Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Evaluating The Use Of Extended Reality Technology To Improve Marching Band Conducting Patterns, Nathan R. Fuhrman

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Conducting pattern consistency is an essential skill for marching band drum

majors, yet developing this consistency through individual practice remains diffi-

cult without real-time feedback. This thesis investigates if the use of extended

reality technologies can be used to enhance the conducting skills of novice drum

majors. Using the Meta Quest 3’s passthrough capability, the system overlays vi-

sual feedback elements — including a 3D pattern guide, path visualization, tempo

cues, and a real-time score — onto the user’s physical environment. A within-

subjects study with seven participants evaluated eight combinations of three binary

feedback variables: pattern guide visibility, tempo …

Managing Graphical Fidelity With Stylized Shaders For Independent Game Development, Benjamin A. Edens

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper outlines work performed by the author within the Unity3D game engine to gain preliminary experience with technical art implementation and suggests design choices that could be useful to other students or independent game developers to manage complexity within their games while maintaining visual appeal. The final product of the discussed project is a small game consisting of an outdoor urban city environment as well as an interior aquarium environment. This paper begins with the author’s motivations and goals for the project before describing the implementation of specific aspects of technical art, including 3D modeling, rigging, animation, level design, …

Privacy Protection In Mobile Photography With Face Cloaking, Rithyka Heng

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In a world of increasing connectivity, privacy is becoming ever-more difficult to maintain. People have little control over the capture of their image while in public and have even less control over the online sharing or posting of their image. This leaves many people vulnerable to being tracked or profiled via their image’s presence in other people’s photos. This thesis implements and evaluates an approach to privacy protection that involves the photographers protecting the privacy of bystanders. Because most photographs are now being taken by smartphones, a mobile application is decidedly the technology that would best achieve widespread adoption and …

An Exploration Of Procedural Methods In Game Level Design, Hector Salinas

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Video games offer players immersive experiences within intricately crafted worlds, and the integration of procedural methods in game level designs extends this potential by introducing dynamic, algorithmically generated content that could stand on par with handcrafted environments. This research highlights the potential to provide players with engaging experiences through procedural level generation, while potentially reducing development time for game developers.

Through a focused exploration on two-dimensional cave generation techniques, this paper aims to provide efficient solutions tailored to this specific environment. This exploration encompasses several procedural generation methods, including Midpoint Displacement, Random Walk, Cellular Automata, Perlin Worms, and Binary Space …

Data-Centric Image Super-Resolution In Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Challenges And Opportunities, Mamata Shrestha

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Super-resolution has emerged as a crucial research topic in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) where it plays an important role in understanding and analysis of complex, qualitative, and quantitative characteristics of tissues at high resolutions. Deep learning techniques have been successful in achieving state-of-the-art results for super-resolution. These deep learning-based methods heavily rely on a substantial amount of data. Additionally, they require a pair of low-resolution and high-resolution images for supervised training which is often unavailable. Particularly in MRI super-resolution, it is often impossible to have low-resolution and high-resolution training image pairs. To overcome this, existing methods for …

Developing Detection And Mapping Of Roads Within Various Forms Of Media Using Opencv, Jordan C. Lyle

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

OpenCV, and Computer Vision in general, has been a Computer Science topic that has interested me for a long time while completing my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Arkansas. As a result of this, I ended up choosing to utilize OpenCV in order to complete the task of detecting road-lines and mapping roads when given a wide variety of images. The purpose of my Honors research and this thesis is to detail the process of creating an algorithm to detect the road-lines such that the results are effective and instantaneous, as well as detail how Computer Vision can be …

Developing A Multi-Platform Application To Facilitate Internal Campus Hiring, Carissa Patton

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Undergraduate research has proven to be highly beneficial to students, yet there are many students who do not know how to get involved or who are too timid to approach professors to inquire about potential research opportunities. Our hypothesis is that a cross-platform application has the potential to bridge the gap and help more students get involved in undergraduate research by providing them information about open positions and the faculty or staff members who are mentoring the projects. The key focus of this thesis is to develop an application that provides details about participating faculty or staff including their research …

Culture In Computing: The Importance Of Developing Gender-Inclusive Software, Creighton France

