2006
Sr. Papers

information compression is a high priority in current and future technologies. Many of the innovations that we use today such as television broadcast, cellular phone service, internet file sharing, and computer multimedia require voluminous data transfers. The need to transmit increasingly large files puts heavy pressures on current compression technology and the people that develop it. This also means that as the rate of information distribution increases there will be further need for better compression algorithms. This is the problem that I wish to examine further in my project. The purpose of this project is to investigate a new data compression algorithm. This is a very broad and difficult goal however, so I do not wish to put myself to the task of developing a complete and efficient algorithm that is ready for public use. Instead I intend to only investigate ways of manipulating data to remove redundancy that have potential to become useful products. My main focus will be to develop an original compression algorithm since I do not wish to synthesize existing techniques together.

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The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)'s primary objective is to archive and service from eh archive climatic data gathered from around the world. In support of that objective, their organizational structure has many divisions and braches within those divisions that have specific roles to complete tasks. Each of these branch levels has their own independent mechanism for gathering, tracking, and sharing knowledge. This fact is also true of the organization's IT branch, whose goal is to place, develop, administer, and maintain the hardware and network infrastructure to meet NCDC's needs. It is critical, especially for continuity of operations, that knowledge on procedures, guidelines, and general information on business-related subject matters be retained and shared with current and future employees in the organization. At this time, in the Information Technology Branch alone, there are six knowledge bases that have no interoperability and no mechanism to share information from one knowledge base to another. The six knowledge bases are either based on a flat-file database (infrodesk, sbdesk), MySQL (Cerberus helpdesk and knowledge base), or FoxPro (IT Access System, IT Hardware Inventory). There are justifications for each system to be configured as it is, but primarily each system was developed, it seems, in a vacuum from other systems. As needs change or systems grow beyond their original intent or size, those systems are not always updated or migrated to newer designs that better meet current needs.

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The Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) is a non-profit foundation dedicated to providing research and educational access to radio and optical astronomy located in Rosman, NC. At present PARI is in the process of bringing several optical telescopes online, to be accessed over the World Wide Web. The enclosures for the five telescopes include two "roll back" roofs, two "clam type" enclosures and one "swing up" door. All these telescopes are located over five hundred meters from the main control room. A computer in the main control room controls the opening and closing of the telescope enclosures, however, at present there is no encoding of the exact position of the roofs or doors as they open and close. Thus, at present, there is an "open" or "close" signal sent, with no feedback as to the progress of the operation of the roofs or doors. Dr. Denninsion and DR. Castelaz would like to have the position of the roofs and doors encoded such that the position would be known to within two to three centimeters.

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I will be working to create an interactive applet for a small yet developing web based company, apathy named AshevilleNow. This company, owned by recent CS graduate Justin Belleme, is a business website dedicated to virtually anyone's edification of everything Asheville and the surrounding area. My contributions to this site will be an interactive map of the greater downtown vicinity, including linked database highlights such as local art galleries or bars. Visual and detailed directions, highlights, media content, and relevant information will be provided inside of this program. These services will be free and offered to anyone worldwide as an informational public service to those interested in learning what makes Asheville special.

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This project is a demonstration of cube environment mapping for simulation reflection in interactive 3D environments. This application is native to OS X with a complete GUI. It allows for users to open an external file that defines the objects in the world to be rendered. The interface allows for the user to rotate the loaded object in real time displaying the reflected surfaces as defined in the file. It was written in Objective-C++ with Xcode, uses JPEGs as textures, and a scene-graph file format inspired by XML.

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My project's purpose was to web-enable the CEDAR system by implementing a web service on a web server and invoking it with the CEDAR client side program. In order to implement and install a web service into the CEDAR System I gained a fundamental understanding of both web services and the CEDAR System. I built the web service for CEDAR using Netbeans 5.0. Netbeans has great support and tutorials for web services built into it. Once built the service was deployed to the Sun Java System Application Server. After successful test, Dr. Brownsmith and I began the process of connecting the web service to both the client and server sides of the CEDAR System.

