I have pretty much decided on my main topic, which is working on the complexity of the Parks Puzzle. I found a survey paper that goes over a number of puzzle problems, and provides a vast reading list, which I am working through now.
For this week, I started reading more into the papers that I found initially interesting for my ideas. I found some to be less relevant than others, but still drew some nice views that may be helpful later to shape my ideas. I want to perhaps find some replacement papers, and also talk to a CS professor this week about idea refinement.
For this week, I created my annotated bibliographies for 2 papers of each of my 3 ideas. I also spoke with Charlie and refined 2 of 3 ideas. For my penetration testing idea, instead of making the project solely on the technical side, I want to basically have three phases of this project- technical, social, and physical. I plan to speak w/ Brendan Post in ITS and see how I could implement this at Earlham. I’d plan to publish the results of this testing to where other schools could do something similar.
In regards to the bibliography, one of my ideas is tracking Digital Footprints of users and I found a paper where the researchers created their own piece of software that was a blend of a password manager and an auditing service. I thought of being able to do something similar and create my own piece of software but with additional features.
This week, I did a first pass reading for a total of 6 papers and visited the writing center for the annotated bibliography. Some of them turned out to be less relevant to the topic than they had appeared, but they were mostly useful and interesting. For one of my journals, the authors introduced the eigen-values and associated them with our facial features which I thought was fascinating. A lot of the methods that I thought were either subjective or determined by consensus actually involved detailed algorithms and logical processes. I look forward to reading them more in depth.
This week, I created annotated bibliographies for papers pertaining to each of my three ideas. I also further considered the possibilities for updating my project ideas – I’m likely to not go with the copyright detection idea. If I go with the visualization of music idea, I’m likely to turn it on its head and deal with the audiation of visual art. I’m still fairly content with the rhythm game idea as it is in its current state.
This week, I browsed through chiefly ACM and Google Scholar to find five papers on each of my topics. I additionally met with Charlie to go through my three ideas, getting some helpful insights about my projects and what is being looked for in the capstone project, as well as generating some ideas based off of the original three. The Copyright Detection idea in particular is likely to be cut – it’s a field already rich with research and work done, making it harder to come up with something better or wholly original.
This week I spent a lot of time trying to refine my last two ideas to make it more suitable for a capstone and tried finding enough research articles about all three ideas. I struggled with finding related articles to my second idea so I came up with a fourth idea that was easy to research. Below I’ll put all four of my ideas that I have right now.
I am still exploring my new ideas.
Idea 1 Title: AI Assistant for Safety Driving
Description: My idea is to use facial recognition to detect fatigue driving or dangerous driving. A small camera will be placed in front of the driver and the AI Assistant will be a mobile phone APP. For fatigue driving, the camera detects behaviors like closing eyes for long time, yarning, frequently rubbing eyes with hand, etc. For other dangerous driving behaviors, the camera can detect behaviors like playing mobile phone, turning back to chat, smoking, etc. After detecting dangerous driving behaviors, the APP will do a series of operations according to the dangerous behavior: giving an alarm, play refresh songs, report the location of the nearest rest stop. Actually there are already research and real products available now, but most of them are commercialized. They are expensive and big-sized. What makes my idea different is that I am going to develop it as a cheap and handy daily life tool. And I probably can enhance the accuracy of detection under dark light or special environment. The main tech is facial recognition and there are many open sources online.
Idea 2 Title: Voice Print Recognition Identifier
Description: Facial recognition is very popular recently, but many people do not notice voice print recognition. VPR is cheaper and more convenient because it only needs one microphone. Voice can tell many information like age, gender, emotion, environment, and etc. Wearing glasses or makeup might affect the performance of facial recognition, but a mature human being’s voice is stable. There are already research and real application on voice print recognition. For example, WeChat user uses voice recognition to log in. But I can innovate my idea on the application, for example, combine it with bank customer service. When a user steals other’s password and calls Chase to do money transaction, the VPR can detect if the voiceprint matches the bank account owner. Or use it to fight crime, home robots, etc. The VPR tech is already exist. I need to innovate from other aspects. But the two primary usages are: speaker identification or speaker verification. Voice print is a spectrogram of voice, forming from wavelength, frequency, intensity and other hundreds of characteristics. I can differentiate people from differences in purity of voice, resonance ways, average pitch characteristic, voice range.
The popular used spectrogram characteristics are: MFCC, PLP, FBank, D-vector by Google, Deep feature, Bottleneck feature, Tandem feature. Existing models: GMM-UBM, JFA, GMM-UBM i-vector, DNN i-vector, Supervised-UBM i-vector. Scoring algorithm: SVM, PLDA, LDA, Cosine Distance.
(But i don’t know if the scope is too big)
Idea 3 Title: Using OCR to grade hand-written homework
Description: Take a picture of the hand-written homework and use OCR tech to extract the content. (OCR is a technology converting printed text into editable text.) Then check if the algebra calculation is correct. Mark the correctness in the picture near the problem. There are already APP like that available online. But it only checks for algebra calculation, and it is not that accurate. It requires good hand-writing. I can expand my project to enhance the OCR tech, or make it check for simple English homework as well. Especially some parents in non english speaking countries cannot speak english to help their children. And probably I can expand the idea to a mobile phone APP that can summarize and analyze the grades data: collect incorrect problems, analyze which category did incorrectly the most, and etc.
