Systems Architecture Commons^™

Multi-Script Handwriting Identification By Fragmenting Strokes, Joshua Jude Thomas

<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>

This study tests the effectiveness of Multi-Script Handwriting Identification after simplifying character strokes, by segmenting them into sub-parts. Character simplification is performed through splitting the character by branching-points and end-points, a process called stroke fragmentation in this study. The resulting sub-parts of the character are called stroke fragments and are evaluated individually to identify the writer. This process shares similarities with the concept of stroke decomposition in Optical Character Recognition which attempts to recognize characters through the writing strokes that make them up. The main idea of this study is that the characters of different writing‑scripts (English, Chinese, etc.) may …

Towards Expressive And Versatile Visualization-As-A-Service (Vaas), Tanner C. Hobson

Doctoral Dissertations

The rapid growth of data in scientific visualization has posed significant challenges to the scalability and availability of interactive visualization tools. These challenges can be largely attributed to the limitations of traditional monolithic applications in handling large datasets and accommodating multiple users or devices. To address these issues, the Visualization-as-a-Service (VaaS) architecture has emerged as a promising solution. VaaS leverages cloud-based visualization capabilities to provide on-demand and cost-effective interactive visualization. Existing VaaS has been simplistic by design with focuses on task-parallelism with single-user-per-device tasks for predetermined visualizations. This dissertation aims to extend the capabilities of VaaS by exploring data-parallel visualization …

Expressive Marks: Art In The Age Of Augmented Reality, Carson G. Levine

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Augmented reality (AR) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) introduce new considerations for the long-standing debate of what it means for digital art to be “real.” However, the ability to create AR experiences is limited to those who are technically skilled or who can afford to consult someone else. This paper addresses the need for an accessible tool that enables artists of all technical backgrounds to expressively create marks in AR. The solution includes a mobile application called CrayonAR. The system was designed to be modular, minimal, and physically engaging, and was developed in Unity using ARFoundation and Firebase Storage and Realtime …

Hybrid Life Cycles In Software Development, Eric Vincent Schoenborn

Culminating Experience Projects

This project applied software specification gathering, architecture, work planning, and development to a real-world development effort for a local business. This project began with a feasibility meeting with the owner of Zeal Aerial Fitness. After feasibility was assessed the intended users, needed functionality, and expected user restrictions were identified with the stakeholders. A hybrid software lifecycle was selected to allow a focus on base functionality up front followed by an iterative development of expectations of the stakeholders. I was able to create various specification diagrams that express the end projects goals to both developers and non-tech individuals using a standard …

Out-Of-Core Gpu Path Tracing On Large Instanced Scenes Via Geometry Streaming, Jeremy Berchtold

Master's Theses

We present a technique for out-of-core GPU path tracing of arbitrarily large scenes that is compatible with hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Our technique improves upon previous works by subdividing the scene spatially into streamable chunks that are loaded using a priority system that maximizes ray throughput and minimizes GPU memory usage. This allows for arbitrarily large scaling of scene complexity. Our system required under 19 minutes to render a solid color version of Disney's Moana Island scene (39.3 million instances, 261.1 million unique quads, and 82.4 billion instanced quads at a resolution of 1024x429 and 1024spp on an RTX 5000 (24GB memory …

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 …

Rethinking The Design Of Online Professor Reputation Systems, Haley Tatum

LSU Master's Theses

Online Professor Reputation (OPR) systems, such as RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), are frequently used by college students to post and access peer evaluations of their pro- fessors. However, recent evidence has shown that these platforms suffer from major bias problems. Failing to address bias in online professor ratings not only leads to negative expectations and experiences in class, but also poor performance on exams. To address these concerns, in this thesis, we study bias in OPR systems from a software design point of view. At the first phase of our analysis, we conduct a systematic literature review of 23 interdisciplinary studies on …

A New Way To Make Music: Processing Digital Audio In Virtual Reality, Gavin E. Payne

