Software Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Battle Bot Ai – Patriot Bot, James Johnston

Computer Engineering

An entry in the the 'Battle Block AI' competition hosted by 'The AI Games'.

Real Time Analytics On Digital Distraction, Kristian Welch

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Hypothesis: empirically measuring the users productivity has the potential to significantly increase their productivity. This paper is the documentation of the process of building software capable of verifying this hypothesis. Starting with the research which gives enough evidence to warrant the hypothesis, also included is commentary on the prototyping, design decisions, and iteration based on user feedback of the software.

Mobilerp, Anthony Fata

Computer Engineering

MobilERP is a system that increases traceability of parts in a manufacturing process in a simple paperless way. The system contains three components, a desktop application, a mobile app, and a database. The mobile application allows employees to scan (using a bar code scanner) parts that they are working/finishing on during the manufacturing process. As the part goes down the assembly line, individuals will barcode scan using the app to track the progress. These changes would get updated to the database, where then the designated person can track the progress of the part as well as any problems or concerns …

Pthreads Profiler, Ryan Van Quinlan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to design and implement a program which would allow users to profile programs that utilize the Pthreads library. This profiler allows users to measure load balance and lock contention between threads as well as discover deadlocks. These tools can be essential to developers of multi-threaded applications, which are notoriously difficult to debug. Additionally, this tool can help find vital performance benefits by providing relative execution measurements. The profiler is written in C++ and utilizes the standard template library as well as glibc extensions.

Rfid Microscope Lab, Patricia Carranza

Computer Engineering

The RFID Microscope Lab is a new exhibit created for the San Luis Obispo Children's Museum. The goal of the project is to create a modern, interactive exhibit that will teach children about different natural specimens through the use of technology. A computer, custom software, and RFID technology, will be used to display facts, microscopic images, and short videos of ten different specimens.

Using Data Visualization Software To Aid In The Analysis Of Geographical Data, Matthew R. Evers, Inzamam Rahaman

STAR Program Research Presentations

NASA Web World Wind (Web WW) is designed to visualize and manage geographical data. As a first implementation of visualization and analysis, we designed an application to map earthquake data onto the globe. Portions of this code were merged with application monitoring magnetic field anomalies possibly associated with earthquake precursor activity. Web WW enabled the visualization of the directional vectors from this data to point to the source location of the earthquake. We also developed a prototype urban management application which utilizes OpenStreetMaps to provide simple features such as route navigation, geographical and services information in an area of interest. …

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.

Resound.Fm, Matthew Bleifer

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to create a social platform for people to share and discover the music they love. Current music streaming technologies lack an effective tool for helping users find new music. The personal element of music that used to exist in the days that people gathered around record players or shared mixtapes has been lost online and Resound.fm seeks to bring it back. Resound.fm is a Ruby on Rails web application, which uses some of the latest web technologies and design patterns to create a powerful new music discovery experience online. The project was completed …

'Fo Fighter: 2d Real-Time Game, Cary Dobeck

Computer Engineering

‘FO Fighter is a 2D real-time game for Android and iOS mobile devices. The game utilizes the motion sensors and touch screens built within these devices to give the player a great amount of control over their character’s position and firing direction. This control allows for a reactive environment set in outer space, where gravity is determined by the device’s orientation, while the player must dodge, fight and destroy multiple enemy fighters on each planet in the solar system. ‘FO Fighter has been tested throughout its development cycle on numerous devices on both the Android and iOS platforms, with testers …

Geospatial Data Modeling To Support Energy Pipeline Integrity Management, Austin Wylie

Master's Theses

Several hundred thousand miles of energy pipelines span the whole of North America -- responsible for carrying the natural gas and liquid petroleum that power the continent's homes and economies. These pipelines, so crucial to everyday goings-on, are closely monitored by various operating companies to ensure they perform safely and smoothly.

Happenings like earthquakes, erosion, and extreme weather, however -- and human factors like vehicle traffic and construction -- all pose threats to pipeline integrity. As such, there is a tremendous need to measure and indicate useful, actionable data for each region of interest, and operators often use computer-based decision …

Drill Design Suite, Neil Nordhof

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Drill Design Suite is a lightweight tool for creating drill for marching band programs.

Development Of A Tridimensional Measuring Application For Ipads, Michael Casebolt, Nicolas Kouatli, Jack Mullen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In today’s fast-paced distribution centers workers and management alike are constantly searching for the quickest and most efficient way to package items for distribution. Even with the advancement of app-oriented solutions to a variety of problems across many industries there is a distinct unmet need in distribution environments for an application capable of increasing the efficiency and accuracy of packaging items. This senior project focused on the development and testing of an application utilizing the Structure Three Dimensional Sensor and a 4th generation iPad to scan an object or group of objects to be packaged and determine the overall dimensions …

Is There Progress Toward Sustainability?: Despite The Inherent Human Resistance To Change., Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The theme of this paper is to briefly survey the status of current efforts to maintain our natural environment and then discuss prospects for achieving future sustainability. The author finds that while there has been general recognition of the need for environmental sensitivity and conservation of natural resources, progress toward achieving sustainability goals has been slow. A principal reason for this lack of action is found in the reactive nature of the human species. Situated by biological design in our environment we typically respond to environmental changes only after they have occurred. Accordingly, while a number of revolutionary proposals have …

Using Remote Sensing Data To Predict The Spread Of Mosquito Borne Disease, Mary Ellen O'Donnell, Erika Podest