I have finished buying the parts to make the headset and i have finished setting up a unity environment, but haven’t been able to run tests there yet.
I have read some literature on all three of my ideas, and was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a lot of academic research potential in the ideas that I thought were a little dry in research, which was my main concern with my ideas. The most exciting idea I got was adding a food recommendation system for my food ordering app, where the user can get either a healthy or a tasty recommendation depending on their preferences.
For my second idea, I realized I need to research the intersection of human-computer interaction and pedagogy.
For my third idea, there is a lot to research about indexing a large number of text documents, where the corpora grows, and there is a space constraint. I can also look into text summarization techniques and metadata extraction from the documents.
Idea #1
Name of Your Project Computational complexity of the ‘Park Puzzle’
What research topic/question your project is going to address? The Park Puzzle is a game that involves splitting a n*n grid into different colored continuous ‘parks’. A solution to a park puzzle involves marking the position of a tree in each park such that no two trees share a row or a column. The research topic involves exploring various algorithms for solving the park puzzle, and determining some bounds on the computational complexity of the puzzle. The most involved version of this project could be to prove those bounds. (The initial, intuitive hypothesis is that the park puzzle cannot be solved in polynomial time)
Update: I am looking into the proofs of NP-completeness of other pencil puzzle problems to gain an understanding of the techniques involved in proving such complexity bounds.
Idea #3
Name of Your Project Fast Integer multiplication
What research topic/question your project is going to address? There have been significant improvements in algorithms for fast multiplication of integers within the last decade (see Fast integer Multiplication by Anandya et al), approaching O(nlogn), which use modular arithmetic and computation on p-adics The research project would be to explore the theory behind these algorithms and verify their results.
Update: I am looking into the minimal mathematical background required to make sense of how the algorithms work, without necessarily getting into all of the details.
Idea#3 Iterative solvers for systems of Linear Equations
Description Large and sparse systems of linear equations appear in the solution to some partial differential equations by finite difference methods, and in general many day-to-day problem areas such as in engineering and scientific computing. As such the theory of developing methods for solving such large systems, and proving their correctness is an area of active research. in this project I would like to test the effectiveness of various iterative methods at finding solutions to systems linear equations with various characteristics by taking an experimental approach.
Update: no update for this idea
Idea: Breakdown of Mathematical Proofs Using Natural Language Processing
I wish to use natural language processing to break down a bachelor-level mathematical proof into the components that make up a proof (e.g. given knowledge, statements, calculations). This will be shown in a GUI so that the user can clearly see the build-up of their proof. Without constraints of time, some more technologies could be applied (machine learning) to give feedback to the user of the strength of their proof.
Update:
No update to this idea.
Character Description Generation from Novels
I want to use natural language processing to allow a user to enter a character’s name (fictional or non-fictional) in whatever PDF they please, and have the algorithm generate a list of facts/short descriptive paragraph about the character. This could be useful when doing novel summaries, studying history and remembering the roles of persons, etc.
Update:
This idea is new and came after a discussion with Charlie that my previous ideas were not too interesting ideas (ie. not much room for expansion, not much coding).
Photo to LaTex Generation
This idea came while looking over some of my math notes and wanting to digitalize them. After looking online, the technology does not seem to be there, with some very primitive attempts. I would like to attempt myself at allowing someone to digitalize their math notes in LaTex form. It would require symbolic and natural language processing, potentially machine learning upon more investigation.
Update:
This is also a new idea, again discussed with Charlie after doubts about the previous idea.
I further developed my ideas and added more details to each of them. Then I talked to Xunfei about modifications and got more suggestions from her. We looked through the research paper I found on Google Scholars together and searched for related articles. After the meeting, I went back to find some more articles. I think I now know what to choose as my final idea.
As suggested by Charlie, I chose a new direction for my third idea:
Name of Your Project? Geosocial Weight Algorithm
What research topic/question your project is going to address? Lots of social networks, including, for example, one that I created with my classmates last year, use geolocation services to sort data. Our social network uses location to not only sort and tag data, but to filter what is available to the user.
What technology will be used in your project? Location APIs, React Native (assuming that I build on to the pre-existing app we have built), Geosocial algorithms.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project? Requirements might include access to Apple devices for development and testing, such as a mac/macbook (could use one in hopper, or another lab), and some version of iPhone for testing, if making a mobile app is the most effective.
How are you planning to implement? Assuming I continue to work on the same basic network that we already began to set up, my implementation would continue in react native. We already have the basic framework of a social networking app, but I think it would be a good foundation on which to apply my ideas for geosocial algorithms
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project? My main idea for this is to create an algorithm which can efficiently update the viewable radius of a post based on the feedback from other users in the area. This algorithm would have to take many things into account, such as the population density, user density, post density, and how much positive and negative feedback should affect the geographic radius of each post.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project? Programming in react-native can be a bit of a challenge. This algorithm could be very complex, so it might get tricky to work with.
