Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...
Sonification, or the “technique of rendering sound in response to data and interactions” [1], is an alternative to visual graphs and has the potential to make data more interpretable and accessible. As a combination of the arts (music) and the sciences (data), sonification is an interdisciplinary tool for connecting people...
This paper synthesizes various works Wang tiles up to this point, including: the reduction from the Halting Problem to Wang Tiling Problem and notions around various aspects of periodicity, including minimal period, aperiodicity, and axis-aligned periodicity. Additionally it includes new work, including: a proof that a tiling can be periodic...
The use of genetic algorithms to compose music and generate sounds is an area of interest in the artificial intelligence field. Music and instrument sounds have known rules and structures that can be followed which make them well-suited for genetic algorithms. However, genetic algorithms still struggle to generate sounds comparable...
Over 37,000 people die each year in automobile accidents, with many of these fatalities resulting from collisions with emergency vehicles. The rise of autonomous cars creates the need for an accurate and failsafe method of detecting and responding to emergency vehicles safely and on time. This thesis investigates the ability...
Social media platforms use many techniques to engage users' attention with their platforms, including notifications, popups, and gamification elements. The impact of social media on physical and mental health has been studied, but limited publicly available research exists on how social media users can be helped to disengage from these...
This study investigates the evaluation of Return on Investment (ROI) in education from the perspective of high school students, introducing a theoretical model that encompasses both financial and non-financial aspects, with a primary focus on the unique insights provided by high school students. Drawing from a literature review and survey-based...
This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the impacts of nuclear energy on the economy and energy security of select European countries. While previous literature has identified a connection between nuclear energy and economic growth, this study focuses on assessing the comparative effects of nuclear energy, measured by operable...
This thesis presents innovative pedagogical approaches to teach fundamental Computer Science (CS) concepts, such as abstraction, representation, algorithms, and computation utilizing manipulatives, which are physical objects that students interact with to teach or reinforce a concept. Teaching and learning with manipulatives has a long history in science and mathematics education,...
The Pacific Islander diaspora in the Pacific Northwest United States is a unique community characterized by diverse cultures, experiences, and motivations for migration. This study aimed to explore the narratives of individuals from different Pacific Islander backgrounds residing in Oregon, shedding light on their reasons for migration and the impact...
Intuitively, it seems as though natural language processing tasks might benefit from explicit representations of the syntactic and semantic properties of text. Ontonotes is a dataset which attempts to annotate texts, to represent as much as possible of the meaning of the text explicitly within the annotation. Many tools exist...
Simulation has provided much design inspiration for the field of robotics. While many astute ideas can be computationally formulated, there are some good structures in animals that people call “biologically-inspired”. Many robots are designed based on natural creatures such as crabs, spiders, etc. Before we can take full advantage of...
Ornithology is an exciting field with novel research emerging everyday. Researchers in bioacoustics often spend hours within the wilderness recording bird calls to analyze later in their lab. The burden of sifting through hours of audio recordings from the field continues to remain a time-consuming and manual task, despite the...
The types and rates of label noise in real-world data sets present a challenge to machine learning projects. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to address this issue. Our method combines a noise modelling technique for correcting label noise across the entire data set with a robust loss...
Forests are important to Oregon for their beauty as well as economic value, and Douglas fir trees are among the most common and important in the state. Managing and monitoring Oregon’s forests is imperative to ensure they can remain healthy and productive. One tool that helps forest scientists to understand...
Users curate music playlists based on emotion to focus or relax, so streaming services often create playlists of songs to aid this process. Prior research focuses on generating playlists of a single mood or genre, although a few studies work to construct automatic playlists that transition between the genres of...
We construct a website to explain how Gaussian mixture models can be optimized using the expectation maximization algorithm. Previous free, online material on this process has been extremely limited. All sources surveyed failed to entirely describe our identified criteria for an in-depth description and useful visualizations. After surveying a variety...
