Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

Automated Detection Of Deep-Sea Animals, Dallas J. Hollis, Duane Edgington, Danelle Cline

STAR Program Research Presentations

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute routinely deploys remotely operated underwater vehicles equipped with high definition cameras for use in scientific studies. Utilizing a video collection of over 22,000 hours and the Video Annotation and Reference System, we have set out to automate the detection and classification of deep-sea animals. This paper serves to explore the pitfalls of automation and suggest possible solutions to automated detection in diverse ecosystems with varying field conditions. Detection was tested using a saliency-based neuromorphic selective attention algorithm. The animals that were not detected were then used to tune saliency parameters. Once objects are detected, …

Whisk: Web Hosted Information Into Summarized Knowledge, Jiewen Wu

Master's Theses

Today’s online content increases at an alarmingly rate which exceeds users’ ability to consume such content. Modern search techniques allow users to enter keyword queries to find content they wish to see. However, such techniques break down when users freely browse the internet without knowing exactly what they want. Users may have to invest an unnecessarily long time reading content to see if they are interested in it. Automatic text summarization helps relieve this problem by creating synopses that significantly reduce the text while preserving the key points. Steffen Lyngbaek created the SPORK summarization pipeline to solve the content overload …

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.

Raspberry Pi Radio Scanner Control Web Application, Jackson Marshall Strand

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this senior project I design and develop software for the Raspberry Pi which allows the user to listen to and control a scanner radio anywhere in their home. The solution involves utilizing a Raspberry Pi 2 interfaced with the radio, a software package to communicate directly with the radio, and a web app hosting a web client providing the interface for user control. Audio streaming is achieved through the use of FFmpeg. Listening on the client is achieved by using an external software such as Video Lan (VLC) to open the audio stream. We provide an operable proof-of-concept with …

Real-Time, Non-Contact Heart Rate Monitor, Daniel Blike

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Raspberry Pi Vpn Travel Router, Daniel S. Pierson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Consumers are increasingly relying on public wireless hotspots to access the internet from a growing number of devices. Usage of these hotspots has expanded from just laptops to everything from iPhones to tablets, which are expected to be internet-connected for full functionality. It has become common for one to check if there’s an open wireless hotspot connection available at places like coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, or even a doctor’s waiting room. The issue that arises is that these public connections present an inherent security risk, as anyone can connect and gain access to the network. For increased security, the use …

Musictrakr, Benjamin Lin

Computer Engineering

MusicTrackr is an IoT device that musicians attach to their instruments. The device has a start and stop button that allows users to record their playing sessions. Each recorded session is sent wirelessly to a cloud database. An accompanying website displays all of the recorded sessions, organized by date. After picking a specific date, the user can view graphs showing total practice time and average session length as well play back any recordings during that date. In addition, the user may add comments to any specific date or recording. Lastly, the user may tag a specific date with a color …

Categorizing Blog Spam, Brandon Bevans

Master's Theses

The internet has matured into the focal point of our era. Its ecosystem is vast, complex, and in many regards unaccounted for. One of the most prevalent aspects of the internet is spam. Similar to the rest of the internet, spam has evolved from simply meaning ‘unwanted emails’ to a blanket term that encompasses any unsolicited or illegitimate content that appears in the wide range of media that exists on the internet.

Many forms of spam permeate the internet, and spam architects continue to develop tools and methods to avoid detection. On the other side, cyber security engineers continue to …

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Stamina Combat Overhaul, Richard Rattner

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

No abstract provided.

Visual Code: Breaking The Binary, Jacob Johannesen, Andrew Adriance

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project seeks to create an accessible programming language that is more visually based. Although some solutions exist, namely MIT’s Scratch, nothing has caught up to the mobile age. This proj- ect aims to reframe creating a game or app into the context of tell- ing a story, putting character creation first. By researching sto- ry-telling and how people learn, and by applying technical and user interface design knowledge, this project intends to deliver a soft- ware solution that opens introductory coding education to more people.

Spest – A Tool For Specification-Based Testing, Corrigan Redford Johnson

Master's Theses

This thesis presents a tool for SPEcification based teSTing (SPEST). SPEST is designed to use well known practices for automated black-box testing to reduce the burden of testing on developers. The tool uses a simple formal specification language to generate highly-readable unit tests that embody best practices for thorough software testing. Because the specification language used to generate the assertions about the code can be compiled, it can also be used to ensure that documentation describing the code is maintained during development and refactoring.