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Econvoz.com is the name of the web site store which will sell prepaid phone cards. This web site contains a web application which consists of a shopping cart, an administrator control panel and a user panel. The user will be able to buy a phone card in 3 easy steps: First, the user will be able to search a phone card that is adequate for the user's calling destination. Then the user will be able to add as many phone cards as he/she wants to the shopping cart. When eh user is ready to check out, he/she will be able to pay with paypal and get the pin numbers and 1-800-numbers from the system right away. The user will be able to track the orders that have been made by him/her. Within each order, there will be a link to the card's) information. By doing this the user will be able to look at the pin #s as many times as he wants.

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It is my intention to examine the intricacies of programming robots in a three-dimensional simulated environment. Robots receive a stream of information from the environment: information about other objects in the environment, boundaries, light intensity, color, other robots, and anything else the robot is programmed and hardwired to assess. Physical interactions must be considered as well, including gravity, friction, kinematics, and the mechanics of collisions, This information must be processed by the robot's brain to make decisions without external influence. The purpose of this project is to study the intricacies of robotics programming using cross-platform software which has multiple simulation environments available.

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Middleware is a successful technology in the business environment that allows companies to introduce flexibility into their business models and integrate multiple systems. This technology solves problems of communication between legacy applications and new applications by transforming data into a standard format. The purpose of this project is to research and develop a middleware solution for the Clustered Environmental Data Archive (CEDAR). CEDAR is operating not in a business environment but a science-based environment and runs large amounts of queries on extremely large data sources. Integrating it with a middleware component will allow extensibility of the current system. It will allow multiple data sources to be queried at once and allow transaction processing across distributed applications all because of a built-in rules engine that directs data and notifications based on states.

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Tyco Valves & Controls produces various pressure relief and control valves for industrial use. These valves are primarily used to insure the protection of lives and property. An Automatic Recirculation (ARC) Valve is a valve that is designed to protect property in the form of a pump. The concept is that when a downstream process is stopped. The ARC valve will automatically redirect flow of a fluid into a reservoir to allow a pump to continue to operate. If the flow was not redirected, the pump would eventually "Dead-head" and be unable to push fluid into the process line causing damage to the pump. Determining the correct valve in order to properly size and select a valve. Since many consumers of this product do not have engineering degrees, and because internal engineering resources are limited, many potential customers choose to do business with competitors that have software applications that help them to size and select the proper valve for their application.

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Asheville Thermoform Plastics is a small manufacturing company located in Fletcher, NC that produces a variety of thermoformed plastic products. As of right now for every customer, new or existing, when a new product is ordered only one person in the company, the owner, is able to give the customer a quote. The owner would like an application that will allow anyone in the company to generate a quote for a customer.

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Payroll systems are widely available to individuals and corporations for purchase and free use. Very few of these packages address many of the unique needs of independently contracted software developers. I propose to develop a software application that is widely available to these developers, which addresses the unique situations that it must be used in, such as the ability to access the system from anywhere, as well as to have multiple, projects and employers in the same interface. This application will be available in a web interface, and new designed for both employers and employees needs. The application will offer detailed reporting of hours and work done on projects, as well as the ability for a user to work for more than one employer without having multiple payroll systems. Being available on the internet they system will require some security measures to be in place, a simple username/password system will be used.

