Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Mouse Vs. Machine: The Game, Cafferty Aiko Frattarelli

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Many modern video games built by big name companies are coded by a group of people together using, and possibly modifying, an already designed game engine. These games usually have another group of people creating the artwork. In this project, I coded and designed a video game from scratch, as well as created all the artwork used in the game. The player controls a mouse character who fights a variety of monsters. In order to create the complexity of the game, I implement basic neural networks as the enemy artificial intelligence, i.e. the decision making process of the enemy. It …

Beyond Homographies: Exploration And Analysis Of Image Warping For Projection In A Dome, Kai Joseph Malowany

Senior Projects Spring 2017

The goal of this project is to provide multiple approaches for warping a flat image tofit the curvature of a geodesic dome, to be presented as an immersive, Augmented Reality (AR) environment. This project looks to develop an algorithmic method of warping any image to fit perspective distortion for a dome-like surface. Despite fairly common usage in planetarium methods and other such shows, there is very little documented method that would allow for the warping of images to fit a curved projection surface. The methods will be explored include using Processing, OpenCV, and fisheye image filters. In addition to the …

Two Topics In Astrophysics: Exoplanetary Gravitational Microlensing And Radio Interferometry, Eleanor Sara Turrell

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics and Computing of Bard College.

Quantifying The Effect Of The Shift In Major League Baseball, Christopher John Hawke Jr.

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Baseball is a very strategic and abstract game, but the baseball world is strangely obsessed with statistics. Modern mainstream statisticians often study offensive data, such as batting average or on-base percentage, in order to evaluate player performance. However, this project observes the game from the opposite perspective: the defensive side of the game. In hopes of analyzing the game from a more concrete perspective, countless mathemeticians - most famously, Bill James - have developed numerous statistical models based on real life data of Major League Baseball (MLB) players. Large numbers of metrics go into these models, but what this project …

Competing Theories Of Pitch Perception: Frequency And Time Domain Analysis, Nowell Thacher Stoddard

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Pitch perception is a phenomenon that has been the subject of much debate within the psychoacoustics community. It is at once a psychological, physiological and mathematical issue that has divided scientists for the last 200 years. My project aims to investigate the benefits and shortcomings of both the place theory and time theory approaches. This is done first by a model consistent with the long-standing focus on the frequency domain, and then by expanding to a more modern approach that functions in the time domain.

Sum Tzu And The Mathematics Of War: A Predictive Assistant For Warhammer 40,000, Ben Kalmin Newman

Senior Projects Spring 2017

The purpose of this project is to classify simple strategies for the tabletop miniature war game Warhammer 40,000. The paper enumerates a series of strategies that are straightforward to automate. Further analysis on these simulations identify collection of proposed best and worst auto-strategies.

The Expectation For The Center Of Mass Of Finite Integer Grids, Finnegan Maximilan Muller Hardy

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics and Computing of Bard College.

Content-Aware Image Resizing, Race Darwin Morel

Senior Projects Spring 2017

The purpose of this project is to implement and explore the use of seam carving — a tool used to select and remove “seams” of low-importance pixels from an image in order to reduce its height or width. I also cover the process of seam insertion, creating new seams of pixels to increase the image’s size rather than reducing it. Using these content-aware algorithms, I investigate the process of intelligently resizing an image. Using edge detection, dynamic programming, and pixel manipulation, I push the limits of seam carving and attempt to quantify the qualitative concept of salience.

Plasma Striations In Vacuum Chambers, Loren Hamilton Jackson

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Plasma, often referred to as the fourth state of matter, is ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons. Specifically, a glow discharge is a glowing plasma formed by a voltage across a low pressure gas. The area of the glow discharge of interest in this study is the positive column, a relatively long column of pink, glowing plasma, and its bright and dark striated patterns.

The striated positive column resembles pattern phenomena caused by standing pressure waves. These pressure wave patterns are due to the length of the tube in which they are contained. However, in past plasma …

The Disciple: A Talking Platformer, Benjamin Sernau

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Working in Unity to create a two-dimensional platformer with a Natural Language Generation system, I have considered a new way in which Artificial Intelligence may affect gameplay. The resulting project, The Disciple, takes input from the environment of the game and offers successfully a sentence relevant to what occurs within the game's world. The sentences this system generates are diverse enough so that, while the Natural Language Generation system may restate what it has said, already, it does not utter the same sentence twice in a row. Often, the Natural Language Generation system selects a phrase I have written from …

Modeling Purple Sea Urchin And California Sheephead Populations In Southern California Kelp Forests, Olivia Rachel Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

In this project I am modelling the predator-prey relationship between California sheephead and purple sea urchin populations, respectively, in kelp forests off the coast of southern California. The Lotka-Volterra equations explain predator-prey relationships in their most basic form. These equations incorporate a set of biological assumptions that can be unrepresentative of many ecological systems. I will consider alternate models that incorporate variations of the Lotka-Volterra model which may better represent the biology of the purple sea urchins and California sheephead. Using biological characteristics of both species in kelp forests, I will set possible and likely parameters and solve for unknown …

Community Detection For Counter-Terrorism, Patrick Michael Kelly

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Community detection in large networks is a process that has been heavily researched in the past decade due to the the emergence of online social networks. For Twitter, Inc., analyzing terrorists communities is vital in the fight against ISIS recruiters who use the twitter platform to radicalize people around the world. The goal of this project is to develop an algorithm which can accurately detect communities in large networks and to provide textual analysis on the discovered communities. Our algorithm combines the results of two unsupervised clustering algorithms to find communities in a given network. One algorithm uses the structure …

Recognizing The Interdependent Self: The Perception Of The Production And Consumption Of Meat At Bard College, Avery Evelyn Brown-Cross

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Nitrate Loading In The Saw Kill Watershed: Small Watershed Nutrient Dynamics, Answering A Community Question, And Assessing Methodological Approaches, Marco Sebastian Spodek

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Biogeochemical cycles mitigate the movement of nutrients through ecosystems at a variety of scales. Within aquatic systems, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are especially critical due to their high influence on primary production and decomposition. However, in excess, N and P can pose hazardous ecological effects downstream. Excessive loading of both N and P to waterways can facilitate harmful algal blooms or dead zones in reservoirs and at drainage points. Extensive research over the past half century has shown that the majority of nutrient loading to aquatic systems is the result of anthropogenic land use. While the effects of these …