The utility and effectiveness of SPEST were validated through several exper- iments conducted with students in …

An Interactive User Interface Improves Data Visualization In R, Nathan Sweem

STAR Program Research Presentations

An interactive user interface application was created using the R statistical computing environment and the Shiny package to visualize historical data on the performance of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Historical data for these funds is scraped from the Yahoo! Finance webpage. The application allows the user to analyze this historical data by category and fund family, which are also scraped from Yahoo! Finance. The application generates interactive plots to compare the performance of selected mutual funds and ETFs given the baseline and center determined by the user. The application has been modified to attentively match the data with …

Simple Macro: Addon For World Of Warcraft, Yemane Gebreyesus

Computer Engineering

This senior project was started to try and solve a problem within World of Warcraft. That particular problem is the underdeveloped default macro interface, which Simple Macro aims to remedy by creating a more user-friendly interface that is accessible by a wider audience. It employs a click through method of accessing and editing data to reduce the amount of typing necessary. The addon also has a feature to specifically help players that want to change a target in certain groups of macros all at once. The project was developed in both Lua and XML.

Detecting Learning Styles In Video Games, Benjamin Cooley

Master's Theses

Video games are increasingly becoming more intelligent, able to adapt themselves to the individual gamer. Learning styles are a set of models used to categorize people into different types of learners to explain why some people learn better through different methods. Since learning and exploration are such fundamental parts of the video game experience, it is interesting to consider the possibility of applying these learning style models to video games, allowing the video game to adapt to its player, providing a better experience. To consider such adaptation, the game must first be able to detect that learning style from how …

Using Spectral Analysis To Evaluate Flute Tone Quality, Ron Yorita

Master's Theses

Many skilled flutists place a high priority on "good" tone quality, or timbre. Timbre can be defined as the audible difference in character that a listener perceives for two notes played at the same pitch. Different timbres are determined by the combination and balance of harmonics that comprise a note. Unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre is difficult to objectively quantify. This project explores (1) how tone quality is described by skilled flutists, (2) whether the harmonic spectrum has some correlation with tone quality, (3) whether certain harmonic spectra are preferred, or considered "good".

Thirty-one flutists ranging from high school students …

Designing A Goal Journaling Application, Kevin Lufkin

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

Achieving a personal goal and making a positive change in one’s life can be a difficult and elusive task. Everyday people are creating and setting new goals for themselves, but more often than not these goals are never realized. Motivation, determination, and discipline are all key elements when it comes to accomplishing a goal, but if there is no clear idea as to how to connect the dots from where one is to where one wants to be these important qualities lose their effectiveness.

The applications that exist today largely fit in the realm of goal/task management and planners. This …

Regen: Optimizing Genetic Selection Algorithms For Heterogeneous Computing, Scott Kenneth Swinkleb Winkleblack

Master's Theses

GenSel is a genetic selection analysis tool used to determine which genetic markers are informational for a given trait. Performing genetic selection related analyses is a time consuming and computationally expensive task. Due to an expected increase in the number of genotyped individuals, analysis times will increase dramatically. Therefore, optimization efforts must be made to keep analysis times reasonable.

This thesis focuses on optimizing one of GenSel’s underlying algorithms for heterogeneous computing. The resulting algorithm exposes task-level parallelism and data-level parallelism present but inaccessible in the original algorithm. The heterogeneous computing solution, ReGen, outperforms the optimized CPU implementation achieving a …

T.O.A.D: Tower Offense Android Development, Jeffrey Bryan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

TOAD is a tower offense game developed for Android smart phones and tablets. TOAD was developed to demonstrate applied principles of computer science and the software design process. The game engine was written as several components to handle various functions and allow for portability to other platforms. The end result is a fully functional game that can be used as a base to further expand on the idea and be showcased on Google Play.

A Comparison Of Image Processing Techniques For Bird Detection, Elsa Reyes

Master's Theses

Orchard fruits and vegetable crops are vulnerable to wild birds and animals. These wild birds and animals can cause critical damage to the produce. Traditional methods of scaring away birds such as scarecrows are not long-term solutions but short-term solutions. This is a huge problem especially near areas like San Luis Obispo where there are vineyards. Bird damage can be as high as 50% for grapes being grown in vineyards. The total estimated revenue lost annually in the 10 counties in California due to bird and rodent damage to 22 selected crops ranged from $168 million to $504 million (in …

A Proof Of Concept For Crowdsourcing Color Perception Experiments, Ryan Nathaniel Mcleod

Master's Theses

Accurately quantifying the human perception of color is an unsolved prob- lem. There are dozens of numerical systems for quantifying colors and how we as humans perceive them, but as a whole, they are far from perfect. The ability to accurately measure color for reproduction and verification is critical to indus- tries that work with textiles, paints, food and beverages, displays, and media compression algorithms. Because the science of color deals with the body, mind, and the subjective study of perception, building models of color requires largely empirical data over pure analytical science. Much of this data is extremely dated, …

Reconstructing Point Clouds Of Mid-Size Objects, Spencer Woodworth

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project explores the use of an inexpensive 3D camera for the acquisition and reconstruction of mid-size objects. The disparity of objects between stereo image pairs are used to calculate depth and generate a depth map. The depth map is used to generate a point cloud representation of the object from a single view. Finally, point clouds are generated from several views of an object and then aligned and merged into a seamless 360-degree point cloud.

