Software Engineering Commons^™

Nutrilog: Design And Development Of A Full-Stack Web Application For Holistic Health Tracking, Jaromir J. Saloni

Honors Theses

NutriLog is a web-based fitness and nutrition tracking application designed to help users record, organize, and interpret personal health data in one centralized platform. Many existing applications focus primarily on either nutrition tracking or exercise performance, which can make it difficult for users to understand how food intake and physical activity interact. NutriLog addresses this gap by combining food logging, exercise logging, calorie adjustment, nutrition summaries, and historical tracking into a single dashboard-based interface.

The application was developed using React and TypeScript for the frontend and Supabase for authentication, database storage, and user-specific data management. Nutrition data is supported through …

Deep Learning Approaches For Voltammetric Analysis Of Coffee, Ryan Koes

Honors Theses

This thesis investigates deep learning approaches for voltammetric analysis of brewed coffee using a low-cost electrochemical system and screen-printed electrodes (SPEs). Traditional analytical methods, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), provide precise quantification of key compounds but require expensive instrumentation and specialized expertise, limiting accessibility. While SPEs offer a more accessible alternative, they yielded poor results with traditional processing; however, when combined with a neural network, the system proved more effective. In experiments with 132 coffee samples, mean errors for caffeine, CGA, and TDS predictions were 52.98 ppm, 70.48 ppm, and 0.08%, respectively. These findings …

A Web-Based Wizard-Of-Oz Platform For Collaborative And Reproducible Human-Robot Interaction Research, Sean O'Connor

Honors Theses

The Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique is widely used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research, but two persistent problems limit its effectiveness: existing tools impose technical barriers that exclude non-engineering domain experts (the Accessibility Problem), and the fragmented landscape of robot-specific implementations makes interaction scripts difficult to port across platforms (the Reproducibility Problem- concerning execution consistency and portability, not third-party replication). Through a literature review, I identified three design principles to address both: a hierarchical specification model, an event-driven execution model, and a plugin architecture that decouples experiment logic from robot-specific implementations. I realized these principles in HRIStudio, an open-source, web-based platform providing …

Evolving Enemy Behavior In Video Games, Hermie H. Adams Iii

Honors Theses

The video game I developed for my senior project lacked complex and engaging enemy artificial intelligence. The standard implementations of AI systems such as finite state machines and behavior trees felt like side-steps rather than innovative solutions. Upon seeing the 'magic' of machine learning in perfecting games such as Snake, Super Mario, and Flappy Bird, I was inspired to seek my answer in the field of evolutionary computation. However, my challenge differed in that the problem space would be defined by dynamic player strategies, making it not well-defined or static. As such, my evaluations are based on enemies exhibiting emergent …

The Future Of Code Style: Learning With Gamified Online Tools, Jacob C. Tjaden

Honors Theses

High-quality code is universally pursued by software developers, and one of the most effective indicators of code quality is code style. However, code style is difficult to teach, particularly to introductory students and programmers who benefit most. In this project, we aim to investigate how online tools can improve and teach Python code style, as well as identify the role of gamification in the process. We build an online platform called Fishy that combines code style appraisal tools and utilizes gamification concepts. Our platform incorporates educational metrics such as a code analysis score and targeted quizzes to assess user performance. …

Kalamazoo Nature Center Mobile Application, Jacob Tebben

Honors Theses

This project aimed to address the challenge of enhancing visitor engagement and information dissemination at the Kalamazoo Nature Center (KNC) through the development of an integrated mobile and desktop application system. This initiative arose due to the limitations posed by traditional mobile applications which often become outdated and need to be updated by a dedicated software team. This project was designed for any user of the KNC desktop app to be able to update content on the mobile app, without the need of a dedicated software team.

The mobile application was designed for visitor use, enabling them to access up-to-date …

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 …

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.

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, …

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 …

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 …