Software Engineering Commons^™

Dancetag: Using Sensors To Improve Feedback Given To Dance Students, Yanelly Mego

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The structure of dance classrooms has remained unchanged for several years. Very little, if any, technology has been incorporated to improve the quality of teaching. This has motivated our research project, whose goal is to capture dance movements with wearable sensors, to develop DANCETAG (Data Analytics and Notation with Captured Event Tagging). This is a platform that allows the gathering of data captured by Sony’s Mocopi sensors and annotating them with the dancer's movements. The Mocopi sensors make up a motion capture system. It is comprised of six small, round sensors that can be attached to velcro straps and clips. …

A Ui-Enhanced Approach To Generic Web-Based Scheduling, Tyler Hinrichs

Honors Scholar Theses

Administrative scheduling is a key aspect of a wide variety of systems, but despite being a widespread need, it is not a straightforward task. Organizational uniqueness introduces complexity when attempting to use algorithmic methods to automate scheduling, as individual organizations often have their own ways of determining various details and constraints of a schedule. However, in this paper, we assert that there are relevant commonalities that many different schedules fundamentally possess, allowing us to create a generic scheduling application that can be productively used for as many different scenarios as possible. After devising a schema that captures this generic representation, …

Improving The Performance Of Wi-Fi Indoor Localization In Both Dense And Unknown Environments, Quang Truong Hai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Indoor localization is important for various pervasive applications, garnering considerable research attention over recent decades. Despite numerous proposed solutions, the practical application of these methods in real-world environments with high applicability remains challenging. One compelling use case for building owners is the ability to track individuals as they navigate through the building, whether for security, customer analytics, space utilization planning, or other management purposes. However, this task becomes exceedingly difficult in environments with hundreds or thousands of people in motion. Conversely, the need to track oneself’s location is also meaningful from the perspective of individuals traversing in crowded spaces. These …

Vaid: Indexing View Designs In Visual Analytics System, Lu Ying, Aoyu Wu, Haotian Li, Zikun Deng, Ji Lan, Jiang Wu, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu, Dazhen Deng, Yingcai Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visual analytics (VA) systems have been widely used in various application domains. However, VA systems are complex in design, which imposes a serious problem: although the academic community constantly designs and implements new designs, the designs are difficult to query, understand, and refer to by subsequent designers. To mark a major step forward in tackling this problem, we index VA designs in an expressive and accessible way, transforming the designs into a structured format. We first conducted a workshop study with VA designers to learn user requirements for understanding and retrieving professional designs in VA systems. Thereafter, we came up …

Regret-Based Defense In Adversarial Reinforcement Learning, Roman Belaire, Pradeep Varakantham, Thanh Hong Nguyen, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial noise in observations, which can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving car receiving adversarially perturbed sensory observations about traffic signs (e.g., a stop sign physically altered to be perceived as a speed limit sign) can be fatal. Leading existing approaches for making RL algorithms robust to an observation-perturbing adversary have focused on (a) regularization approaches that make expected value objectives robust by adding adversarial loss terms; or (b) employing "maximin'' (i.e., maximizing the minimum value) notions of robustness. While regularization approaches are adept at reducing the probability …

Analyzing And Revivifying Function Signature Inference Using Deep Learning, Yan Lin, Trisha Singhal, Debin Gao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Function signature plays an important role in binary analysis and security enhancement, with typical examples in bug finding and control-flow integrity enforcement. However, recovery of function signatures by static binary analysis is challenging since crucial information vital for such recovery is stripped off during compilation. Although function signature recovery using deep learning (DL) is proposed in an effort to handle such challenges, the reported accuracy is low for binaries compiled with optimizations. In this paper, we first perform a systematic study to quantify the extent to which compiler optimizations (negatively) impact the accuracy of existing DL techniques based on Recurrent …

Robust Auto-Scaling With Probabilistic Workload Forecasting For Cloud Databases, Haitian Hang, Xiu Tang, Jianling Sun, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Haoye Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Auto-scaling is crucial for achieving elasticity in cloud databases as well as other cloud systems. Predictive auto-scaling, which leverages forecasting techniques to adjust resources based on predicted workload, has been widely adopted. However, the inherent inaccuracy of forecasting presents a significant challenge, potentially causing resource under-provisioning. To address this challenge, we propose robust predictive auto-scaling that considers the uncertainty in forecasts. Unlike previous predictive approaches that rely on single-valued forecasts, we leverage probabilistic forecasting techniques to generate quan-tile forecasts, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the potential future workloads. By formulating the auto-scaling problem as a robust optimization problem, we …