Verifying R Code And Visualizing Power Grid Data: Signature Quality Metrics And Gui Development, Emmanuel C. Herrera, Brett Amidan

STAR Program Research Presentations

Verifying R code and visualizing Power Grid data:

Signature Quality Metrics and GUI development

Author: Emmanuel Herrera

Mentors: Brett Amidan and Landon Sego

There are many bioforensic signatures produced by analytical instruments that are expensive to produce and maintain accuracy. SQM is an R package which will provide subject matter experts with tools that will help them assess the specific quality of signatures and determine their accuracy, utility and cost by simple function calls. Many published academic papers were surveyed on the kinds of metrics already being implemented. Once understood how some metrics measured accuracy, the SQM package was duplicated …

Channels: Easy Video Content Consumption, Alexander R. Ledwith

Computer Engineering

The idea for this project is to take a user’s digital movie and television show library, and organize the individual videos into lists that will continuously and concurrently play like cable TV channels. This means that when a list of channels is switched to, video content will automatically start playing, possibly in the middle, based on a schedule. It should serve the needs of the user by allowing the user to quickly watch any of their existing channels, easily add a new channel based on chosen criteria or manual selection, and easily add new video content. In addition, the product …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Mantis: A Predictive Driving Directions Recommendation System, Christopher Hoover

Master's Theses

This thesis presents Mantis, a system designed to evaluate possible driving routes and recommend the optimal route based on current and predicted travel conditions. The system uses the Bing Maps REST service to obtain a set of routes. Traffic data from the California Department of Transportation’s Performance Measurement System (PeMS) is then used to estimate travel times for these routes. In addition to simple travel time estimation based on instantaneous traffic conditions, Mantis can use historic data to predict traffic speeds at future times. This allows Mantis to more effectively account for regularly repeating traffic patterns such as rush hour, …

Project Writeup On Amethyst: A 3d Adventure Game For Tablets, Adam Hintz

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Amethyst is a point-and-click science fiction adventure game for tablets, developed over two quarters to demonstrate applied principles of computer graphics and software engineering discipline. Using a novel interaction system, players can engage in environmental puzzles. Development of Amethyst required non-trivial quality assurance measures and workflow enhancements. The end result is a functional technical demo showcasing a single level, with the ability to rapidly produce more content.

Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Natural Language Processing has recently increased in popularity. The field of authorship analysis, specifically, uses various characteristics of text quantified by markers. NLPStats serves as a tool designed to streamline marker extraction based on user needs. A flexible query system allows for custom marker requests, adjustment of result formatting, and preprocessing options. Furthermore, an efficiently designed structure ensures that users retrieve information quickly. As a whole, NLPStats enables anyone, regardless of NLP experience, to extract important information about the text of a document.

Tacky Golf, Robert Crosby

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project implements a simple miniature golf game in 3d for the iPhone. Using a modular approach the game engine was written in several modules to handle its various functions and for cross platform potability. Four major modules are described in detail about their design choices and how they work. Ultimately the game and its engine are intended to be sold on the Apple App store and to be used for future games and applications on the iPhone.

Wireless Sensor Network For Wine Fermentation, Kerry Scharfglass, Andrew Lehmer

Computer Engineering

This project implements an automated temperature monitoring system for wine fermentation which is affordable, easy to use, and scalable to typical small winery setups. To realize these requirements, we implemented the system as a wireless sensor network utilizing commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Temperature and system diagnostic information is communicated wirelessly in a peer-to-peer network topology such that all information flows toward an aggregating server. The server makes the temperature information available over the Internet via a web application and alerts the winemaker by email when the temperature has left acceptable bounds that the winemaker may configure. This project also involved materials …

Teaching Introductory Programming Concepts: A Comparison Of Scratch And Arduino, Anne Beug

Master's Theses

Computing has become an integral part of modern America. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between 2008 and 2018, the United States will have 1.4 million job openings in computing fields [1]. Since the early 2000's (just after the "dot com bust"), the number of students enrolled in computing majors (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, etc.) dropped precipitously by over 50%, only starting to rise again in 2009 [2]. One way to rectify to this gap between demand and supply is to start training students in computational thinking during high school. While the Computer Science Advanced Placement AB test has …