STAR Program Research Presentations

There is interest in how environmental variables derived from satellite data such as temperature, vegetation cover, and precipitation correlate to vector borne disease occurrence such as malaria and dengue fever. This study will be carried out using a decision tree based open source software called Random Forests to find correlations between the remote sensing variables and mosquito abundance. Software will be written in C# to take large amounts of data from the NASA satellite database and automatically format it for the Random Forest Software input. Correlations found, using Random Forests, between disease incidence and the variables can be used as …

Pre-R: Making Health Care Healthier, Grant Ramil, Mark Corpuz, Eliot Mestre, Akshay Rangnekar, Alex Lin

Computer Engineering

The Pre-R project provides a central database of medical service fees offered by hospitals across the United States. The database is crowdsourced and all data points are provided by end users or by hospital providers themselves. The fees are searchable through a website (www.pre-r.com) and iOS and Android applications. The mobile applications also provide a way for users to capture a picture of any medical bill and upload it for analysis and entry to our database.

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.

Autotab - Automatic Guitar Tablature Generation, Shaun Boley, Anthony Cisneros, Eric Kauzlarich

Computer Engineering

Our project consists of two different parts:

The first part contains an analysis of various pitch estimation algorithms. A number of different open-source pitch estimation libraries were tested using guitar recordings in order to gauge how accurately and consistently they outputted the correct frequencies. The results showed that the algorithms did not perform up to expectations, especially when testing with guitars with wound strings and within certain frequency ranges.

The second part details the creation of a tablature generator. It reads in a note sequence as an input, then generates tablature in the form of ASCII text. A modified greedy …

Design Of Cpu Simulation Software For Armv7 Instruction Set Architecture, Dillon Tellier

Computer Engineering

Simulations have long been a part of the engineering process in both the professional and academic domain. From a pedagogic standpoint, simulations allow students to explore the dynamics of engineering scenarios by controlling variables, taking measurements, and observing behavior which would be difficult or impossible without simulation. One such tool is a CPU simulator used in Cal Poly’s Computer Architecture classes; this software simulates an instruction accurate operation of a computer processor and reports statistics regarding the execution of the supplied compiled machine code. For the last several years Cal Poly’s computer architecture classes have used a previous version of …

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, …

Regionalization Of An Asset Storage And Distribution Service, Cameron Dunn, Nathaniel Morrison

Computer Engineering

The existing service we work on, Asset Services, is comprised of multiple independent services which work together to provide an easy interface for internal clients to allow end users to upload their own content, and then distribute that content to both internal and external clients, with a firewall between the service and most external clients. Although Asset Services handles millions of requests a day from all over the globe, all requests and data were sent through a single data center. The objective of this project was to create new endpoints for end users to upload and download assets to/from. By …

Midiflapper: A Leap Motion Midi Controller, Mark M. Henry

Computer Science and Software Engineering

An application called MIDIFlapper was developed that translates data from the Leap Motion, an NUI device, into MIDI data suitable for use by a contemporary digital audio workstation. This allows electronic musicians to use the Leap Motion for musical creation and live performance.

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.

Can Clustering Improve Requirements Traceability? A Tracelab-Enabled Study, Brett Taylor Armstrong

Master's Theses

Software permeates every aspect of our modern lives. In many applications, such in the software for airplane flight controls, or nuclear power control systems software failures can have catastrophic consequences. As we place so much trust in software, how can we know if it is trustworthy? Through software assurance, we can attempt to quantify just that.

Building complex, high assurance software is no simple task. The difficult information landscape of a software engineering project can make verification and validation, the process by which the assurance of a software is assessed, very difficult. In order to manage the inevitable information overload …

Big Data: Immediate Opportunities And Longer Term Challenges, Jens Pohl, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The transformation of words, locations, and human interactions into digital data forms the basis of trend detection and information extraction opportunities that can be automated with the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive computer storage and processing technology. Trend detection, which focuses on what, is facilitated by the ability to apply analytics to an entire corpus of data instead of a random sample. Since the corpus essentially includes all data within a population there is no need to apply any of the precautions that are in order to ensure the representativeness of a sample in traditional statistical analysis. Several examples are …

Gravity Evolved, Clark Duvall

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Gravity Evolved is a galactic physics game, created for mobile devices. In the game, you make your own solar system by creating planets, and then placing weapons on the planets. The physics of these planets and projectiles shot by the weapons are then simulated. Gravity Evolved has a Battle mode, where your solar system is pitted against an opposing solar system. In Battle mode, you earn money to unlock, create, and upgrade items in your solar system. Gravity Evolved will be on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in the summer of 2013.

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 …

Protocases, Christopher M. Polis

Computer Engineering

Design and implementation of a 3D printing web application.

Integrated Collision Avoidance System Sensor Evaluation Final Design Project, Alex F. Graebe, Bridgette S. Kimball, Drew T. Lavoise

Mechanical Engineering

Following the development of Aircraft Collision Avoidance Technology (ACAT) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a need arose to transition the life-saving technology to aid the general aviation community. Considering the realistic cost of implementation, it was decided that the technology should be adapted to function on any smartphone, using that device as an end-to-end solution to sense, process, and alert the pilot to imminent threats. In September of 2012, the SAS (Sense and Survive) Senior Project Team at California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo was assigned the task of using smartphone technology to accurately sense …

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, …