Gusset plates are an important component of bridges. They are thick sheets of steel that join steel members together using fasteners and also strengthen their joint. Transportation agencies regularly evaluate and rate their inventories of gusset plate connections using visual inspection, which is very costly. To address this issue, we...
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) communities often use open bug reporting to allow users to participate by reporting bugs. This practice can lead to more duplicate reports, as inexperienced users can be less rigorous about researching existing bug reports. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent of this...
Analysis, visualization, and design of vector fields on surfaces have a wide variety of major applications in both scientific visualization and computer graphics. On the one hand, analysis and visualization of vector fields provide critical insights to the flow data produced from simulation or experiments of various engineering processes. On...
Motion capture data is a digital representation of the complex temporal structure of human motion. Motion capture is widely used for data-driven animation in sports,medicine and entertainment, because of its ability to capture complex and realistic
motions. Due to its efficiency and cost, methods for reusing collections of motion capture...
In this thesis I present the choice calculus, a formal language for representing variation in software and other structured artifacts. The choice calculus is intended to support variation research in a way similar to the lambda calculus in programming language research. Specifically, it provides a simple formal basis for presenting,...
General purpose computer systems have seen increased performance potential through the parallel processing capabilities of multicore processors. Yet this potential performance can only be attained through parallel applications, thus forcing software developers to rethink how everyday applications are designed. The most readily form of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) within any...
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...
The selection process for map projections is a mystery to many mapmakers and GIS users. Map projections ought to be selected based on the map’s geographic extent and the required distortion properties, with the goal of minimizing the distortion of the mapped area. Despite some available selection guidelines, the selection...
It is possible to purchase, for as little as $10,000, a cluster of computers with the capability to rival the supercomputers of only a few years ago. Now, users that have little to no experience developing distributed applications or managing a cluster are in a position to do so. To...
While there are many ways to evaluate a user interface design, the user's mental workload and situation awareness (SA) are particularly important considerations in the supervisory control of safety-critical systems. Typically, operators of these systems must monitor high-volume, time-sensitive status information. Interface design for this domain can be challenging and...