Analyzing And Revivifying Function Signature Inference Using Deep Learning, Yan Lin, Trisha Singhal, Debin Gao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Function signature plays an important role in binary analysis and security enhancement, with typical examples in bug finding and control-flow integrity enforcement. However, recovery of function signatures by static binary analysis is challenging since crucial information vital for such recovery is stripped off during compilation. Although function signature recovery using deep learning (DL) is proposed in an effort to handle such challenges, the reported accuracy is low for binaries compiled with optimizations. In this paper, we first perform a systematic study to quantify the extent to which compiler optimizations (negatively) impact the accuracy of existing DL techniques based on Recurrent …

Exploring The Relationship Between Anxiety And Virtual Reality Sickness, David Wesley Woolverton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

As virtual reality (VR) becomes more commonly used in education, it is important to understand the technology’s weakness and mitigate any potential negative effects on student success. One adverse side-effect of VR use is simulation-induced motion sickness, known in the context of VR as VR sickness. Previous research by Howard and Van Zandt (2021) found that possessing a phobia had a significant positive correlation with VR sickness, but only if the phobia is triggered by the simulation, suggesting that symptoms are actually connected to the anxiety the phobia induces. This study explored the hypothesized correlation between anxiety and VR sickness, …

Vibmilk: Non-Intrusive Milk Spoilage Detection Via Smartphone Vibration, Yuezhong Wu, Wei Song, Yanxiang Wang, Dong Ma, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantifying the chemical process of milk spoilage is challenging due to the need for bulky, expensive equipment that is not user-friendly for milk producers or customers. This lack of a convenient and accurate milk spoilage detection system can cause two significant issues. First, people who consume spoiled milk may experience serious health problems. Secondly, milk manufacturers typically provide a “best before” date to indicate freshness, but this date only shows the highest quality of the milk, not the last day it can be safely consumed, leading to significant milk waste. A practical and efficient solution to this problem is proposed …

Large Language Models For Qualitative Research In Software Engineering: Exploring Opportunities And Challenges, Muneera Bano, Rashina Hoda, Didar Zowghi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent surge in the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into qualitative research in software engineering, much like in other professional domains, demands a closer inspection. This vision paper seeks to explore the opportunities of using LLMs in qualitative research to address many of its legacy challenges as well as potential new concerns and pitfalls arising from the use of LLMs. We share our vision for the evolving role of the qualitative researcher in the age of LLMs and contemplate how they may utilize LLMs at various stages of their research experience.

Instant3d: Instant Text-To-3d Generation, Ming Li, Pan Zhou, Jia-Wei Liu, Jussi Keppo, Shuicheng Yan, Xiangyu Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text-to-3D generation has attracted much attention from the computer vision community. Existing methods mainly optimize a neural field from scratch for each text prompt, relying on heavy and repetitive training cost which impedes their practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for fast text-to-3D generation, dubbed Instant3D. Once trained, Instant3D is able to create a 3D object for an unseen text prompt in less than one second with a single run of a feedforward network. We achieve this remarkable speed by devising a new network that directly constructs a 3D triplane from a text prompt. The core …

Breathpro: Monitoring Breathing Mode During Running With Earables, Changshuo Hu, Thivya Kandappu, Yang Liu, Cecilia Mascolo, Dong Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Running is a popular and accessible form of aerobic exercise, significantly benefiting our health and wellness. By monitoring a range of running parameters with wearable devices, runners can gain a deep understanding of their running behavior, facilitating performance improvement in future runs. Among these parameters, breathing, which fuels our bodies with oxygen and expels carbon dioxide, is crucial to improving the efficiency of running. While previous studies have made substantial progress in measuring breathing rate, exploration of additional breathing monitoring during running is still lacking. In this work, we fill this gap by presenting BreathPro, the first breathing mode monitoring …

Swapvid: Integrating Video Viewing And Document Exploration With Direct Manipulation, Taichi Murakami, Kazuyuki Fujita, Kotaro Hara, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Videos accompanied by documents—document-based videos—enable presenters to share contents beyond videos and audience to use them for detailed content comprehension. However, concurrently exploring multiple channels of information could be taxing. We propose SwapVid, a novel interface for viewing and exploring document-based videos. SwapVid seamlessly integrates a video and a document into a single view and lets the content behaves as both video and a document; it adaptively switches a document-based video to act as a video or a document upon direct manipulation (e.g., scrolling the document, manipulating the video timeline). We conducted a user study with twenty participants, comparing SwapVid …