After updating my ideas, I picked out 5-7 articles for each of my ideas, quickly finding an abundance of relevant material. I also set up a meeting at the writing center this weekend to discuss how to get started writing, and I will start reading into the articles I found soon. I plan to try and meet with Charlie again soon to discuss my strategy moving forward, and to talk about the quality of the sources I aquired this week.
For this week, I updated my 3 proposal ideas and met with Charlie to review and seek his advice. Prior to this meeting, I found my 5 articles for each and used these discuss potential problems if each idea was used.
Post meeting w/ Charlie, I read a little deeper into the articles and now have a better idea on which proposal I may want to further investigate. Before I ead into the articles, I read the two PDF’s on Moodle about reading research papers and tried to implement this into my first and second pass of each article.
Idea 1
My first idea stays the same, making an online food ordering system that works over wifi. I need to think about how to differentiate my product, what is new with this, and how to test it.
Idea 2
A web platform aimed at helping people learn/practice math. Using a template, it would generate math questions, and allow people to try to solve them. It would also provide step by step solutions for people. This would be especially applicable to calculus. There are APIs that help with this, at least some open source.
Idea 3
A time tracker app for TAs, who are currently logging in their hours on a Google spreadsheet. This site could allow TAs to clock-in and clock-out, take attendance, and also show them how much they worked in each pay period. The app would also update the currently existing Google sheet with the new logs. This can also be packaged in a way that others can also use it.
Idea 1
Idea 2
Idea 3
Idea 1: Joseph Moore Museum Guided Tour
This project is an attempt at expanding the accessibility of the Joseph Moore Museum, especially to patrons whose first language is not English. The project is to create an app which will scan QR codes beside a museum exhibit, and provide information on that exhibit in the preferred language of the user. Audio narration for each language would extend accessibility even further. Additionally, exhibit traffic could be obtained by counting the QR scans for each exhibit, allow for a degree of analytics. To make the project fit the bill for a capstone, it would be necessary to plan from the beginning with generalization in mind. Rather than build specifically for JMM, I would build such that any museum could plug in their data and utilize it.
Technology
This project will utilize QR scanning technology, Unity for mobile app development, as well as web hosting to offload the exhibit information and audio files from the mobile device.
Software
This project will require a mobile development suite, most likely Unity given I have some familiarity with it. I will also need to host a web server for the files related to each exhibit (text description for each language selection, audio files, photos, etc). The app will utilize a modern smartphone with a camera of decent resolution, and internet connectivity.
Implementation
Before I begin, I will begin a conversation with the museum director about the project. Since my project will be associated with an established organization, it is important that the project goals align with the organization’s vision. I will also begin searching for people who would be interested in translating exhibit info from English to various languages such as Hindi, Spanish, and Japanese. Meanwhile, I will begin working on a prototype app with the goal being to successfully scans QR codes and displays different data based on the QR code scanned. After I have a working prototype, I will begin work on setting up a web server to host the exhibit information, and linking that to the app. Towards the end I will polish up the UI experience.
Novelty
My project will be providing new features and technology to the Joseph Moore Museum in order to expand its capacities for language accessibility.
Potential Issues/Difficulties
One of the most glaring issues with this project is scope. My unfamiliarity with web hosting combined with limited experience with mobile app design means making an accurate timeline will be quite difficult. Building a polished mobile app is time-consuming, and might not fit within the time-frame of the project.
JMM has a lot of exhibits, which means there is a lot of text to be translated and audio to be recorded. Finding people up to the task of translating and recording could prove to be quite difficult.
One last issue that has been brought to my attention is accessibility with respect to patrons who aren’t comfortable downloading apps. The most widely accessible version of this project is a website with pages for each exhibit directed to by QR codes. The shift of the project then becomes about managing the collection of translation data, rather than stretching my abilities in computer science.
Idea 2: Long Range RFID Guided JMM Tour
The basic idea here is to implement a multi-lingual app-based automated guided tour of the Joseph Moore Museum using long range RFID tags. While the app is open, it will scan for RFID tags present at each exhibit. When your smartphone is within a couple feet from the exhibit, the audio for that exhibit will play through the user’s headphones or speakers. Since exhibits at JMM are close together, it may be more practical to make the tags closer range, requiring the patron to touch their phone to the RFID tag. This project would require phones equipped with NFC capabilities. An extension to this project would be investigating how well google translate works on the exhibit descriptions. I will send google translate data from English to Russian of a few exhibit signs to Egor for accuracy analysis.
Idea 3: GPS-based Guided Tour of Earlham + Virtual Tour Using Drone Footage/Imagery
For this capstone idea I would design a guided tour of Earlham which utilizes GPS data to trigger informative audio clips as you pass Earlham’s various buildings. Multilingual accessibility is again crucial to this project. It would allow visitors who may not understand English fluently to take an informative tour of campus on their own time. This project would pair nicely with a virtual component as well. Using drones, I could capture video simulating a walking tour of campus, and stop at each location to play recorded audio describing each building. A simpler alternative would be stitching many still images taken in sequence, similar to Maps Street View; however, live video captures the liveliness of campus better, and would pair nicely with VR. Because high quality video isn’t cheap, a middle-path approach could be using street view style images to navigate from building to building, but have each building be associated with a 360 degree video clip to enjoy while the informative audio is played.
