Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

On The Pursuit Of Developer Happiness: Webcam-Based Eye Tracking And Affect Recognition In The Ide, Tamsin Rogers

Honors Theses

Recent research highlights the viability of webcam-based eye tracking as a low-cost alternative to dedicated remote eye trackers. Simultaneously, research shows the importance of understanding emotions of software developers, where it was found that emotions have significant effects on productivity, code quality, and team dynamics. In this paper, we present our work towards an integrated eye-tracking and affect recognition tool for use during software development. This combined approach could enhance our understanding of software development by combining information about the code developers are looking at, along with the emotions they experience. The presented tool utilizes an unmodified webcam to capture …

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 …

Surface Reconstruction Library, Jhye Tim Chi

Honors Theses

The project aims to convert an arbitrary point cloud into a triangular mesh. Point clouds are a list of 3d points that model the topology of an object. Point clouds can have various issues, such as missing or noisy data. For the scope, we had no control over point cloud generation. We were also unable to deal with underlying registration or alignment problems. Triangular meshes are a list of triangles that have 3d vertices. This aggregate list of triangles defines the reconstructed surface. Our project implementation is based on Alexander Hornung and Leif Kobbelt’s method for surface reconstruction using the …

Class Scheduling Web App, Anubhav Rawal

Honors Theses

This Scheduling Web Application in Django was built to allow a user to create a schedule for upcoming semesters. Users with appropriate privileges could upload an excel schedule to which instructors could be assigned. Additionally features included dynamic editing for admin users and viewing the main schedule for general users. Our goal was to create an application from the ground up using the Django framework to accomplish these tasks.

Iot Garden Frost Alarm, Andrew James

Honors Theses

Home gardeners are faced with yearly challenges due to spring frosts harming young plants. This is frequently mitigated by covering crops with frost blankets, but only on nights when a frost is predicted. In areas with less predictable climate, an unexpected frost can kill vulnerable plants, reducing the amount of food produced. A system is proposed and designed here to use internet of things (IoT) technology to enable a small weather station in the home garden to report current climate data and predict frosts, then alert the gardener in time for them to cover their plants.

The system as designed …

Simplifying The Creation Of Virtual Topologies Using Mpi Sessions, Tom Herschberg

Honors Theses

As supercomputers have approached exascale performance, several scalability issues have emerged within MPI. These issues arise because MPI includes all processes in the World model, which consumes unacceptable amounts of time and resources at large scale. The Sessions model was developed to combat these issues by removing the requirement of MPI_COMM_WORLD, which provides a more scalable method of creating communication groups in large jobs. Additionally, the Sessions model enables the creation of virtual topologies directly from sets of processes allocated to the execution of a parallel application rather than building virtual topologies from an existing communication group such as MPI_COMM_WORLD. …

School District Boundaries Map, Nick Huffman

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project is to provide a school district boundary mapping feature to a product sold by Level Data called SDVS, which is a plugin used by districts inside of PowerSchool. Using primarily the features offered by Mapbox, We have implemented a React component that is capable of plotting useful data points related to a student and their school district on a map. The tool is designed to be used primarily by school administrators to determine whether or not a student lives within their district boundaries. The application uses a dataset that is provided by the NCES to …

Meta-Analysis Of Biological Research Literature, Evan Suggs

Honors Theses

Comparative studies have been powerful tools in generating a broad understanding about the evolution of animal social systems but they currently rely on the slow, manual process of reading thousands of abstracts and papers from research databases. A web application was created for researchers conducting a comparative survey, in order to speed up their research. This web application automates the retrieval of research papers and their selection process. Using previously obtained data sets on the orders Artiodacytla and Lagomorph, a machine learning application was created to classify the papers. These techniques and tools should greatly increase the speed at which …

A Mobile Application For Crowdsourced Acquisition Of Urban Street-View Pedestrian Facility Data, Andrew Fink

Honors Theses

In recent years, pedestrians have been dangerously overrepresented in traffic crashes, and the pedestrian fatality rate has steadily increased during the last decade. Additionally, studies have shown that the majority of pedestrian-involved traffic accidents occur in urban non-intersections, which suggests that a more well-connected pedestrian facility network in cities would lower the rate of pedestrian involvement in traffic accidents. One way to improve the pedestrian facility network coverage is to first have up-to-date, accurate, and thorough data regarding the presence of existing pedestrian facilities. However, state departments of transportation have stated that the current methods of acquiring this data are …

The Standards Project, Dustin Robbins

Honors Theses

The Standards Project is a web app that is intended to assist United States K-12 students in meeting the academic standards each state has set out for their students. The app is intended to allow instructors to see how proficient incoming students are in standards set for the prior grade (e.g. 6th grade students’ 5th grade math skills would be shown) and launch “interventions”—be these online modules with educational content and quiz questions, after school activities, or some other form of instruction—in order to help students in problem areas while spending a minimum of class time on old material.

