervals when the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OOH-CA) patient is physiologically primed for successful countershock. Interruptions to CPR may negatively impact defibrillation success. Multiple defibrillations can be associated with decreased post-resuscitation myocardial function. We hypothesize that a more complete picture of the cardiovascular system can be gained through non-linear dynamics and integration of multiple physiologic measures from biomedical signals.

Materials and Methods

Retrospective analysis of 153 anonymized OOH-CA patients who received at least one defibrillation for ventricular fibrillation (VF) was undertaken. A machine learning …

Find: Framework For Intelligent Research Discovery, Clint Cuffy, Tej Mehta, Hengbin Li

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Computers are essential to research yet the different ways in which computers can automate or speed up research have not been fully explored. Researchers are publishing experimental results faster than ever before and the number of articles to read on a single subject now presents an overwhelming task. FiND aims to expedite this process through an extensible backbone infrastructure for the automated synthesizing of data. FiND includes a Web User Interface, Perl Core and MySQL Database developed using the software constraints of Perl, HTML, CSS, CGI and MySQL. FiND attempts to simplify this task by reducing time spent in exhaustive …

Rfid Based Navigation, Mengyu Bai, Andrew Sainz, So Kim

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) based Navigation System is built and designed to allow both commercial and recreational drivers to know and monitor traffic patterns while on the road. By using the RFID based Navigation System, drivers will receive real time data to aid navigation which is a major benefit especially in an emergency situation. Further studies of the RFID technology will potentially open doors to the development of autonomous vehicles. The RFID based Navigation application is available for Android devices, and it presents drivers with real time, current data to aid navigation across a terrain in the shortest possible …

Swummary: Self-Documenting Code, Keith Herbert, John Goldhamer, Dylan Ilvento

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Using Natural Language Summaries of Program Elements to Improve Code Search

There are countless people that are intimidated by reading computer programs, potentially driving away future engineers. Even current software developers, when moving from project to project, face downtime due to acclimating themselves with a new, poorly commented code base. Our project, which we call Swummary, strives to eliminate these problems by providing succinct natural language summaries of source code.

We were tasked with developing a functioning prototype of a natural language source code summarizer, based on the frameworks SrcML and Software Word Usage Model (SWUM), as well as the …

Hybrid Call Center: Amc Technology Llc, Tejas Trivedi, Joshua Stephens, Daniel Kim

Capstone Design Expo Posters

AMC Technology wanted to add voice over IP (VoIP) functionality to Salesforce.com (Customer Relationship Management system). As it is currently, Salesforce.com does not have voice functionality, in that you cannot place or receive calls using Salesforce. Adding voice functionality to Salesforce is incredibly useful because it eliminates the need for hardware phones and allows for a more modern and efficient approach to calling for companies that have/rely upon call centers, such as customers of AMC Technology whose products connect CTIs (Computer Telephony Interface) and CRMs. We used a voice service called Twilio to provide functionality with Salesforce. AMC Technology wanted …

Capital One Mobile Authentication: Authentication Using Biometric, Anh Dang, Hunter Miller, Matthew Mosca

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Capital One, a large US bank, is currently providing customers with a mobile servicing experience. One of the features of the mobile servicing app is easy and convenient access to account information. Capital One currently allows users to authenticate using a traditional username / password, their registered SureSwipe feature and even their finger on supported devices. The project's goal is to evaluate the viability of retinal recognition as a new method for biometric authentication.

By successfully developing this project, the application could offer retinal recognition as an additional biometric authentication option to customers. This can be used to help eliminate …

Imir: Identifying Mirna Regulation In Diseases: Bioinformatics Tool, Jeremy Yu, Bolade Ottola, Theo Contes

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Cancer mutations involves various biological factors and cellular mechanisms involving genes, miRNAs, transcription factors (TFs), chemicals etc. Hence, understanding the activity and role of all of these factors can be exploited for therapeutics. To aid this, iMir, a web portal with multi-tabbed design, analysis and user-guide has been developed to search, analyze and visualize the miRNA-disease, miRNA-TF-gene, miRNA-drug associations. Agile methodology was adopted for the software development of this tool. Weekly requirements and goals were discussed, drafted and accomplished and subject to review, testing and documentation. Code integrated upon approval. iMir has been developed using MySQL as a database and …

Establishing Performance Guarantees For Behavior-Based Robot Missions Using An Smt Solver, Feng Tang, Damian M. Lyons, Ronald Arkin

Faculty Publications

In prior work we developed an approach to formally representing behavior-based multi-robot programs, and the uncertain environments in which they operate, as process networks. We automatically extract a set of probabilistic equations governing program execution in that environment using a static analysis module called VIPARS, and solve these using a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) to establish whether stated performance guarantees hold for the program in that environment. In this paper we address the challenge of expanding the range of performance guarantees that are possible by using an SMT-solver instead of a DBN. We translate flow functions, which are recursive probabilistic …

Educational Methods For Inverted-Lecture Computer Science And Engineering Classrooms To Overcome Common Barriers To Stem Student Success, Kathleen Timmerman