We present a tool that converts any image into a painterly rendered one, or one that looks as though it was hand-painted. To do this, we implemented the Sobel filter to calculate the edge field that is used to create streamlines, which serve as the foundation for brush strokes. We...
Visualization and simulation software serves an important role in education, especially in the education of abstract topics. The field of computational theory, and specifically the topics of formal languages and finite automata are well suited to visualization. When done properly, this improves the learning experience for both students and educators....
This full research paper explores two factors of increasing importance for first-year university engineering curricula: sustainability and diversity. Over the past fifteen years, many universities in the United States have adjusted their engineering programs in response to these two values expressed by industry, professional organizations, and the Accreditation Board for...
Oceanic plankton have both a large impact on our oceans health and atmo- spheric balance of Co2. The overall health of planktonic life is determined by many physical, chemical, and ecological factors, that drive taxonomic abundances and the relative amount of non-living biomass called detritus. Recent advances in microscopic imaging...
Predicting the average affect of a piece of music is a task which has been of recent interest in the field of music information retrieval. We investigate the use of sentiment analysis on online social media conversations to predict a song’s valence and arousal. Using four music emotion datasets -...
This research paper describes the impacts of a new programming class on first-year, non-CS engineering students. In the spring of 2021, the College of Engineering at Oregon State University piloted a new programming course that will be required of all engineering majors in the following academic years. We used the...
When my mother’s mother sent her over to the new, western world, she sent her with a suitcase full of spices you couldn’t find at an American grocery store in the 90’s: tamarind and turmeric, coriander root and cumin. Ammu, my mother, had truly packed her entire life and everything...
This paper presents a method of implementing real-time apple detection for closed-loop control to approach apples for grabbing. The approach is to train two known real-time object detection networks–the Faster R-CNN and YOLOv5–on a novel dataset to verify that it is possible to achieve maximum average precision (mAP) above 50\%...
This algorithm presents the first steps towards a solution for novice database administrators that helps them transform a non-normalized relational database into a database in the third normal form. The algorithm uses relational algebra operations that apply principles from the third normal form. This provides the database administrator with an...
Automatic Music Transcription is a growing area of interest in Music Information Retrieval, and recent research has shown promise using onset detection on spectrograms. We propose a deep learning model that takes raw audio as input in order to transcribe a solo piano performance from audio to MIDI without complicated...
The widespread adoption of computerized systems around the turn of the century as a means of more efficiently conducting elections introduced more issues than these computer systems were intended to address. Though many of these flaws were not considered for years or decades after the introduction of digital election infrastructure,...
All life depends on the reliable translation of RNA to protein according to complex interactions between translation machinery and RNA sequence features. While ribosomal occupancy and codon frequencies vary across coding regions, well-established metrics for computing coding potential of RNA do not capture such positional dependence. Here, we investigate position-dependent...
Through comparison and analysis of selected holidays in countries with significantly different features (Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and the United States), this study aims to gauge the impact of holiday celebrations in influencing cultural values in those countries studied. K. Zygulski’s classification system for holidays was applied to divide the holidays of...
Data science is a rapidly growing industry permeating throughout every aspect of society. Everything collects data these days, and people use this data to find meaningful patterns leading to benefits ranging from more intuitive marketing to better cancer detection. However, increased data collection also leads to increased complexity, and data...
Exemplar-based style transfer techniques reimagine the content of a target image in the style of an exemplar image. Style transfer techniques that make use of patch-based synthesis copy sections of the exemplar to corresponding regions of the target, creating a new image in a patchwork manner. The artistic control one...
The online computer science classroom is growing, but there is little research on how to teach inclusive design online. As a result, online CS students are graduating without learning how to avoid bias in their software designs. Through the lens of the Inclusive Design Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), this thesis...
Rhizome is an information-centric model that uses different interaction methods than traditional desktop systems. I built Rhizome with the specific use case of sharing a photo to observe people using the Rhizome operating system (OS) shell and modern OS shells. The purpose of this is to measure the cognitive load...