An Evaluation Of Heart Rate Monitoring With In-Ear Microphones Under Motion, Kayla-Jade Butkow, Ting Dang, Andrea Ferlini, Dong Ma, Yang Liu, Cecilia Mascolo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the soaring adoption of in-ear wearables, the research community has started investigating suitable in-ear heart rate detection systems. Heart rate is a key physiological marker of cardiovascular health and physical fitness. Continuous and reliable heart rate monitoring with wearable devices has therefore gained increasing attention in recent years. Existing heart rate detection systems in wearables mainly rely on photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors, however, these are notorious for poor performance in the presence of human motion. In this work, leveraging the occlusion effect that enhances low-frequency bone-conducted sounds in the ear canal, we investigate for the first time in-ear audio-based motion-resilient …

Formalization Of A Security Framework Design For A Health Prescription Assistant In An Internet Of Things System, Thomas Rolando Mellema

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Security system design flaws will create greater risks and repercussions as the systems being secured further integrate into our daily life. One such application example is incorporating the powerful potential of the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) into software services engineered for improving the practices of monitoring and prescribing effective healthcare to patients. A study was performed in this application area in order to specify a security system design for a Health Prescription Assistant (HPA) that operated with medical IoT (mIoT) devices in a healthcare environment. Although the efficiency of this system was measured, little was presented to …

An Intelligent Academic Advising System For Course Recommendation Using Large Language Models, Malika Maya Iratni

Theses

Academic advising is an important resource for students, especially in higher education, in order to guide them to make the best possible decisions to improve their overall academic performance and overall academic journey. With the increasing number of students joining these institutions each year, traditional advising becomes a time-consuming and inefficient process that can leave students discouraged, and advisors overwhelmed. Therefore, there is a need to develop intelligent advising systems that make use of the recent advancements in technology, to support the advising process, and increase overall student satisfaction. In this work, an academic advising model that uses Recommender Systems …

Vascular Brain Digital Twins For Medical Training And Education In Metaverse, Shamma Khaled Alghafri

Theses

This study addresses the need for innovative educational tools in the field of anatomy, specifically focusing on brain anatomy. The objective is to develop a virtual reality application and a 3D visualization that offer immersive and interactive learning experiences for students. The VR application, developed using Unity and designed for the Oculus Quest 2 headset, creates an immersive virtual laboratory environment. This environment includes interactive elements such as a table with buttons for displaying brain models and a whiteboard for user interaction. Users can manipulate and explore different brain structures, enhancing their understanding of complex anatomical features. Additionally, we integrated …

A System Of Communication Between Two Computers Using Novel Frequency Shift Keying Techniques, Jared Reyes

Honors Thesis

Frequency shift keying (FSK) is an old but powerful form of modulation that powered much of the early modems of the 1960’s, and the author felt inspired to make his own version of audio binary FSK modulation. He researched the general history and legacy of the Bell 103, a modem using FSK that defined telecommunication for the next few decades. Using research of the most common English characters of recent emails to determine which English characters should have the shortest bit length, a novel character encoding standard was created using variable bit rate. In addition, he has created a modulation …

Semantic Segmentation Of Point Cloud Sequences Using Point Transformer V3, Marion Sisk

Master's Theses

Semantic segmentation of point clouds is a basic step for many autonomous systems including automobiles. In autonomous driving systems, LiDAR sensors are frequently used to produce point cloud sequences that allow the system to perceive the environment and navigate safely. Modern machine learning techniques for segmentation have predominately focused on single-scan segmentation, however sequence segmentation has often proven to perform better on common segmentation metrics. Using the popular Semantic KITTI dataset, we show that by providing point cloud sequences to a segmentation pipeline based on Point Transformer v3, we increase the segmentation performance between seven and fifteen percent when compared …

Data Engineering: Building Software Efficiency In Medium To Large Organizations, Alessandro De La Torre

Whittier Scholars Program

The introduction of PoetHQ, a mobile application, offers an economical strategy for colleges, potentially ushering in significant cost savings. These savings could be redirected towards enhancing academic programs and services, enriching the educational landscape for students. PoetHQ aims to democratize access to crucial software, effectively removing financial barriers and facilitating a richer educational experience. By providing an efficient software solution that reduces organizational overhead while maximizing accessibility for students, the project highlights the essential role of equitable education and resource optimization within academic institutions.