Project Idea One:
Name of Your Project
Implementing AI into Rhythm-Based Video Games
What research topic/question your project is going to address?
The project is going to attempt to address a common issue with rhythm games – particularly for mobile devices – where, upon finishing a song, the game goes into an ‘Endless Mode’. Currently, ‘Endless Mode’s tend to be the same song repeated, generally increasing in tempo as time goes on, which makes the game more repetitive and boring the better you are/longer you can last.
What technology will be used in your project?
I would use Unity, as well as Melodrive, primarily. Further technology, including alternative music-based AIs, may be explored as needed. A laptop or desktop computer to code on, as well as a mobile device, would be used for testing.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project?
The Unity game engine, Melodrive, a laptop or desktop, and a mobile device.
How are you planning to implement?
I would implement this project by first creating a simple rhythm-based game (one example of such would be the popular Piano Tiles), in Unity, creating a system by which the game can generate a level based on any song uploaded by the user. Once that framework has been created, I would use Melodrive’s Unity API (or create an API using another music-based AI if necessary) to generate infinite new music for a truly ‘Endless’ experience that will never bore the user with repeated music. The implementation would also allow a user to save the songs generated by the AI – each song would be of a similar length to the original song, and after each song, would become more intense/fast-paced/harder.
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?
My project is different from others due to the two fields it delves into – video game design, and AI. The project would be new from its conception; from what I can tell, there are currently no games or apps on the mobile market that can offer a non-repetitive ‘Endless Mode’ upon completion of a song/level. Similar technology could be used in any other video game, as well, instead of a repeating song serving as the background music.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?
The first difficulty I’ll have with this project is coding the initial game – while manually creating parameters for set songs (i.e. when to make objects for the player to tap, where to place them, and so forth) is easy, albeit time-consuming, making a program to dynamically create the level based on any input sound clip will be considerably more difficult. Additionally, depending on the limitations of Melodrive’s Unity API, it may be a challenge to create infinite music during the play session. If that is the case, I’ll have to jury rig it to do so, or alternatively create an all-new API using one of the other various music-based AIs.
Project Idea Two:
Name of Your Project
Copyright Infringement Detection in Music
What research topic/question your project is going to address?
There have been two major affronts on copyright law in recent times – a surplus of questionable copyright claims by various groups for audio and visual copyright infringement on YouTube, and the Flame v. Katy Perry trial, in which Flame claims Perry infringed on the copyright of his song Joyful Noise in her song Dark Horse. Currently, Flame has won the case, though it is likely to be appealed. While I am skeptical of the legitimacy of his claim, as well as many of those on YouTube, it is important for content creators and musicians to be aware if they are liable to be sued, or said to be infringing on copyright. As such, this project will attempt to create software which compares an input audio file to a library of music, to see if it is at risk.
What technology will be used in your project?
I’m unsure how exactly it would be handled at the moment, but extensive use of databases and database management software would be utilized – likely a database consisting of compressed data about each song, which it would compare to the input file.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project?
A desktop – and, in all likelihood, something holding such a database will need to be hosted on a server, if one is not readily available.
How are you planning to implement?
I would pull from databases of music in order to check them against the input file to check for liability of copyright infringement – potentially including a “how likely” measurement. I would look into Shazam and Google’s “what song is this” to see if I can incorporate any of that software.
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?
This project differs from others in the particular scope of the problem it is addressing – I’ve yet to see similar projects dealing with music in such a way, particularly in accordance to copyright law. I may be able to use some information found in prior projects having to do with databases of music (such as a music recommendation project I saw last year).
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?
Assuming I’m able to find a database to suit my purposes, the greatest difficulties will likely be time-based: going through a database of ‘every’ song would likely be time-consuming, so I’ll have to find ways with which to quicken the process. If there is no such database available, then I’ll face another problem – I’ll have to make my own database, likely with only a selected number of songs, as a test case for the project, which will turn more into a proof-of-concept than a useful tool.
Project Idea Three:
Name of Your Project
(Visual) Art to Music
What research topic/question your project is going to address?
Music is made with waves of sound; color is made with waves on the electromagnetic spectrum. Given the similarity, and the proximity to each other as art forms, this project seeks to turn a visual art piece into music, or vice-versa, by mapping various colors to different pitches of sound, based on the properties of their respective waves.
What technology will be used in your project?
Depending on which languages’ libraries work best with sound and image reading/manipulation, I’ll base the project around that language – this is something I would ask a professor for help in determining.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project?
At its core, no special software should be needed besides what I already have on my computer – language interpreters, code editors, etc.
How are you planning to implement?
I’d like to build this project from scratch. There would be a lot of work at the beginning, just trying to map images to sounds in a way that a painting wouldn’t come out to be a completely garbled mess – if I can’t find a way to do so without destroying the integrity of the project, it would mostly be used for turning songs into a visual representation. Currently, the plan would be to map each note to a new pixel, or batch of pixels.
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?