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The field of computing as we know it today exists because of the contributions of numerous female mathematicians, computer scientists, and programmers. While working with hardware was viewed as “a man’s job” during the mid-20th century, computing and programming was viewed as a noble and high-paying field for women to occupy. However, as time has progressed, the U.S. has seen a decrease in the number of women pursuing computer science. The idea that computing is a masculine discipline is common in the U.S. today for reasons such as male-centered marketing of electronics and gadgets, an inaccurate representation of what it …

Movie Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Bert, Gibson Nkhata

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sentiment analysis (SA) or opinion mining is analysis of emotions and opinions from texts. It is one of the active research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Various approaches have been deployed in the literature to address the problem. These techniques devise complex and sophisticated frameworks in order to attain optimal accuracy with their focus on polarity classification or binary classification. In this paper, we aim to fine-tune BERT in a simple but robust approach for movie reviews sentiment analysis to provide better accuracy than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. We start by conducting sentiment classification for every review, followed by computing …

Design And Comparison Of Asynchronous Fft Implementations, Julie Bigot

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a widely used digital signal processing technology in a large variety of applications. For battery-powered embedded systems incorporating FFT, its physical implementation is constrained by strict power consumption, especially during idle periods. Compared to the prevailing clocked synchronous counterpart, quasi-delay insensitive asynchronous circuits offer a series of advantages including flexible timing requirement and lower leakage power, making them ideal choices for these systems. In this thesis work, various FFT configurations were implemented in the low-power Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL) paradigm. Analysis illustrates the area and power consumption trends along the changing of the number …

Multivariate Fairness For Paper Selection, Reem Alsaffar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Peer review is the process by which publishers select the best publications for inclusion in a journal or a conference. Bias in the peer review process can impact which papers are selected for inclusion in conferences and journals. Although often implicit, race, gender and other demographics can prevent members of underrepresented groups from presenting at major conferences. To try to avoid bias, many conferences use a double-blind review process to increase fairness during reviewing. However, recent studies argue that the bias has not been removed completely. Our research focuses on developing fair algorithms that correct for these biases and select …

Electrical Modeling For Dynamic Performance Prediction And Optimization Of Mcpms Layout, Quang Minh Le

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the fast development of Multichip Power Modules (MCPM) packaging and Wide Bandgap (WBG) technology has enabled higher voltage and current ratings, better thermal performance, lower parasitic parameters, and higher mechanical reliability. However, the design of the MCPM layout is a multidisciplinary problem leading to many time-consuming analyses and tedious design processes. Because of these challenges, the design automation tool for MCPM layout has become an emerging research area and gained much attention from the power electronics community. The two critical objectives of a design automation tool for MCPM layout are fast and accurate models for design insights …

Technology Agency On Usage: Grounded Theory And Measurement Of Technology Induced Usage Behavior, Sandip Kumar Sarkar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Most of today’s software applications involve a dyadic interplay between human and technology agency. The use of algorithms driven by user can alter users' interaction patterns by affording them novel and relevant technology action possibilities. I argue that algorithmic activities and features embedded in apps can keep users on IT applications (apps) for longer periods of time. I refer to the behavior of interacting with the apps for longer time than planned as technology-induced excessive use. While practitioners are beginning to recognize characteristics of technology-induced excessive use, research on this topic is very limited. I used a multimethod approach to …

Gauging The State-Of-The-Art For Foresight Weight Pruning On Neural Networks, Noah James

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The state-of-the-art for pruning neural networks is ambiguous due to poor experimental practices in the field. Newly developed approaches rarely compare to each other, and when they do, their comparisons are lackluster or contain errors. In the interest of stabilizing the field of pruning, this paper initiates a dive into reproducing prominent pruning algorithms across several architectures and datasets. As a first step towards this goal, this paper shows results for foresight weight pruning across 6 baseline pruning strategies, 5 modern pruning strategies, random pruning, and one legacy method (Optimal Brain Damage). All strategies are evaluated on 3 different architectures …

An Investigation Into, And The Construction Of, An Operable Windows Notifier, Grey Hixson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Office of Sustainability at the University of Arkansas identified that building occupants that have control over operable windows may open them at inappropriate times. Windows opened in a building with a temperature and air differential leads to increased HVAC operating costs and building occupant discomfort. This led the Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities at the University of Arkansas to propose the construction of a mobile application that a building occupant can use to make an informed decision before opening their window. I have formulated a series of research objectives in conjunction with the Director of the Office of Sustainability …