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

New educational pedagogies are emerging in an effort to increase the number of new engineers available to enter the workforce in the coming years. One of the re-occurring themes in these pedagogies is variations of the flipped classroom. Often the additional classroom time gained from flipping is used to reinforce learning objectives. It is hypothesized that it might be more beneficial to students if a portion of that time is used to address common non-cognitive barriers that prevent students from succeeding in the major. In a freshman Introductory Computer Science course, three different pedagogies are compared: a hybrid lecture-active learning …

A Hybrid Approach To Aerial Video Image Registration, Karol T. Salva

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Many video processing applications, such as motion detection and tracking, rely on accurate and robust alignment between consecutive video frames. Traditional approaches to video image registration, such as pyramidal Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature detection and tracking are fast and subpixel accurate, but are not robust to large inter-frame displacements due to rotation, scale, or translation. This thesis presents an alternative hybrid approach using normalized gradient correlation (NGC) in the frequency domain and normalized cross-correlation (NCC) in the spatial domain that is fast, accurate, and robust to large displacements. A scale space search is incorporated into NGC to enable more consistent recovery …

Stability And Sensitivity Measures For Solutions In Complex, Intelligent, Adaptive And Autonomous Systems, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Simulation has become a pivotal tool for the design, analysis, and control of complex, intelligent, adaptive and autonomous systems and its components. However, due to the nature of these systems, traditional evaluation practices are often not sufficient. As the components follow adaptive rules, the cumulative events often exploit bifurcation enabling events, leading to clusters of solutions that do not follow the usual rules for standard distributed events. When using simulation for design, analysis, and control of such systems, the evaluation needs to be richer, applying bifurcation and cluster analysis to understand the distribution, applying factor analysis to understand the important …

Identifying Market Indicators And Content Quality From A Financial Micro-Blog Platform, Siobhán Mcnamara

Dissertations

Investment platforms and discussion platforms have come to change the face of finance. The stock market is open to both professional and non-professional investors via online financial channels. Information too comes via a shared domain as both professionals and non-professionals log onto online communication platforms to share, search and discuss market trends. Due to their growing role in finance, understanding online communities has become the focus of much stock market research. Determining who is influential in a network, how information spreads and what translates to buy or sell decision is potentially very lucrative. In this research paper a dataset from …

Predicting Intake Of Applications For First Registration In The Property Registration Authority, Orlaith Mernagh

Dissertations

The motivation for this dissertation is rooted in a real business need. The Property Registration Authority is the state organisation tasked with maintaining a register of land ownership on the island of Ireland. The PRA currently faces a series of challenges; a high level of staff retiring and the inherent loss of knowledge associated with this trend, a lack of recruitment in recent years and a large increase in lodgement of applications for first registration as a result of legislation. The organisation therefore requires a reliable system for predicting future intake. Prior to this project, there has also been a …

Development Of Cloud-Based Uav Monitoring And Management System, Mason Itkin, Mihui Kim, Younghee Park

Faculty Publications

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging technology with the potential to revolutionize commercial industries and the public domain outside of the military. UAVs would be able to speed up rescue and recovery operations from natural disasters and can be used for autonomous delivery systems (e.g., Amazon Prime Air). An increase in the number of active UAV systems in dense urban areas is attributed to an influx of UAV hobbyists and commercial multi-UAV systems. As airspace for UAV flight becomes more limited, it is important to monitor and manage many UAV systems using modern collision avoidance techniques. In this paper, …

A High Performance Ceramic-Polymer Separator For Lithium Batteries, Jitendra Kumar, Padmakar Kichambare, Amarendra K. Rai, Rabi Bhattacharya, Stanley J. Rodrigues, Guru Subramanyam

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

A three-layered (ceramic-polymer-ceramic) hybrid separator was prepared by coating ceramic electrolyte [lithium aluminum germanium phosphate (LAGP)] over both sides of polyethylene (PE) polymer membrane using electron beam physical vapor deposition (EB-PVD) technique. Ionic conductivities of membranes were evaluated after soaking PE and LAGP/PE/LAGP membranes in a 1 Molar (1M) lithium hexafluroarsenate (LiAsF₆) electrolyte in ethylene carbonate (EC), dimethyl carbonate (DMC) and ethylmethyl carbonate (EMC) in volume ratio (1:1:1). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques were employed to evaluate morphology and structure of the separators before and after cycling performance tests to better understand structure-property correlation. …

Knowledge Driven Search Intent Mining, Ashutosh Jadhav

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Understanding users' latent intents behind search queries is essential for satisfying a user's search needs. Search intent mining can help search engines to enhance its ranking of search results, enabling new search features like instant answers, personalization, search result diversification, and the recommendation of more relevant ads. Hence, there has been increasing attention on studying how to effectively mine search intents by analyzing search engine query logs. While state-of-the-art techniques can identify the domain of the queries (e.g. sports, movies, health), identifying domain-specific intent is still an open problem. Among all the topics available on the Internet, health is one …