A Design Science Approach To Investigating Decentralized Identity Technology, Janelle Krupicka

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The internet needs secure forms of identity authentication to function properly, but identity authentication is not a core part of the internet’s architecture. Instead, approaches to identity verification vary, often using centralized stores of identity information that are targets of cyber attacks. Decentralized identity is a secure way to manage identity online that puts users’ identities in their own hands and that has the potential to become a core part of cybersecurity. However, decentralized identity technology is new and continually evolving, which makes implementing this technology in an organizational setting challenging. This paper suggests that, in the future, decentralized identity …

Binder, Tyler A. Peaster, Lindsey M. Davenport, Madelyn Little, Alex Bales

ATU Scholars Symposium

Binder is a mobile application that aims to introduce readers to a book recommendation service that appeals to devoted and casual readers. The main goal of Binder is to enrich book selection and reading experience. This project was created in response to deficiencies in the mobile space for book suggestions, library management, and reading personalization. The tools we used to create the project include Visual Studio, .Net Maui Framework, C#, XAML, CSS, MongoDB, NoSQL, Git, GitHub, and Figma. The project’s selection of books were sourced from the Google Books repository. Binder aims to provide an intuitive interface that allows users …

Jsper (Just Stablediffusion Plus Easy Retraining), Adam Rusterholz, Meghan Finn, Zach Zolliecoffer, Zach Judy

ATU Scholars Symposium

JSPER is an an AI art generation Web Application that is both flexible and accessible. Our goal is to enable anyone to create and use their own customized art models, regardless of technical skill level. These models can be trained on almost anything, from a person, to an animal, to a specific object, or even style. The user only has to upload a handful of images of their subject. Then, training settings get optimized at the push of a button to match the type of subject the user is training. After training, their customized model can be used to generate …

Rescape: Transforming Coral-Reefscape Images For Quantitative Analysis, Zachary Ferris, Eraldo Ribeiro, Tomofumi Nagata, Robert Van Woesik

Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Ever since the first image of a coral reef was captured in 1885, people worldwide have been accumulating images of coral reefscapes that document the historic conditions of reefs. However, these innumerable reefscape images suffer from perspective distortion, which reduces the apparent size of distant taxa, rendering the images unusable for quantitative analysis of reef conditions. Here we solve this century-long distortion problem by developing a novel computer-vision algorithm, ReScape, which removes the perspective distortion from reefscape images by transforming them into top-down views, making them usable for quantitative analysis of reef conditions. In doing so, we demonstrate the …

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 …

A Smart Resume Builder Tool Using Generative Ai, Ivan A. Velo Castaneda, Anas Hourani, Magdalene Moy

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Crafting a standout resume is crucial in today’s competitive job market. Not only does it create a strong first impression on employers but it also it opens the doors for endless job opportunities. Despite existing resume assistance for FHSU students on the Career Services page, there's a lack of tools for generating or streamlining the resume writing process. To address this issue, an efficient resume builder utilizing OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model was developed specifically for FHSU students. Its key features include intuitive template selection, dynamic AI-generated content for tailored resumes, multi-format output supporting PDF and Word formats, and a user-friendly experience …

Software Based Approach To Realtime Sports Graphics, Honesty Beaton

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

My research presents a software-based approach to real-time sports graphics, leveraging Unity, C#, and OpenCV. We aimed to enhance viewer engagement by providing dynamic and interactive graphics during sports broadcasts. My method involves real-time analysis of video feeds to cut out players, place them onto a virtual court, and underlay immersive visuals, giving the appearance that virtual visuals physically exist beneath a player. Evaluation of this approach demonstrates the effectiveness of utilizing a software-based approach for real-time sports graphics, akin to traditional hardware-based solutions

Lyraquist: Language Learning Via Music App, Vivian D'Souza, Siri Avula, Mahi Patel, Tanvi Singh, Ashley Bickham

Senior Theses

Lyraquist is a new language learning mobile app that encourages the practice of a foreign language through music. Language learners can connect their Spotify Premium account to Lyraquist to listen to music in their target languages and utilize tools such as translation and vocabulary lists to facilitate language practice. Through integration with Spotify, users can import and create Spotify playlists and search the service’s entire catalog. By combining daily listening habits with several tasks associated with language learning in one place, Lyraquist hopes to be a useful language learning tool.

The Social Pot: A Social Media Application, Reid Long

Honors Projects

The Social Pot is a web application that allows a user to post to Instagram and X simultaneously from one place. The user creates a Social Pot Account and from there can set their Instagram username and password within the home page. Once the user attempts to post, it will redirect them to login to X which once successful will make the tweet. Used the API 'instagram-private-api'. User needed to give access to my X Project which in turn gave an Auth token (via X redirect URL). The auth token was then sent to my endpoint in order to get …