MSU Student Research Celebration

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/405

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Blueprints MSU: The Game
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Trapp, John; Mattioli, Tyler; Sanders, Jason
The transition between high school and college can be a daunting experience for many students. The problem with traditional college prep is that it is expensive because of the high demand on resources. It requires dedicated staff at every high school or a roaming team of specialists. The cost for implementing these programs are simply too high for most school systems. To mitigate costs, and to help improve the transition to college life, the Montana State University School of Computing has partnered with the College of Education to design and build a mobile application to help high school students answer important questions they may have and also to learn about the formal and informal societal roles and regulations of university life. Before the involvement of the School of Computing, the Blueprints team traveled to high schools in the area seeking questions and concerns about college. They catalogued approximately 450 unique questions. This project involves the review of the questions gathered during prior activities and produce a game that is able to answer them adequately. To create our game, we used GameMaker, a software suite designed for making games. Overall, the Blueprints game will address these formal and informal societal roles and help provide high school students a look into the complexities of university life and to remove the apprehension of living alone. In the future we plan to conduct studies on its effectiveness, then we will release it to high schools to get both their feedback, and hopefully their students: ready to tackle their university tenure.
An Investigation of Musical Structure with Persistent Homology
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Tomlinson, Angus
While topological data analysis (TDA) is seldom used in natural language processing, TDA techniques have been even more rarely applied to the realm of music. Therefore, we are seeking to understand the topological structure of music with persistent homology, a TDA tool for measuring the persistence of simplicial complex filtrations. Borrowing a “bag of words” technique from natural language processing, we are converting measures in a song to “bag of notes” vectors. From these vectors, we will produce Vietoris-Rips filtrations of the songs and analyze the resulting filtrations with persistent homology. Using this approach, we hypothesize that we will be able to define an inverse relationship between a song's underlying persistence and its constituent notes. This inverse topological descriptor could be used to highlight structural components of a song that would not be evident by merely observing a song's notes. This tool would be quite useful to topologists and musicians alike, and would lay the foundation for future research on the structure of music.
Applying Techniques from Topological Data Analysis on a Celestial Data Set: The Bigger Picture
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Thompson, Ryan
As the field of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) continues to grow and develop, there are an increasing amount of applications that lend themselves towards this type of data analysis. This research applies the processes of TDA on a celestial data set provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with the hopes to help show and demonstrate the galactic uniformity that has past been observed. In order to achieve this, the large point cloud must first be parsed into different groups, or “windows”, that focus on a select spatial region. This allows for the scope to be narrowed to these smaller, computational manageable sectors. Once these viewing areas are established, the methods of TDA can be employed on each individual region, ultimately producing a persistence diagram that then acts as a descriptor for that chosen window. In order to best sample this data set, two methods will be used: cubical decomposition and a random “cookie-cutter” approach. The number and size of the cubes and “cookies” will be varied to ensure that all aspects of the set are captured. The diagrams that will then be created for each region are able to be compared and contrasted, revealing the spatial nature that is inherently present in these celestial manifolds.
Visualizing Point Clouds in Virtual Reality
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Thompson, Ryan; Wright, Tyler
As the field of virtual reality (VR) continues to grow and expand, there is an ever-increasing need for VR applications and programs. This project is sponsored by Blackmore Sensor and Analytics under the Software Factory program. The main objective is to take LIDAR-created point clouds and shift them into a VR environment. Once these points are in a VR setting, a user can then navigate the space and view the point cloud from any angle, height, and/or distance, thus allowing technicians to observe potential latent sampling errors or to simply grant users a videogame experience in VR environments. In order to achieve this goal, the point cloud must first be loaded into Unity, a game engine that provides application development for VR devices. Once the points are in a Scene, a user is granted the ability to navigate the VR space by way of a physics capsule, a movement system, a simple menu, and a cross-hair component. In the future, we plan on computing meshes for these VR environments, therefore granting the user a simulated physical world with realistic collision detection.
The Paranoid Writer’s Vault
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Stone, Travis
For writers, collecting, organizing and securing one’s work can be challenging. There are, of course, tools that writers can use that are already readily available, but these tools rarely meet all the needs of a writer and are never tailor-made to a writer’s specific needs. To address this shortcoming, I created a system that could handle all of the various tasks needed in order to better organize and secure a writer’s work. The system can be divided into three sections; an online file storage and database server, a web based text editor, and a note-taking android application. The server’s operating system is Ubuntu and hosts a database that organizes notes by date, genre, type (ex. Lines, morals, themes, etc.), and whether they are associated with an ongoing project or are independent. The server also hosts a website that contains a text editor for editing documents hosted on the server. The editor only has a few functions (bold, italics, plus others) as implementing a text editor to the standard of Microsoft Word, for example, is not necessary in the context of this project. The android application is designed to take notes and quickly organize them into the appropriate folder or database. Possible future improvements to the system might include adding several additional servers to host all the data on a cloud network, as well as integrating a remote command system that will be able to accept and then execute certain commands.