Analysis Of Gpu Memory Vulnerabilities, Jarrett Hoover

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have become a widely used technology for various purposes. While their intended use is accelerating graphics rendering, their parallel computing capabilities have expanded their use into other areas. They are used in computer gaming, deep learning for artificial intelligence and mining cryptocurrencies. Their rise in popularity led to research involving several security aspects, including this paper’s focus, memory vulnerabilities. Research documented many vulnerabilities, including GPUs not implementing address space layout randomization, not zeroing out memory after deallocation, and not initializing newly allocated memory. These vulnerabilities can lead to a victim’s sensitive data being leaked to an …

Using A Bert-Based Ensemble Network For Abusive Language Detection, Noah Ballinger

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, online discussion has skyrocketed in scope and scale. However, so has the amount of toxicity and offensive posts on social media and other discussion sites. Despite this rise in prevalence, the ability to automatically moderate online discussion platforms has seen minimal development. Recently, though, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to improve, the potential of AI-based detection of harmful internet content has become a real possibility. In the past couple years, there has been a surge in performance on tasks in the field of natural language processing, mainly due to the development of …

A Study Of Software Development Methodologies, Kendra Risener

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Software development methodologies are often overlooked by software engineers as aspects of development that are handled by project managers alone. However, if every member of the team better understood the development methodology being used, it increases the likelihood that the method is properly implemented and ultimately used to complete the project more efficiently. Thus, this paper seeks to explore six common methodologies: the Waterfall Model, the Spiral Model, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. These are discussed in two main sections in the paper. In the first section, the frameworks are isolated and viewed by themselves. The histories, unique features, …

Using Bluetooth Low Energy And E-Ink Displays For Inventory Tracking, David Whelan

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The combination of Bluetooth Low energy and E-Ink displays allow for a low energy wire-less display. The application of this technology is far reaching especially given how the Bluetooth Low Energy specification can be extended. This paper proposes an extension to this specification specifically for inventory tracking. This extension combined with the low energy E-Ink display results in a smart label that can keep track of additional meta data and inventory counts for physical inventory. This label helps track the physical inventory and can help mitigate any errors in the logical organization of inventory.

Implementing The Cms+ Sports Rankings Algorithm In A Javafx Environment, Luke Welch

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Every year, sports teams and athletes get cut from championship opportunities because of their rank. While this reality is easier to swallow if a team or athlete is distant from the cut, it is much harder when they are right on the edge. Many times, it leaves fans and athletes wondering, “Why wasn’t I ranked higher? What factors when into the ranking? Are the rankings based on opinion alone?” These are fair questions that deserve an answer. Many times, sports rankings are derived from opinion polls. Other times, they are derived from a combination of opinion polls and measured performance. …

Framework Of Hardware Trojan Detection Leveraging Structural Checking Tool, Rafael Dacanay Del Carmen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since there is a significant demand for obtaining third-party soft Intellectual Property (IP) by first-party integrated circuit (IC) vendors, it is becoming easier for adversaries to insert malicious logic known as hardware Trojans into designs. Due to this, vendors need to find ways to screen the third-party IPs for possible security threats and then mitigate them. The development of the Structural Checking (SC) tool provides a solution to this issue. This tool analyzes the structure of an unknown soft IP design and creates a network of all the signals within the design and how they are connected to each other. …

Contrastive Learning For Unsupervised Auditory Texture Models, Christina Trexler

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Sounds with a high level of stationarity, also known as sound textures, have perceptually relevant features which can be captured by stimulus-computable models. This makes texture-like sounds, such as those made by rain, wind, and fire, an appealing test case for understanding the underlying mechanisms of auditory recognition. Previous auditory texture models typically measured statistics from auditory filter bank representations, and the statistics they used were somewhat ad-hoc, hand-engineered through a process of trial and error. Here, we investigate whether a better auditory texture representation can be obtained via contrastive learning, taking advantage of the stationarity of auditory textures to …

Component Damage Source Identification For Critical Infrastructure Systems, Nathan Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are becoming increasingly prevalent for both Critical Infrastructure and the Industry 4.0 initiative. Bad values within components of the software portion of CPS, or the computer systems, have the potential to cause major damage if left unchecked, and so detection and locating of where these occur is vital. We further define features of these computer systems and create a use-based system topology. We then introduce a function to monitor system integrity and the presence of bad values as well as an algorithm to locate them. We then show an improved version, taking advantage of several system properties …

An Automated Method To Enrich Consumer Health Vocabularies Using Glove Word Embeddings And An Auxiliary Lexical Resource, Mohammed Ibrahim, Susan Gauch, Omar Salman, Mohammed Alqahtani

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background

Clear language makes communication easier between any two parties. A layman may have difficulty communicating with a professional due to not understanding the specialized terms common to the domain. In healthcare, it is rare to find a layman knowledgeable in medical terminology which can lead to poor understanding of their condition and/or treatment. To bridge this gap, several professional vocabularies and ontologies have been created to map laymen medical terms to professional medical terms and vice versa.