It …

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 …

Lee Honors College Mobile Application, James Ward

Honors Theses

In the spring of 2018 three Computer Science students Benjamin Campbell, James Ward, and Peter Shutt created a mobile application. This app was developed over the span of two semesters for their senior design project; a capstone to their degrees.

Their client, The Lee Honors College at Western Michigan University --referred to as LHC and WMU respectively hereafter-- has a plethora of academic and social information, and a large demand for access to it. This information includes building hours, contact information, health resources, a LHC specific course catalog, social media posts, event descriptions, and much more. The volume of information, …

Attracting Human Attention Using Robotic Facial Expressions And Gestures, Venus Yu

Honors Theses

Robots will soon interact with humans in settings outside of a lab. Since it will be likely that their bodies will not be as developed as their programming, they will not have the complex limbs needed to perform simple tasks. Thus they will need to seek human assistance by asking them for help appropriately. But how will these robots know how to act? This research will focus on the specific nonverbal behaviors a robot could use to attract someone’s attention and convince them to interact with the robot. In particular, it will need the correct facial expressions and gestures to …

Audio Software (Vst Plugin) Development With Practical Application, Zachary Hummel

Honors Theses

Audio engineers around the world routinely utilize small pieces of software, known as “plugins,” to help shape the sound of the media they are working with. These plugins are inserted into a digital audio workstation (DAW) and contain digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms that can affect audio in a number of ways limited only by the creativity of the software developer. Common implementations of plugins include equalizers, compressors and limiters, gain, phase rotation or polarity inversion algorithms, reverb and delay, and emulation of the non-linearities of analog audio equipment. The intent of this thesis project is to design and produce …

Software Improvements To Parint, A Parallel Integration Software Package, Lawrence Cuneaz

Honors Theses

The best software is easy to configure and compile, is expandable and is well tested. Development of the ParInt software package for parallel integration stopped a number of years ago. When handed the software, parts of the package no longer configured or compiled consistently. Furthermore it relied on one random number generator and had no functional testing. The team tuned the auto configuration so that the program would configure and build on current systems, created expandable functionality to add new random number generators and created two functional test packs. Now ParInt can be developed with confidence knowing that it compiles …

Natural Language Processing For Foreign Language Learning, Jacob Kausler

Honors Theses

This research presents novel algorithms which generate sentences in a natural language, using natural language generation techniques. The purpose of the algorithms is to benefit foreign language learning. As far as we can tell, ours is the first such research being done in the field. In creating the algorithms, we also developed a piece of software to showcase the work and allow testing by users. The main algorithm begins by generating sentence models by using one of two methods, namely modeled sentence generation and semantic sentence generation. Each of these have benefits and drawbacks, which the user must take into …

Multisensory Emotion Recognition With Speech And Facial Expression, Jacob P. Roeland

Honors Theses

Computers through both desktop and mobile devices are only becoming more important in our lives leading us to have more involved and longer interactions with them. Because of this our brains actually classify our involvement with them in a manner similar to our interactions with our fellow humans. This can lead to frustration and anxiety when our computers interrupt our work or pleasure with contextually inappropriate messages, much the same way it would if a friend or co-worker was pushy or rude. A way to solve this issue is to give our machines emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize …

A Web Application In Rest: The Design, Implementation, And Evaluation Of A Web Application Based On RePresentational STate TRansfer, William O’Brien

Honors Theses

It is no secret the Internet has evolved at an alarming rate since its public debut in the early 90s. What began as a simple way for users to publish files has evolved into a platform for impressively complex interactive applications. Now, applications once restricted to a single operating system are made available to all through advancements in browser technology and libraries. For a long time, Adobe has offered Photoshop as a far from trivial image editing program for around $100 to the Windows and Mac platforms. Recently, a web application emulating Photoshop’s features has been made freely available to …

Creating A Video Device Application, Kevin Septor

Honors Theses

A video device, such as a webcam, has the capability to be used in many ways, including recording video and behaving like a security camera. A TV tuner card can also record video, and in addition be used for watching television. However, the video hardware and device driver the operating system uses to access it are only capable of delivering raw frames of video. A user space application is necessary for exploiting the capabilities of such a device beyond reading sequential frames of video. This research explores the desiderata in a powerful video device application, and introduces a program that …