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Computer Sciences

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Digital Democracy

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Robot Reporter Website Development, Samuel Verkruyse Jun 2019

Robot Reporter Website Development, Samuel Verkruyse

Computer Engineering

The Robot Reporter Website Development project created a front end interface for interacting with news stories generated by the Robot Reporter script that was originally developed for the Digital Democracy institute at Cal Poly. Various graphs, videos, and other interesting content is displayed to the user in order to create an automated news website focusing on activity in state legislatures.


Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo Feb 2019

Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo

Master's Theses

In our current political climate, state level legislators have become increasingly impor- tant. Due to cuts in funding and growing focus at the national level, public oversight for these legislators has drastically decreased. This makes it difficult for citizens and activists to understand the relationships and commonalities between legislators. This thesis provides three contributions to address this issue. First, we created a data set containing over 1200 features focused on a legislator’s activity on bills. Second, we created embeddings that represented a legislator’s level of activity and engagement for a given bill using a custom model called Democracy2Vec. Third, we …


Detecting Speakers In Video Footage, Michael Williams Apr 2018

Detecting Speakers In Video Footage, Michael Williams

Master's Theses

Facial recognition is a powerful tool for identifying people visually. Yet, when the end goal is more specific than merely identifying the person in a picture problems can arise. Speaker identification is one such task which expects more predictive power out of a facial recognition system than can be provided on its own. Speaker identification is the task of identifying who is speaking in video not simply who is present in the video. This extra requirement introduces numerous false positives into the facial recognition system largely due to one main scenario. The person speaking is not on camera. This paper …


Improvements To Digital Democracy's Transcription Tool, Andrew Reinman Jun 2016

Improvements To Digital Democracy's Transcription Tool, Andrew Reinman

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Digital Democracy is a website that hosts legislative court hearings along with their transcripts and other information. The current process for getting these videos onto the website is quite tedious. By improving the tool currently used, I will automate a lot of the current work in order to greatly reduce the time spent getting videos on our website.