I haven’t seen a similar project like this via a few searches; as far as I can tell, this is more or less an original idea. What’s ‘new’ in this project is the transformation from audio to visual and vice-versa, aiming to result in a generally satisfactory end result.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?
I believe the most difficult portion of this will be in trying to turn a complicated picture into a satisfying, not convoluted and/or unpleasant, audio file. I do, however, believe the song-to-visual component would be significantly easier, though the resulting images may need to be kept rather vague as a result. The implementation of both sides could change drastically over the course of the project in order to get a pleasant result.
Changes to Idea #1
There were no major changes recommended, except that the scope of the project could be limited to classical iterative solvers of linear systems.
Idea #2
Name of Your Project Computational complexity of the ‘Park Puzzle’
What research topic/question your project is going to address? The Park Puzzle is a game that involves splitting a n*n grid into different colored continuous ‘parks’. A solution to a park puzzle involves marking the position of a tree in each park such that no two trees share a row or a column. The research topic involves exploring various algorithms for solving the park puzzle, and determining some bounds on the computational complexity of the puzzle. The most involved version of this project could be to prove those bounds. (The initial, intuitive hypothesis is that the park puzzle cannot be solved in polynomial time)
What technology will be used in your project?A simple Java program for generating park puzzles coded by Igor (similar apps are also available online). Pen and lots of paper.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project? If computational methods seem like the appropriate way to tackle the problem, then the appropriate software may be written in python for reasonably sized puzzles
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project? The project is more research oriented, and the end result is not a concrete implementation of an idea as a program.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project? It is quite likely that the problem is very complex, and a more restricted scope in the same direction might have to be chosen.
Idea #3
Name of Your Project Fast
multiplication using p-adics
What research
topic/question your project is going to address? There
have been significant improvements in algorithms for fast
multiplication of integers using p-adic numbers, approaching
O(nlogn). The research project would be to explore the theory behind
these algorithms and verify their results.
What
technology will be used in your project? C++
for writing the algorithms
What software and hardware
will be needed for your project? Cluster
for testing the algorithms
How is your project
different from others? What’s new in your project? It
is quite similar to the first idea I had proposed, but involves a
different area of mathematics.
What’s the
difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter
during your project? I expect
most of the difficulties to arise with understanding and analysing
the algorithms.
1. My first idea stays the same, but Xunfei recommended me to enable rating and commenting under each product to make the app a bit more interactive & informative. I will order recommendations for different skin types by star ratings. I am also thinking to include filtering by content, price, etc.
2. My second idea is similar to the first one, and it’s also on personalization with Machine Learning. I will be creating an app that will recommend makeup products such as lipsticks, eyeshadows, blush, etc. as well as their shades depending on the users’ “personal color”. The personal color analysis will be done using a quiz that will have a set of questions and perhaps facial recognition for higher accuracy. Then the app will pick out the best shades of makeup products that will go with your skin tone!
3. My third idea is making an app in which users can check for events happening not only at Earlham but also in nearby cities such as Richmond, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, etc. Students, faculty, and local residents get bored in a small town and are sometimes clueless about fun events happening nearby. I hope this app could get people more involved in the community. I am also thinking to include restaurant/movie deals that might be happening locally.
Breakdown of Mathematical Proofs Using Natural Language Processing
I wish to use natural language processing to break down a bachelor-level mathematical proof into the components that make up a proof (e.g. given knowledge, statements, calculations). This will be shown in a GUI so that the user can clearly see the build-up of their proof. Without constraints of time, some more technologies could be applied (machine learning) to give feedback to the user of the strength of their proof.
WhatsUp! : A Passive Event-Sharing Application for Friends
This application will enable a user to check on friends current/planned activities through a simple feed or calendar. Events will have scheduled times, lists of “agreed” participants, and the location. They can be confirmed events, or requests for an event, such as someone looking to go to Walmart at a certain time. Privacy settings could be configured to those in a Geo-Area, or to a specific list of friends, and notifications could also be customized.
Extensive Music Recommendation Website
This website will allow users to input songs and/or attribute values to return recommendations. Users will be able to view detailed analysis of their input tracks attributes and can search also with track attributes (e.g. acousticness, energy, speechiness). This will be done with the Spotify API.
A new way of 3d printing. The implementation includes a pixel grid that is controlled by a computer, the 3d object is converted into layers, the layer then controls the corresponding pixels the molten plastic flows through. Based on the layer the pixels ‘open’ and ‘close’ to form the 3d object. The pixel grid moves up as it finishes a layer forming the 3d object.
A drone that creates a google street view like map. A radius can be set using a mobile interface and the drone will go around using pathfinding algorithms. It will take images that will be stitched together to create a 3d space – google street view like maps. This can be used to map and study deep cave systems.
A new way of 3d printing. The implementation includes a pixel grid that is controlled by a computer, the 3d object is converted into layers, the layer then controls the corresponding pixels the molten plastic flows through. Based on the layer the pixels ‘open’ and ‘close’ to form the 3d object. The pixel grid moves up as it finishes a layer forming the
Based on natural language processing and AI – a program that takes in a description of the application that needs to be built. The AI will then use a natural language processor to convert the description to code. This can be useful for businesses that cannot afford to hire software developers to build their application.