Distance estimation is a key process for movement and spatial cognition. However, this process is hindered when navigating virtual environments in virtual reality (VR) due to the movement being exclusively visually simulated. In order to contribute to the understanding of how this hinderance effects our ability to estimate distances in...
As the link between human microbiomes and health has become more established, the interest in applying statistical approaches to microbiome data to understand the mechanisms behind these links has grown. However, microbiome data is often of unmanageable size, and consequently, producing quality lower dimensional representations of samples is a significant...
We take for granted how quickly we, as humans, form mental models of the world around us. By the time we are toddlers, we have an observable intuition around the physical rules of the world. Stacking blocks such that they don’t fall over becomes such a trivial task, that it...
The local presence or absence of individual botanical species can be predicted with high accuracy by a simple feed-forward neural network, using only local climate data to make inference. This study proposes a framework for learning these predictive models, demonstrates highly accurate predictions for species with a sufficiently large area...
As fifth generation telecommunications equipment becomes more viable and reliable, demand for high-speed, low-latency, viewpoint specific data analysis is expected to dramatically increase. Systems such as self-driving cars, traffic cameras, warehouses and other commercial buildings will be using fifth generation telecommunications to form ‘smart cities’, driving demand for the edge....
This thesis seeks to explain a new method of extracting temporal logic formulas from time series data using machine learning. Two strategies were followed during the development of this research: first, a generative adversarial network was combined with already-existing temporal logic extraction code by Belta. This was achieved by injecting...
Expensive pricing for laboratory bioreactors proves to be the main barrier-to-entry for lab-scale academic research. Most laboratory bioreactors are priced at $100K+ and require significant training to use, thereby limiting their accessibility. The IDEAL (Intuitive, Developmental And Research Oriented, Easy To Use, Affordable, And Low Volume) Bioreactor aims to solve...
Graphics of hair have been constantly improved since Kajiya’s famous teddy bear in 1989. By combining these concepts and real-world physics laws, I created a realistic representation of hair on a sphere-shaped head. OpenGL also provides a constantly updated display to continuously render the graphic. Using springs, the hair can...
Multi-party computation (MPC) is a field of study focused on devising cryptographic protocols that allow participants to learn the output of some function of their private inputs without trusting a third party to perform the computation. This is usually done at a large scale between data centers, with little emphasis...
With robots becoming increasingly commonplace in today’s society, we need to find ways to help robots to become better accepted. One common method used to gain acceptance and build rapport is through the use of humor. Currently, research in robot comedy exists, albeit it is fairly limited. Our goal with...
The ever-increasing global population presents looming problems for the field of agriculture. Global food demand will, at some point, increase to the point where there is not enough crop-ready land to keep up. This creates an additional incentive, other than economics, for growers to increase their yield-per-acre and make sure...
BoGL is a programming language created for the purpose of computer science education that is specific to the domain of board games. Although there is a language grammar and an existing implementation that is currently used by students, a complete and formal language standard does not yet exist. In the...
Metal-organic frameworks are promising novel materials for gas storage and separations because of their extremely high internal surface area and their modular structures based on metal nodes and organic linker molecules. Due to their modular design, it is possible to finely tune a structure for optimal storage of a specific...
This project focuses on implementing a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm as a pathfinding algorithm for navigating tracks with the Oregon State University Global Formula Racing (GFR) team's driverless car. The new algorithm would use an optimization function to calculate the least-cost path for the car to take by assigning...
Although computer science (CS) education researchers and practitioners have found ways to improve CS classroom inclusivity, few researchers have considered inclusivity of online CS education. We have begun developing a new approach that we term “embedded inclusive design” to address inclusive CS. The essence of the approach is to integrate...
Recently there has been a large amount of research into basic human movement as a baseline for robotic motion. Robotic grasping is a challenging problem for a number of reasons. One of which is that it is difficult to accurately know the interaction between the hand and the object, especially...
