We develop a system for simulation-based optimization of defensive formations for American football. The first component of the system is an environment for simulating football plays with real physical interactions between players and their surroundings. The simulator is built on the AGEIA PhysX engine, which incorporates rigid body dynamics and...
"The purpose of this project is to load test, and fine tune the loan search functionality of the Broker Blueprint web application, an innovative Business-to-Business (B2B) online service aiding mortgage lenders and brokers in today's highly competitive mortgage market.
Broker Blueprint enables brokers to search for suitable mortgage loans across...
This project aims to study the performance of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Protocol implemented in JAVA for web applications. Secure Sockets Layer protocol allows client/server applications to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery. In particular, this project focuses on an implementation of...
We designed a concise way to store and manipulate GIS coverage data in a geospatial database. Our
geospatial database is implemented with PostgreSQL and PostGIS. PostgreSQL is an object-relational
database, and PostGIS supports various geospatial operations as an SQL extension. In our Oregon
Relational Spatial Topology (ORST) approach, topological relationships...
The Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) is the department responsible for providing reasonable
accommodation to students with documented disabilities. Each term, SSD serves approximately 500
students and receives hundreds of requests for various services. These services range from alternative
testing, alternative formats, notetaking, classroom relocation, and requests for tables...
Almost every student in the School of EECS undergoes the process of Blanket Credit
Registration wherein the student has to fill out the form for registration, meet the
concerned professor and obtain his approval. The staff of the department has to maintain
the details of the student and the Professor...
3D datasets acquire great importance in the context of medical imaging. In this thesis we survey and enhance solutions to problems inherently associated with 3D datasets-processing time,noise and visualization. Efforts include development of a tool kit to provide a multi-threaded processing platform to cut processing time, produce real time visualization...
Packet loss, delay and time-varying bandwidth are three main problems facing multimedia streaming applications over the Internet. Existing techniques such as Media-aware network protocol, network adaptive source and channel coding, etc. have been proposed to either overcome or alleviate these drawbacks of the Internet. But these techniques either need specialized...
The Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is a mainstay of flow visualization. It is, however, computationally intensive, which limits its interactivity. Also, when used to view three-dimensional (3D) vector fields, the resulting images are dense and cluttered, making it difficult to perceive the flow on the interior parts of the field....
Oftentimes in visualization, the goal of using volume datasets is not just to visualize them but also to analyze and compare them. In order to compare the two volumes, we cannot take all the voxels into consideration. The size of a typical volume data set is quite large (maybe a...
Finding information can cost a significant amount of time, even when the information is already stored on the user’s local computer system. There is significant research aimed at reducing these time costs, but little research into exactly what these costs are or how they impact people’s use of tools and...
Software maintenance accounts for a large portion of the software development cost, particularly the process of updating programs either to adapt for requirement change or to enhance design or efficiency. Currently, program updates are generally performed manually by programmers using text editors. This is an unreliable
method because syntax and...
This thesis presents a model for simulating individual pedestrian motion based on empirical data. The model keeps track of a pedestrian’s position, orientation, and body configuration and leverages motion capture data to generate plausible motion. Our model can automatically incorporate a pedestrian’s physical limitations when making movement decisions, since it...
Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers’ debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information...
The code reuse problem is a common software engineering problem in scientific computing. As a prevailing programming language in many scientific fields, Fortran does not provide support to address this problem. One particular reason is that Fortran lacks the support for generic programming. By applying program-generation techniques, we developed two...
Traditional application of Voronoi diagrams for space partitioning creates Voronoi regions, with areas determined by the generators’ relative locations and weights. Especially in the area of information space (re)construction, however, there is a need for inverse solutions; i.e., finding weights that result in regions with predefined areas. In this thesis,...
We present an approach for generating a character’s response in anticipation of an impending impact. Protective anticipatory movement is built upon several simple actions that have been identified as response mechanisms in monkeys and in humans. These actions are parameterized by a model of the interaction based on the approaching...
The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
This thesis presents a domain specific visual language designed to allow coaches to create content that exhibits the complex 2D interactions observed in the game of American football. Coaches can visually program the content by using symbols and drawing primitives similar to those that they currently use to design static...
Media application on the internet has become more and more popular as the bandwidth of the network links increase. The bottleneck of the existing media systems is no longer the link bandwidth at user’s end, but the server’s ability to handle streaming requests. These existing streaming systems do not scale...
The high cost of manually producing background characters creates a demand for a
way to automatically generate plausible behaviors. These background extras need to
behave in a manner that is believable such that they do not distract the focus of the
audience from the primary action occurring in the scene....
The computer game industry continues to progress toward realistic-looking character motion. However, even in state-of-the-art games, the use of motion capture data in character animation may result in errors such as “foot slipping,” where the feet do not match up with the floor properly during translation. Various algorithms have been...
This thesis describes the implementation of an interface for querying established correspondences between anatomical structures across species. I was the main developer of this query engine, called the Comparative Anatomy Information System. My work involved developing methods to query the knowledge base, perform the specified comparison, display the anatomical hierarchies...
As broadband Internet becomes widely available, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications over the Internet are becoming increasingly popular. Such an example is a video multicast application in which, one source streams a video to a large number of destination nodes through an overlay multicast tree consisting of peers.
These overlay multicast-based applications,...
Popular applications such as P2P file sharing, multiplayer gaming, videoconferencing, etc. rely on the efficiency of content distribution from a single source to multiple receivers. Most users of these applications are on the widely prevalent source constraint networks such as the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and wireless networks. Overlay multicast...
Protein secondary structure prediction plays a pivotal role in predicting protein folding in three-dimensions. Its task is to assign each residue one of the three secondary structure classes helix, strand, or random coil. This is an instance of the problem of sequential supervised learning in machine learning. This thesis describes...