1st Idea
My 1st idea pretty much stayed the same as it was last week w/ some additional details. Instead of just testing/researching about network security, Charlie advised to look into physical security (open ports on servers, etc) and social security.
2nd Idea
Hacking into an air gapped device. Air gapped means that none of the devices interfaces have connectivity to the internet. Many believe this secures their device. I could look into and possibly use my own devices to test on.
3rd Idea
Today, everyone has some sort of digital footprint. I could envision writing software, that given parameters such as name, DOB, and age, could go on the web and find more information about that person.
Thanks to Charlie for helping guide me to finding these ideas.
A Forum Site to Improve Student Access to Administrative Information
How do we improve communication between students and Earlham administration? Currently, when students have an administrative question, information is not easily found on Earlham’s website, and it is difficult to find the right person to talk to.
Open source forum code such as Reddit or Discourse.
HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and the dependencies for the forum code I choose.
Using an open source forum code, I will create a site for Earlham student to post questions about certain departments or offices. Members of the Earlham community can post replies, and administrators can moderate the categories of questions that apply to them. There also may be an automatically generated reply found by searching Earlham’s website. When a question has a lot of upvotes, it may generate an email to the relevant administrator.
This site would provide a single space for student questions, improving student access to campus information. This would also ease the burden on administrators answering the same questions from many students. While the site is built upon an existing forum model, it would be formalized for usage by Earlham students and administrators.
Finding the best existing forum source code to use will take time. Using the chosen forum basis, and being able to build upon it to work for both students and administrators is key. As with any software project, the project could run into problems of feasibility, so planning the minimum and most important features is also important.
Name of Your Project
Implementing AI into Rhythm-Based Video Games
What research topic/question your project is going to address?
The project is going to attempt to address a common issue with rhythm games – particularly for mobile devices – where, upon finishing a song, the game goes into an ‘Endless Mode’. Currently, ‘Endless Mode’s tend to be the same song repeated, generally increasing in tempo as time goes on, which makes the game more repetitive and boring the better you are/longer you can last.
What technology will be used in your project?
I would use Unity, as well as Melodrive, primarily. Further technology, including alternative music-based AIs, may be explored as needed. A laptop or desktop computer to code on, as well as a mobile device, would be used for testing.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project?
The Unity game engine, Melodrive, a laptop or desktop, and a mobile device.
How are you planning to implement?
I would implement this project by first creating a simple rhythm-based game (one example of such would be the popular Piano Tiles), in Unity, creating a system by which the game can generate a level based on any song uploaded by the user. Once that framework has been created, I would use Melodrive’s Unity API (or create an API using another music-based AI if necessary) to generate infinite new music for a truly ‘Endless’ experience that will never bore the user with repeated music.
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?
My project is different from others due to the two fields it delves into – video game design, and AI. The project would be new from its conception; from what I can tell, there are currently no games or apps on the mobile market that can offer a non-repetitive ‘Endless Mode’ upon completion of a song/level. Similar technology could be used in any other video game, as well, instead of a repeating song serving as the background music.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?
The first difficulty I’ll have with this project is coding the initial game – while manually creating parameters for set songs (i.e. when to make objects for the player to tap, where to place them, and so forth) is easy, albeit time-consuming, making a program to dynamically create the level based on any input sound clip will be considerably more difficult. Additionally, depending on the limitations of Melodrive’s Unity API, it may be a challenge to create infinite music during the play session. If that is the case, I’ll have to jury rig it to do so, or alternatively create an all-new API using one of the other various music-based AIs.
Joseph Moore Museum Guided Tour
This project is an attempt at expanding the accessibility of the Joseph Moore Museum, especially to patrons whose first language is not English. The project is to create an app which will scan QR codes beside a museum exhibit, and provide information on that exhibit in the preferred language of the user. Audio narration for each language would extend accessibility even further. Additionally, exhibit traffic could be obtained by counting the QR scans for each exhibit, allow for a degree of analytics.
My project will utilize QR scanning technology, Unity for mobile app development, as well as web hosting to offload the exhibit information and audio files from the mobile device.
My project will require a mobile development suite, most likely Unity given I have some familiarity with it. I will also need to host a web server for the files related to each exhibit (text description for each language selection, audio files, photos, etc). The app will utilize a modern smart-phone with a camera of decent resolution, and internet connectivity.
Before I begin, I will begin a conversation with the museum director about the project. Since my project will be associated with an established organization, it is important that the project goals align with the organization’s vision. I will also begin searching for people who would be interested in translating exhibit info from English to various languages such as Hindi, Spanish, and Japanese. Meanwhile, I will begin working on a prototype app with the goal being to successfully scans QR codes and displays different data based on the QR code scanned. After I have a working prototype, I will begin work on setting up a web server to host the exhibit information, and linking that to the app. Towards the end I will polish up the UI experience.
My project will be providing new features and technology to the Joseph Moore Museum in order to expand its capacities for language accessibility.
One of the most glaring issues with this project is scope. My unfamiliarity with web hosting combined with limited experience with mobile app design means making an accurate timeline will be quite difficult. Building a polished mobile app is time-consuming, and might not fit within the time-frame of the project.