Reachability analysis enables the safety assurance of control systems despite uncertain initial conditions and control inputs, and can be an important component to run on-board an autonomous system. This thesis explores the characteristics of reachability analysis with different algorithmic configurations and runtime parameters running onboard the F1Tenth 1/10th-scale autonomous racing...
This document analyzes the application of Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization (MCCFR) in the game of Hasboro’s Clue. As a partially observable stochastic multiplayer game, Clue is well-suited for MCCFR methods. MCCFR has previously been shown to be effective in beating top human players around the world in No-Limit Texas...
The agricultural industry in the Western United States continues to possess issues of overwatering, accounting for over 80% of consumed water per year in the country. While technologies such as satellite imaging and sensor networks have slowly improved irrigation Best Management Practices to reduce superfluous water consumption, limitations associated with...
Demanding task environments (e.g., supervising a remotely piloted aircraft) require performing tasks quickly and accurately; however, periods of low and high operator workload can decrease task performance. Intelligent modulation of the system’s demands and interaction modality in response to changes in operator workload state may increase performance by avoiding undesirable...
Profile Hidden Markov Models utilize the information stored in a multiple sequence alignment such as its residues and conserved regions to assign probabilities at each column. This indicates areas in the sequences where similar functionality is observed. These probability weights are then combined to assign a sequence score, which is...
LoRaWAN networks are becoming more popular, and it is becoming common for developers to look at solutions utilizing Internet of Things concepts. In this paper, I introduce a Fenceless Grazing System utilizing the LoRaWAN network stack and discuss the limitations of this theorized network to better understand the scalability prior...
Recent studies have shown that novel continuous dropout methods can be viewed as a Bayesian interpretation of model parameters, though most such studies have shown results using normal distributions. As the posterior distributions over neural network nodes and parameters are intractable, given that they are a result of artificial construction...
Dynamic bipedal locomotion is among the most difficult and yet relevant problems in modern robotics. While a multitude of classical control methods for bipedal locomotion exist, they are often brittle or limited in capability. In recent years, work in applying reinforcement learning to robotics has lead to superior performance across...
Signal is a multimedia messaging application developed by OpenWhisper Systems in 2015 which allows its users to communicate securely between one another through the use of a complex encryption scheme. The set of algorithms used in combination to provide the services of the Signal application to their users is called...
Accurately modeling the chemistry of conventional and alternative liquid transportation fuels in combustion technology is vital to predicting important quantities such as the burning rate, heat release, and pollutant emissions. However, incorporating detailed chemical kinetic models into reactive-flow simulations poses a significant challenge due to the associated high computational expense...
This thesis describes the implementation of ultrasonic sensors to trigger a stimulus to increase peer interaction for children with disabilities using modified ride-on-cars for mobility. Modified ride-on-car technology has improved mobility for children with disabilities by effectively replicating the social benefits of a powered mobility device, yet there are opportunities...
Traditionally, people learn to perform object assembly tasks by following the steps in a paper-based instruction manual. Using augmented reality (AR) technology, the instructions could instead be computer generated and appear directly within the user’s workspace as they perform the task. Literature suggests AR’s feasibility in improving performance and learning...
Parking around Oregon State University campus can be severely limited, and for students looking to spend all day studying and going to classes it can be a pain to find parking that lasts for more than two hours. This thesis aims to resolve these issues by developing an application called...
In a big data day and age, there is an abundance of information and we now have the tools to understand it with data mining and machine learning algorithms. With the rise and fall and rise again of Bitcoin, the finance industry and society itself is caught in between. There...
Most software systems today do not support cognitive diversity. Further, because of differences in problem-solving styles that cluster by gender, software that poorly supports cognitive diversity can also embed gender biases. To help software professionals fix gender bias “bugs” related to people’s problem-solving styles for information processing and learning of...
Anime and manga’s general lack of brown and black characters may not seem unusual at first considering that the medium is produced in Japan by Japanese creators for Japanese audiences, and thus chiefly features Japanese characters. However, its significant proportion of white characters necessitates a more critical investigation of racial...