Senior Projects Spring 2022

The work of this project attempts to provide new methods of creating music with technology. The product, Fields, is a functional piece of virtual reality software, providing users an immersive and interactive set of tools used to build and design instruments in a modular manner. Each virtual tool is analogous to musical hardware such as guitar pedals, synthesizers, or samplers, and can be thought of as an effect or instrument on its own. Specific configurations of these virtual audio effects can then be played to produce music, and then even saved by the user to load up and play with …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Edge-Cloud Iot Data Analytics: Intelligence At The Edge With Deep Learning, Ananda Mohon M. Ghosh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rapid growth in numbers of connected devices, including sensors, mobile, wearable, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is creating an explosion of data that are moving across the network. To carry out machine learning (ML), IoT data are typically transferred to the cloud or another centralized system for storage and processing; however, this causes latencies and increases network traffic. Edge computing has the potential to remedy those issues by moving computation closer to the network edge and data sources. On the other hand, edge computing is limited in terms of computational power and thus is not well suited for …

Stay-At-Home Motor Rehabilitation: Optimizing Spatiotemporal Learning On Low-Cost Capacitive Sensor Arrays, Reid Sutherland

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Repeated, consistent, and precise gesture performance is a key part of recovery for stroke and other motor-impaired patients. Close professional supervision to these exercises is also essential to ensure proper neuromotor repair, which consumes a large amount of medical resources. Gesture recognition systems are emerging as stay-at-home solutions to this problem, but the best solutions are expensive, and the inexpensive solutions are not universal enough to tackle patient-to-patient variability. While many methods have been studied and implemented, the gesture recognition system designer does not have a strategy to effectively predict the right method to fit the needs of a patient. …

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

U.S. Census Explorer: A Gui And Visualization Tool For The U.S. Census Data Api, Timothy Snyder

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

U.S. Census Explorer is a software application that is designed to provide tools for intuitive exploration and analysis of United States census data for non-technical users. The application serves as an interface into the U.S. Census Bureau’s data API that enables a complete workflow from data acquisition to data visualization without the need for technical intervention from the user. The suite of tools provided include a graphical user interface for dynamically querying U.S. census data, geographic visualizations, and the ability to download your work to common spreadsheet and image formats for inclusion in external works.

Automatic Performance Optimization On Heterogeneous Computer Systems Using Manycore Coprocessors, Chenggang Lai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emerging computer architectures and advanced computing technologies, such as Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture and graphics processing units (GPU), provide a promising solution to employ parallelism for achieving high performance, scalability and low power consumption. As a result, accelerators have become a crucial part in developing supercomputers. Accelerators usually equip with different types of cores and memory. It will compel application developers to reach challenging performance goals. The added complexity has led to the development of task-based runtime systems, which allow complex computations to be expressed as task graphs, and rely on scheduling algorithms to perform load balancing between …

Usability Of Sound-Driven User Interfaces, Zachary T. Roth, Dale R. Thompson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The model for interacting with computing devices remains primarily focused on visual design. However, sound has a unique set of advantages. In this work, an experiment was devised where participants were tasked with identifying elements in an audio-only computing environment. The interaction relied on mouse movement and button presses for navigation. Experiment trials consisted of variations in sound duration, volume, and distinctness according to both experiment progress and user behavior. Participant interactions with the system were tracked to examine the usability of the interface. Preliminary results indicated the majority of participants mastered every provided test, but the total time spent …

E-Classroom For An Underserved Institution, Bhanuprakash Madupati, Kaleem Danish Mohammed, Dilipkumar Pampana

All Capstone Projects

The E-Class Room system is a web based project. An educational institution in India is understaffed and has limited interaction among faculty, student and industry experts. The project is to provide an online platform for the students and faculty of the institution to enhance their educational needs and to share their learning with their fellow students, faculty or industrial experts. It aims to provide a platform for mutual cooperation between different kinds of learning. The new system will provide directional way for online learning between faculty, student and industrial experts.

A Survey Paper On Service Oriented Architecture Approach And Modern Web Services, Kamala Manasa Dhara, Madhuri Dharmala, Chamma Krishan Sharma

All Capstone Projects

Service-Oriented Architecture is an architectural design pattern based on distinct pieces of software providing application functionality as services to other applications via a protocol. It is a collection of micro-services which are self-contained and provides unit functionality. The architectural style has the following essential core features which are inter-operability, service abstraction, service discovery, service autonomy, service statelessness re-usability, loose coupling. Service-oriented architectures are not a new thing. The first service-oriented architecture for many people in the past was with the use DCOM (uses RPC – Remote Procedural Calls) and CORBA (uses IIOP protocol) but because of the lack of standards …