Objective

Many of the presented vocabularies are built manually or semi-automatically requiring large investments of time and human effort and consequently the …

Computational Frameworks For Multi-Robot Cooperative 3d Printing And Planning, Laxmi Prasad Poudel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a novel cooperative 3D printing (C3DP) approach for multi-robot additive manufacturing (AM) and presents scheduling and planning strategies that enable multi-robot cooperation in the manufacturing environment. C3DP is the first step towards achieving the overarching goal of swarm manufacturing (SM). SM is a paradigm for distributed manufacturing that envisions networks of micro-factories, each of which employs thousands of mobile robots that can manufacture different products on demand. SM breaks down the complicated supply chain used to deliver a product from a large production facility from one part of the world to another. Instead, it establishes a network …

Towards A Large-Scale Intelligent Mobile-Argumentation And Discovering Arguments, Controversial Topics And Topic-Oriented Focal Sets In Cyber-Argumentation, Najla Althuniyan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

User-generated content (UGC) platforms host different forms of information, such as audio, video, pictures, and text. They have many online applications, such as social media, blogs, photo and video sharing, customer reviews, debate, and deliberation platforms. Usually, the content of these platforms is provided and consumed by users. Most of these platforms, mainly social media and blogs, are often used for online discussion. These platforms offer tools for users to share and express opinions. Commonly, people from different backgrounds and origins discuss opinions about various issues over the Internet. Furthermore, discussions among users contain substantial information from which knowledge about …

Design And Development Of Techniques To Ensure Integrity In Fog Computing Based Databases, Abdulwahab Fahad S. Alazeb

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The advancement of information technology in coming years will bring significant changes to the way sensitive data is processed. But the volume of generated data is rapidly growing worldwide. Technologies such as cloud computing, fog computing, and the Internet of things (IoT) will offer business service providers and consumers opportunities to obtain effective and efficient services as well as enhance their experiences and services; increased availability and higher-quality services via real-time data processing augment the potential for technology to add value to everyday experiences. This improves human life quality and easiness. As promising as these technological innovations, they are prone …

Automated Privacy Protection For Mobile Device Users And Bystanders In Public Spaces, David Darling

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As smartphones have gained popularity over recent years, they have provided usersconvenient access to services and integrated sensors that were previously only available through larger, stationary computing devices. This trend of ubiquitous, mobile devices provides unparalleled convenience and productivity for users who wish to perform everyday actions such as taking photos, participating in social media, reading emails, or checking online banking transactions. However, the increasing use of mobile devices in public spaces by users has negative implications for their own privacy and, in some cases, that of bystanders around them.

Specifically, digital photography trends in public have negative implications for …

City Goers: An Exploration Into Creating Seemingly Intelligent A.I. Systems, Matthew Brooke

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Artificial Intelligence systems have come a long way over the years. One particular application of A.I. is its incorporation in video games. A key goal of creating an A.I. system in a video game is to convey a level of intellect to the player. During playtests for Halo: Combat Evolved, the developers at Bungie noticed that players deemed tougher enemies as more intelligent than weaker ones, despite the fact that there were no differences in behavior in the enemies. The tougher enemies provided a greater illusion of intelligence to the players. Inspired by this, I set out to create a …

Brave New World Reboot: Technology’S Role In Consumer Manipulation And Implications For Privacy And Transparency, Allie Mertensotto

Marketing Undergraduate Honors Theses

Most consumers are aware that our data is being obtained and collected through the use of our devices we keep in our homes or even on our person throughout the day. But, it is understated how much data is being collected. Conversations you have with your peers – in a close proximity of a device – are being used to tailor advertising. The advertisements you receive on your devices are uniquely catered to your individual person, due to the fact it consistently uses our data to produce efficient and personal ads. On the flip side, our government is also tapping …