JMM has a lot of exhibits, which means there is a lot of text to be translated and audio to be recorded. Finding people up to the task of translating and recording could prove to be quite difficult.
Name of Your Project? Corner Finder AI
What research topic/question your project is going to address? Can deep learning and/or neural networks be used over a set of imagery to identify rectilinear structures which might be undetectable to the human eye (in other words, structures that are buried, or very obfuscated).
What technology will be used in your project? Drones and drone imagery, as well as machine learning concepts like deep learning with training data and neural networks.
What software and hardware will be needed for your project? I would like to make this project so that it can be used with the data the IFS trip collected from Iceland this summer. This also gives me an advantage with testing/learning data, as we created quite a stockpile of the kind of drone imagery I would like to analyse.
How are you planning to implement? I plan to use python, or another language to create the software for this, possibly with support from some libraries (depending on language).
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project? From my first hand experience and preliminary research, it seems that most image analysis like this is done through direct processing of data, rather than by training an AI. The scripts we have used are mostly filtering the data that is there, rather than analyzing patterns. I think that this different approach might help us find things we wouldn’t find otherwise.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project? The main difficulty will likely be the complicated nature of this kind of software. I have a medium level of experience with AI concepts, but something at this level will undoubtedly get murky with details eventually.
Compile Python code into byte code.
To enable JVM to run python code. Since JVM executes bytecode, I want to find a way to automatically compile python code to byte code.
Software involved: JVM, javac, python interpreter
The difficulties come from the large scope of the language.
Name of My Project
Who’s Running?: In depth look at who’s running for what, when, and info about them.
What research topic/question is my project going to address?
What technology will be used in your project?
What software and hardware will be needed for your project?
How are you planning to implement?
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?
Buying tickets of popular concerts: the application imitates real users to buy concert tickets on the website. Users can set it up before the tickets opening date. As long as the tickets are open to sell, the application will immediately buy them. If the tickets are sold out, it keeps reloading the webpage until there are new tickets available.
One time I wanted to buy a concert ticket, but that concert was very popular, and tickets were sold out immediately. Then I kept reloading the website, hoping other people would cancel their orders. But I couldn’t keep reloading the page every second for the whole day. Then I thought if I can have software to do that for me. I did research and found that some web browser automation tools, for example, Selenium, can imitate operation like real users on a web browser. I searched online and found that most of this kind of software buy train tickets instead of concert tickets. The primary technology I will use is Selenium. And I will also need to learn how to read page source code. I will primary write a python script with Selenium to imitate real users buying a ticket online. Selenium can provide a web driver on Google Chrome to go to the target website. And the driver will locate element by tag names, element ID, XPath, class names and etc., and it can do automatic click and input.
But there are several difficulties in my project. The first one is money security. Some ticket websites require payment immediately while making the order. Therefore, users need to provide their website account and bank card information beforehand. I need to be careful about bank card security. The second problem is that this software is website-specific. Different websites require different processes to buy tickets. I need to write different codes to deal with different sites.
The third problem is that some websites require complicated verification on user login. I don’t know if web browser automation can deal with a very complicated verification. The last issue is that I don’t know if the scope of this project is big enough. I can have my software operates for several famous ticket websites and probably can have the mobile APP version.
Penetration testing to show the weaknesses of businesses
What results can be gained from businesses investing in someone do penetration
Personal computer & Network Adapter
Kali Linux OS, Virtual Box
Using the Network Adapter and Kali Linux’s built in features, access to a specific network becomes easier. Goals are described at the beginning and the attack is centered around those goals.
Other than Byron Roosa who graduated a few years ago, I am the only student who has had a security interest so this makes my project unique from others. My project is centered around helping the community. A penetration tests sole purpose is to help a business detect security flaws.
An obvious difficulty with my project is the legality associated with hacking. Getting a business to allow me to do this would take some convincing. Learning to navigate Kali Linux correctly would also be a difficulty.
Name of Your Project?
Pixel Printer
What research topic/question your project is going to address?
My project aims to improve the current process of 3d printing that is used for mainstream industrial 3d printing.
What technology will be used in your project?
What software and hardware will be needed for your project?
How are you planning to implement?
My implementation includes a pixel grid that is controlled by a computer, the 3d object is converted into layers, the layer then controls the corresponding pixels the molten plastic flows through,. Based on the layer the pixels ‘open’ and ‘close’ to form the 3d object. The pixel grid moves up as it finishes a layer.
How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?
My project is an entirely new concept. This process of 3D-printing does not exist. The current 3d printers consist of a nozzle through which the molten plastic flows, the nozzle then moves around forming the object which is very time consuming. My process uses a pixel grid that allows molten plastic to flow through the pixels forming the object.
What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?
Breakdown of Mathematical Proofs Using Natural Language Processing
How available and useful current technology is to address completeness of mathematical proofs in intro/bachelor level mathematics courses.
Python Natural Language Processing libraries, and SwiftUI for the GUI.
Languages: Python, Swift
Development: XCode
The end goal would be to assist students taking undergraduate classes.