“Seeker” is a project that explores story creation in both script and graphic novel format. This thesis is broken into two main parts: a modified screenplay accompanied by art and process work.
keywords: storytelling, illustration, script, graphic novel
Inclusive design is important in today's software industry, but there is little research about how to teach it. In collaboration with 9 teacher-researchers across 8 U.S. universities and more than 400 computer and information science students, we embarked upon an Action Research investigation to gather insights into the pedagogical content...
The Corvallis Community Relations (CCR) office has launched an initiative called “I Heart Corvallis” that serves to enhance OSU students’ sense of connection and contribution to the greater Corvallis community. The eponymous “I Heart Corvallis” mobile application serves as a central hub for community events and resources available to students...
In this thesis, we consider Maxwell's Equations and their numerical discretization using finite difference and finite element methods. We first describe Maxwell's equations in linear dielectrics and then present finite difference and finite element methods for this case. We then describe Maxwell's equations in linear metamaterials using the Lorentz and...
Flow cytometry is a highly-extensible technology for performing rapid multi-parametric particle analysis. The use of flow cytometry has proliferated with the advent of smaller, intuitive, and more affordable instruments, along with a perpetual increase in research and medical applications. However, the technology is still largely inaccessible due to cost and...
The Virtual Machine Control Structure is an x86 hardware structure available on Intel platforms which support the VMX instruction set extensions. Developers working with Linux kernel virtualization technologies may need to alter fields in the VMCS, but the few existing tools for updating the structure are unstable or difficult to...
Many real world problems have partial solutions or intermediary steps which can lead toward solving the problem. When assembling robotic teams to solve these problems, we have intuition about which intermediary steps are more useful than others. We examine methods to identify and apply our designer intuition onto tightly coupled...
We analyze merger parameters of binary black hole systems (BBHSs), including orbital separation and time at which gravitational and viscous timescales intersect for all combinations of black holes (BHs) in the range 1-100 solar masses. Our initial examination of BBHS merger parameters using the assumption R=0.5r reveals suspicious trends in...
This paper discusses the merits of providing users variational views when editing variational code. I provide a plugin for the popular Atom Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which replaces #ifdef annotations commonly used by the C PreProcessor (CPP) with colored backgrounds, thus reducing code clutter and attempting to help programmers quickly...
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and are believed to lower the satisfaction of interacting with others. This thesis attempted to document the impact that AAC devices have on social interactions, in the hope of...
This project studied how a user's handedness affects his or her ability to use a
special-purpose handheld digital device such as a digital camera or rangefinder. More
specifically, it sought to identify how handedness affects speed and accuracy when
navigating within a menu system. 24 participants were given 8 menu...
Robotic global navigation is often based on the assumption that the world is static. It assumes that obstacles present in maps will be there later and new obstacles will be dealt with by a local planning algorithm. When robots interact in an environment inhabited by people, this assumption does not...
We examined the effects of perspective (first person versus third person) and immersion (immersive virtual reality versus nonimmersive video screen) on motor learning in order to assess the format of mental action representations. We also evaluated whether these effects were modulated by experience. Experienced dancers and novices practiced line dances...
In this work we propose a curve approximation method that operates in the curvature
domain. The curvature is represented using one of several different types of
basis functions (linear, quadratic, spline, sinusoidal, orthogonal polynomial), and the
curve's geometry is reconstructed from that curvature basis. Our hypothesis is that
different curvature...
We present a proof that the number of breakpoints in the arrival function between two terminals in graphs of treewidth ω is n^(O(log²ω) when the edge arrival functions are piecewise linear. This is an improvement on the bound of n^(Θ(log n))by Foschini, Hershberger, and Suri for graphs without any bound...
Often, characters of entertainment works, such as movies, books, or video
games, display traits that people find relatable. In certain cases, a spectator of a work
will develop such a strong psychological bond with a character that they identify with
them. Identification with fictional characters is usually a subconscious act...