Interactive Feature Selection And Visualization For Large Observational Data, Jingyuan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Data can create enormous values in both scientific and industrial fields, especially for access to new knowledge and inspiration of innovation. As the massive increases in computing power, data storage capacity, as well as capability of data generation and collection, the scientific research communities are confronting with a transformation of exploiting the advanced uses of the large-scale, complex, and high-resolution data sets in situation awareness and decision-making projects. To comprehensively analyze the big data problems requires the analyses aiming at various aspects which involves of effective selections of static and time-varying feature patterns that fulfills the interests of domain users. …

Data Analytics Of University Student Records, Mark Blaise Decotes

Masters Theses

Understanding the proper navigation of a college curriculum is a daunting task for students, faculty, and staff. Collegiate courses offer enough intellectual challenge without the unnecessary confusion caused by course scheduling issues. Administrative faculty who execute curriculum changes need both quantitative data and empirical evidence to support their notions about which courses are cornerstone. Students require clear understanding of paths through their courses and majors that give them the optimal chance of success. In this work, we re-envision the analysis of student records from several decades by opening up these datasets to new ways of interactivity. We represent curricula through …

Coffee: Context Observer For Fast Enthralling Entertainment, Anthony M. Lenz

Master's Theses

Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the Kinect, oh my! With so many devices available to the average consumer, the limitations and pitfalls of each interface are becoming more apparent. Swimming in devices, users often have to stop and think about how to interact with each device to accomplish the current tasks at hand. The goal of this thesis is to minimize user cognitive effort in handling multiple devices by creating a context aware hybrid interface. The context aware system will be explored through the hybridization of gesture and touch interfaces using a multi-touch coffee table and the next-generation Microsoft Kinect. …

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.

Senior Project Report - Doctest, Stephen Weessies

Computer Engineering

DocTest is a program that, simply put, allows a programmer or user to document STANAG 4586 (a standard for unmanned aerial vehicle interoperability) messages and test the vehicle system at Lockheed Martin [5]. The program is extensible to allow for further development aiding our software team to do what they do best and not get bogged down in tedious but necessary documentation. DocTest is also used to aid in testing, keeping track of the issues and bugs found and creating a document that captures each issue so an issue is not missed or forgotten. This program was made for use …

Beaglebone Webcam Server, Alexander Corcoran

Computer Engineering

The Beaglebone Webcam Server is a Linux based IP webcam, based on an inexpensive ARM development board, which hosts its own web server to display the webcam feed. The server has the ability to either connect to a wired router, or to act as a wireless access point in order for users to connect and control its functions via any Wi-Fi enabled device.

Flexrender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture For Ray Tracing Huge Scenes On Commodity Hardware., Robert Edward Somers

Master's Theses

As the quest for more realistic computer graphics marches steadily on, the demand for rich and detailed imagery is greater than ever. However, the current "sweet spot" in terms of price, power consumption, and performance is in commodity hardware. If we desire to render scenes with tens or hundreds of millions of polygons as cheaply as possible, we need a way of doing so that maximizes the use of the commodity hardware we already have at our disposal.

Techniques such as normal mapping and level of detail have attempted to address the problem by reducing the amount of geometry in …

Zen Cart Shopper, Michael Mcmahon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Zen Cart is a popular e-commerce tool for building a shopping cart web site. A typical Zen Cart store is not well suited for the small touch screens commonly found on today’s smart phones. Zen Cart Shopper is a solution for Android systems which employs web scraping techniques to display a store’s content in a smart phone friendly interface. This report describes the design and implementation of the Zen Cart Shopper app for Android.

Architecture, Design, And Implementation Of A Rapidly Prototyped Virtual Environment For A Military Spaceplane, Scott A. Rothermel

Theses and Dissertations

The new Global Engagement vision places increased emphasis on the Air Force's ability to control and exploit space. A military spaceplane combining reliable access to space, high operational tempos, and multi-mission capabilities is in conceptual stages of development. Virtual environment technology provides an opportunity to investigate system requirements and unconventional interface paradigms for this unique vehicle. A virtual environment architecture and design based on support for a rapid prototyping development process, separation of concerns, and user interface development is presented. The rapid prototyping process allowed management of changing requirements via an evolutionary approach to implementation. Separation of the activities performed …