I have not seen/be able to find applications of natural language processing towards the field of algebra and mathematical proofs.
Finding a large enough dataset to work with, that is consistent. Creating a strict enough rule set to classify proof components by.
This is a mega update on my to make up for several weeks of missing updates.
Talked to Dave and uploaded the outline for the proposal paper
In past week, I have spent time doing research to find interesting papers that I think will be related to my ideas. For each of my ideas there are at least five papers to take a look on at thee moment. However, for the last idea about a mobile application for time scheduling, I could only find some topics about effective time scheduling and mostly are just about general mobile application development. I have also read some paper for the first pass in order to briefly know what the authors were proposing in their papers and how well are those paper fit to my topics. I am also looking for available data sets for my first two ideas.
Read the CS papers help documents to understand how to read and understand the long papers.
Finding difficulties in searching for papers directly related to my ideas. Read a couple of papers according to the instructions which helped understand the material.
Met with Dave and Ajit to discuss the 3 ideas. The first 2 ideas were supported and I received some extra information about some features I can add to the project.
ACM membership is set- up and I am trying to refine the 3 ideas by looking up CS papers and discussing with fellow peers.
For this week, I have been looking for research papers on the three topics that I have chose, specifically for the Text Categorization and the Air Quality Monitoring system. Two things I found out:
– Air Quality Monitoring system:There have been many research on a low-price air quality system, some of which use the same technology as I do. This gives me two advantages: First is that I can reference and study those paper for my research. Secondly, I can compare the results I made on my model with that of other researchers so that my model monitoring system would be the same as the others (which would indicate that my model is working correctly).
– Text Categorization: It has been a research and application topic for over a decade. Many researchers have made considerable amount of progress on this topic, which provides me with more insight into the way to approach, which model should I use, etc… Furthermore, I have not found any documents about the application of Text Categorization on Social Media. Therefore my application can be a newly added topic. One thing that I need to worry about is how I am able to get the post and analyze them. Also, I need a pre-classified dataset to train my model in, which I haven’t found. Other than that, I think this can be a great topic to look into.
I have talked with Ajit about all three ideas and received some feedbacks and suggestion. Also, I have started finding research papers that are related to my ideas to read for next week.
Here are my ideas for topics! Another post with some cost analyses is coming soon!
Topic Name: Real-time management using Augmented Reality
Topic Description: Examine the applications of Head-Mounted augmented reality displays such as HoloLens or Project Northstar in real-time management scenarios like Theatre Stage Management or NASA rocket launch management and implement a basic proof of concept software to eventually be used in the Theatre department as part of my Theatre Capstone.
Topic Name: Using real-time spacial mapping to improve calling for stage managers during performances
Topic Description: Examine the feasibility of using technologies such as Kinect 2.0 in the area of theatre to allow stage managers to keep better track of the positions etc of their actors, allowing them to make more accurate cue calls when their vision of the actors might be obscured, and implement a proof-of-concept application for use in my Theatre Capstone.
Topic Name: Using micro controllers to facilitate cross-device communication and control
Topic Description: Use Arduinos or Raspberry Pis to allow two or more very different devices to be controlled by another device. For example, allow Qlab on a computer and cues on a light board to be controlled from a single application running on a different computer. If feasible, make a proof-of-concept for use in my Theatre Capstone.
I have changed two of my ideas upon re-evaluating the achievability of the project given my skill and the time limit I have
Idea 1: Optical Character Recognition using Machine Learning
Optical character recognition is not a completely new field of research. However, with the advance of today’s technology, we can apply machine learning to optical character recognition and therefore can recognize not only the printed characters but the more difficult handwritten characters or characters from different type of documents such as certificate or receipt. With the help of OCR, a lot of human work can be reduce. I would like to research about that specific use of machine learning in OCR to handle those harder cases.
Idea 2: Disease prediction
People have always want to know their health status therefore they can prepare and take a better care of their body. It is not difficult to know a person’s current health status since he/she can just go to hospital to have a general medical check. However, people also want to know what type of disease they may have the future, this is when disease prediction using machine learning will be useful. I would like to research about this topic but the first things I found to be difficult will be how to get the appropriate the training data set.
Idea 3: Time management application
Since students sometimes need help with planning the classes and studying for exams, I want to create an application that at first can suggest the best time for students to go class or what time to study. After that, each term, the student can input how well did he/she perform on those classes/exams and from that in the next term/semester the application may suggest a more specific timetable for that specific students to have a better performance.
Topic Name: Earlham Tennis App
Developing an app to use it as a way of improvement for the tennis players. Entering data during matches to get score stats, errors and serve percentages. All this data will be stored in a database and could be accessed at any time.
Topic Name: Box Office App
Again, develop a mobile application to manage the Earlham Box Office. Users would be able to look at the event schedule, purchase tickets. To make it efficient, the student data will have to be obtained in order to find from the directory.
Topic Name: Sensor
If possible, make a sensor that would be attached to the tennis racquet determining how much strength is used and how many balls were hit in a span of time. This would be collected and according to the body analytics of the player, it can be determined how to improve the performance. The stats can then be seen on a web application.