Tatami: A Productive Work-Based Social Media, Jacob Kreiner, Jacob Holcombe, Minh Nguyen

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Tatami is a collaborative social media app created by Ippon Technologies that focuses on workflow and communication in an industry setting. Ippon wanted a product that allows members of a company to maximize productivity, and have a communal message board that shows what is going on in the company currently. Functionality of this product would allow a user to create an account, set up and edit their profile and be able to post messages to a workplace timeline. For a more specific and personal timeline we need users to be able to create and subscribe to groups and trends corresponding …

A Work System Front End For Object-Oriented Analysis And Design, Steven Alter, Narasimha Bolloju

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper proposes that basic ideas from the work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) might serve as a front end to object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), thereby providing a path from business-oriented descriptions to formal, technical specifications. After describing the background motivation and summarizing work system concepts, the paper uses a hiring system example to show how two tools from WSM can be used as a front end for OOAD, in effect, a step before creating use case diagrams and other types of Unified Modeling Language (UML) artifacts. Potential benefits of this approach stem from a …

Application Intrusion Detection: Security For Cloud Deployments, Justin Murphy, Nick Harrison, John Taylor

Capstone Design Expo Posters

As servers move to the cloud, sources for security analysis become more limited. Security teams must make the most of the resources available to them. Our project attempts to fulfill this need by providing a template-based application to analyze and detect security events in logs that are available in cloud environments. We focus on authentication logs, but analysis modules can be added to flag anomalies in any log.

The deliverables include log analysis, including successive repeated failures, location-based anomalies, and excessive failed login attempts across multiple accounts. To present our findings we output the results to a web interface for …

Design And Development Of The Ebear: A Socially Assistive Robot For Elderly People With Depression, Amirhossein Kargarbideh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There has been tremendous progress in the field of robotics in the past decade and especially developing humanoid robots with social abilities that can assist human at a socio-emotional level. The objective of this thesis is to develop and study a perceptive and expressive animal-like robot equipped with artificial intelligence in assisting the elderly people with depression. We investigated how social robots can become companions of elderly individuals with depression and improve their mood and increase their happiness and well-being. The robotic platform built in this thesis is a bear-like robot called the eBear. The eBear can show facial expression …

Energy-Aware Reconfigurable Logic Device Using Spin-Based Storage And Carbon Nanotube Switching, Mohan Krishna Gopi Krishna

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Scaling of semiconductors to the 14-nanometer range and below nanometer range introduces serious design challenges that include high static power in memories and high leakage power, hindering further integration of CMOS devices. Thus, emerging devices are under intense analysis to overcome these drawbacks caused by transistor size scaling. Spintronics technology provides excellent features such as Non-Volatility, low read power, low read delay, higher scalability as well as easy integration with CMOS in comparison with SRAM memories. In addition, Carbon-Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNFETs) provide superior electrical conductivity, low delay and low power consumption in comparison with conventional CMOS technology. Thus in …

Cepsim: Modelling And Simulation Of Complex Event Processing Systems In Cloud Environments, Wilson A. Higashino, Miriam Am Capretz, Luiz F. Bittencourt

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The emergence of Big Data has had profound impacts on how data are stored and processed. As technologies created to process continuous streams of data with low latency, Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Stream Processing (SP) have often been related to the Big Data velocity dimension and used in this context. Many modern CEP and SP systems leverage cloud environments to provide the low latency and scalability required by Big Data applications, yet validating these systems at the required scale is a research problem per se. Cloud computing simulators have been used as a tool to facilitate reproducible and repeatable …

Intelligent Voice Activated Home Automation (Iva), Mrunal Dipakkumar Bhatt

ETD Archive

This thesis presents the design of an original Intelligent Home Automation Architecture. My work was divided in two phases. The first portion was dedicated to acquiring a thorough understanding of the most successful and diffused Home-Automation commercial architectures. During this phase, I intended to gain a deep appreciation for the variety of organizations, capabilities, limitations, and potential areas of growth of the existing Home-Automation leading systems. In order to acquire this knowledge, I had to use a reverse engineering approach. The reason for using this methodology arises from the fact that all the products considered in this study are commercially …

Use Of A Small Unmanned Aerial System For The Sr-530 Mudslide Incident Near Oso, Washington, Robin Murphy, Brittany Duncan, Tyler Collins, Justin Kendrick, Patrick Lohman, Tamara Palmer, Frank Sanborn

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue deployed three commercially available small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs)—an AirRobot AR100B quadrotor, an Insitu Scan Eagle, and a PrecisionHawk Lancaster—to the 2014 SR-530 Washington State mudslides. The purpose of the flights was to allow geologists and hydrologists to assess the eminent risk of loss of life to responders from further slides and flooding, as well as to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the event. The AirRobot AR100B in conjunction with PrecisionHawk postprocessing software created two-dimensional (2D) and 3D reconstructions of the inaccessible “moonscape” region of the slide and provided engineers with a …