Wagon: The Social Media Wish List
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Splady, Aaron
There are many online shopping websites that allow you to create wish lists. These have a very large shortcoming in that they are website specific. Wagon aims to be a consumer-focused site to allow people to easily share any item they are interested in with their friends. It is centered around each user having different lists with varying degrees of privacy. Users will be able view their own lists, the lists of their friends, and public lists. If a user would like to buy an item for another user, they will be able to click on a link that will direct them to the product page. The goal of Wagon is to streamline online gift shopping so that users can spend less time shopping online and give gifts that are exactly what the recipient desires.
Storytelling: Computer Science for American Indians in the Middle Grades
(Montana State Univeristy, 2017-04) Smith, Hayley
Computer Science is rarely taught in the high schools, and even less likely to be taught in a middle school. However, research suggests that students decide if they will continue in STEM by the end of 8th grade. Students have a natural ability to tell stories, especially the students from tribal communities who use stories to express themselves. ALICE is developed to be an easy to learn programming software that uses 3D graphics to provide instantaneous results to the user. This research project will develop curriculum using ALICE to teach computational thinking and computer science to middle school students by embedding storytelling activities into the Indian Education for All standards currently implemented across the state of Montana. To increase effects of these research, a website will also be developed to provide the community information about the project, research results and the lessons developed.
Charging Station and Automated Docking for Tangobots
(Montana State University, 2017-04) Pruss, Dominik; Soddy, James; Busby, Brandon
As the size and number of motorized robots under the Computer Science Department increases, so does the time and manpower required to maintain the robots. The purpose of this project is to design and build a prototype charging station for Tangobots, the newest generation of robots being introduced to the Computer Science Department. This will enable the Tangobots to charge themselves, saving significant manual effort by operators. Currently the only way to charge the Tangobots is to manually charge each battery independently after removal from the device. In this project we will design and create a charging station that is easily mounted by the Tangobots. We will also create an API that will be implemented by the Tangobots, which will monitor the current battery level and determine when to navigate to a charging station, dock with a charging station, and charge its battery with little to no user assistance.
Covariance in the Human Brain
(Montana State University, 2017-04) O'Dea, Justin
The goal of this research is to better understand brain functions of individuals engaging in shared activities. The data that is collected from our research will better help us understand covariance in the human brain. We will compare participants’ brain waves by using an Electroencephalography (EEG) which measures brain oscillations. The shared activities will range from reading a book, watching a video, or reciting text from a theater play. Covariance is measured by the joint inconsistency of two variables when they are at random. The brain oscillations of interest are known as Alpha, Beta, Theta, Delta, Gamma, and mu oscillations. Each oscillation is represented by various frequencies, which are measured in Hertz. To determine the different frequencies of the oscillations, subjects will be asked to take part in a shared activity. Subjects will perform multiple activities, and the data being produced from the subject’s brain oscillations will be recorded by the EEG. After data has been recorded, researchers will examine which waves or collection of waves best capture covariance when people are sharing an experience. This research has the potential to broaden our understanding of the human brain, and may lead to future developments in the field.
wFlow: Machine Learning Assisted Flowchart Generation Module for the wDesk Platform
(Montana State University, 2017-04) O'Bleness, Mackenzie; Peters, Lisa
wDesk, a financial services reporting platform created by Workiva, allows users to aggregate a wide variety of data about internal processes and requirements within the platform. Despite the presence of this data within wDesk, users still frequently use this same data outside of the platform to manually create process flow diagrams for reporting. In order to improve this workflow, Workiva partnered with the MSU Software Factory to create a module that will allow users to generate a flowchart from the existing data within the wDesk system that meets the high product standards of the company. This new module, called wFlow, was developed using Workiva’s standard development practices and technologies. Following an agile development cycle, wFlow was implemented using Dart and React, and utilizes Workiva’s publicly available front-end frameworks, w_module and w_flux. To optimize the generated flowcharts, the use of machine learning algorithms was explored for the purposes of creating a clear and readable graph layout without user oversight, when given only the data that comprises the nodes and connections of the graph. The integration of wFlow into the wDesk ecosystem will significantly improve the workflow of its users and open the door for further machine learning integration into Workiva products.

MSU Student Research Celebration

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