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This thesis – “The Sweet Roll: A Project in Podcasting Gaming News, Discussions and
Reviews” – assesses the current gaming scene, including games, gamers, news, and
reviews of gaming, and creates a pilot podcast The Sweet Roll as a demonstration and
discussion of what could be done better. Through a...
Free energy is a fundamental property of a thermodynamic system, from which pressure, entropy, and other interesting properties can be derived. It is useful, then, to be able to accurately compute the free energy at various densities and temperatures in a way that can serve as the basis for further...
Pollinators are an integral part of agriculture and the ecosystem. However, due to changing land use, populations of wild pollinators are decreasing and plant distributions are changing all around the world. To understand how plant-pollinator networks will adapt over time, we would like to understand how pollinators choose flowers to...
One of the tasks that continues to prove difficult in robotics is the ability to grasp objects of varying shapes. It is time-consuming to acquire large amounts of real-world data in order to train accurate classifiers that can predict the success or failure of a grasp. To solve this issue,...
The purpose of this study is to explore kernel machine learning methods for species distribution modeling. Previous studies have shown the success of Generalized Boosted Regression Models, however kernel methods have been unexplored for species distribution modeling. Using the eBird dataset, four machine learning methods were tested for accuracy and...
Over the past few decades, the ratio of women to men in many traditionally maledominated fields has become much more equal. However, in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields the ratio has not improved at the same rate. In computer science the ratio is still very uneven. Today women...
Buses can be impractical for those who must adhere to a strict schedule or depend on them for emergencies. While variations from the official bus schedule are understandable and largely unavoidable, a lack of communication discourages adoption at a rate disproportionate with their actual likelihood. Even if a bus is...
Throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East, hundreds of Roman ruins lie scattered about. Many Roman aqueducts, bridges, roads, and even buildings remain standing over two thousand years after their construction, as functional as the day they were built. In the modern United States, however, many public works projects...
Recent work in machine learning concerns the detection and identification of bird species from audio recordings of their vocalizations. Such analysis can yield valuable ecological information concerning the activity and distribution of species in the wild. Current species-identification methods require individual syllables of bird audio as input, but field-collected audio...
As of February 2012, approximately 46% of American adults own a smartphone. The graphics quality of these devices gets better each year. However, they still have many more limitations in graphics processing and storage space than desktop computers. This means that applications on these devices should focus on optimizing their...
Modern technology has enabled the advancement of biological research through the use of powerful machines and computers as well as innovative computer programs. Advances in sequencing technology and software enable us to make de novo assemblies of organism genomes, and the development of specialized computer programs can automate routine but...
Generating solutions to Sokoban levels is an NP-hard problem that is difficult for even modern day computers to solve due to its complexity. This project explores the creation of a Sokoban solver by eliminating as many potential moves as possible to greatly limit the overall search space. This reduction is...
A financial processor is the most important component of a credit union‘s IT infrastructure. A database storing member demographic information, account balances, and transaction history, it performs financial calculations, such as interest, dividends, and maturities. It also provides a user interface, allowing tellers and financial service representatives to manage accounts...
Regression testing is a common and necessary task carried out by software practitioners to validate the quality of evolving software systems. Unfortunately, regression testing is often an expensive, time-consuming process, particularly when applied to large software systems. Consequently, practitioners may wish to prioritize the test cases in their regression test...
The push towards higher performing and more sensitive mixed signal circuitry has required the parallel development of increasingly more complex and sensitive test and calibration harnesses. Current off-chip methods of test and calibration may require higher pin counts or induce unwanted parasitic interference.
In this thesis, the design of a...
Factorization of integers is an important aspect of cryptography since it can be used as an
attack against some of the common cryptographic methods being used. There are
numerous methods in existence for factoring integers. Some of these are faster than
others for general numbers, while others work best on...
DiskGrapher is a graphical visualization tool designed to help users better manage the
space on their hard drives. The main goal of DiskGrapher is to provide a different
visualization technique to display information, with the goal of providing a more intuitive
understanding of the directory structure of the disk than...