Undergraduate Scholars Program

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The Undergraduate Scholars Program (USP) is one of the largest multidisciplinary undergraduate research programs at MSU. We are here to help undergraduate students in all disciplines pursue research, scholarship, and creative projects.



The Undergraduate Scholars Program (USP) facilitates, supports, and promotes undergraduate research and scholarship by providing funding and logistical support directly to students.

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Author: search.filters.author.Thompson, Ryan

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    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.
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    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.
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