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The field of computer graphics is becoming an increasingly important and influential part of computer science. Many techniques are used in computer graphics to create the image that is most suited for its purpose. The Marching Cubes algorithm is over of the most famous algorithms used in scientific visualization. This algorithm, which was first described by Harvey Cline and Bill Lorenson, is used to create a surface model from serial section. While this algorithm has been discussed in my classes, we did not implement the algorithm. The Marching Cubes algorithm is included in the Association of Computing machinery's juried publication of the forty-eight most important papers in Computer Graphics, Seminal Graphics: Pioneering Efforts That Shaped The Field, edited by Rosalee Wolfe. Unlike many famous algorithms, quick sort for example, the marching cubes algorithm implementation is not easily examinable. I would like to develop an application with an easy to use graphical user interface that implements the marching cubes algorithm. This application will be aimed towards an audience that is knowledgeable with the medical purposes of reconstructing an image from data slices. The application would allow the user to easily load the slides in, create a 3D model from them, and be able to easily manipulate this model. Features that the application will include are: Importing of multiple slides, Data preprocessing of the slides, Automatic reconstruction (changes will be immediate, and noticeable), Zooming, rotation, and slicing of the 3D model.

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This program is an implementation of the Wizards of the Coast board game RoboRally. The goal of the game is to navigate the dangerous factory floor in order to tag the two flags, and the first player to accomplish this is the winner. Players face obstacles on the board - in the form of conveyor belts, pits and rotators - an in the other players, both by being shot at and by being pushed off course. Players must plan carefully, as they are allowed only limited movement options each turn, and these become even more restricted as the robots take damage. Robot Race was written in Java using the Net Beans IDE. It imports .jpg and .png files for use as graphical elements, and reads a text file for board configuration.

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Gallery on demand is a photo sharing web application designed to make the process of sharing libraries of digital images fast and easy. Once an account has been created users are allowed to upload, group into galleries, comment, and rate their digital images. They then can give their username to friends and family allowing them to view their galleries. Incorporating a "drag and drop" system, creating galleries, and grouping images together can be done with ease. The application also supports several query options, allowing users to query images by date, search captions for keywords, or view by rating allowing easy access to images which user want to mark as their favorites.

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The owner of Oodenaa Zem, inc. asked me to develop a web application based on their existing product, I-WayInfo, which is currently a Palm Pilot application. This software provides interstate exit information within the United States for travelers in the forty-eight contiguous states. Additional details about the original product can be found at www.iWayInfo.com. The owner gave me a database containing data for three states and a palm Pilot with I-WayInfo installed. My goal was to develop a web-based proof of concept application with similar functionality to I-WayInfo. As a proof of concept, this project was designed to work on a limited set of mobile devices with the intent of adding support for more devices in the future. The web pages are written with XHTML BASIC to ensure compatibility with the greatest number of devices. Testing was performed using emulators provided by Microsoft for the 2003 Smartphone and the Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC. In the end, the customer is happy with the results and wishes to pursue further development. I am looking forward to seeing this project develop into a product.

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I am a math tutor and I have found out that students do not like geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. Also, they do not know the geometric shapes well. So, they can not figure out the line equation y=mx+b, nor even how to define slope = y/x. Therefore, I would like to use my senior project to create a geometry program. I have immersed myself in Eastern and Western culture and education, so I have two different philosophies to help me search for the right way to help my students and my program. The strategy for my program is a simple, easy and fun way to learn geometric shapes, and I would like my students to enjoy learning math. My program will use a mouse and keyboard to input function. The keyboard will be used to choose colors or clear the drawing. The mouse is used for drawing. The Geometry Visualization: 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D Objects with Computer Graphics was written in Python and Pygame. Python is free, open source, and easy to use. Python scripts are portables across many platforms, all major Unix systems, Linux, Windows 95/98, Windows NT, and MacOS.

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The Universal Photo Editor is an image editing program created with those unaccustomed to image editing in mind. The program's interface is designed to be both intuitive and easy to use. After being loaded, an image can be rotated, flipped or cropped. The program includes tools to blur and sharpen an image to enhance the image's appearance. A customizable 3x3 image processing kernel is provided for more advanced users. The user can display a histogram of the image's color channels anytime during the editing process. When finished, the user can save the image in a format of the user's choice. All interfaces were designed so that new features could be added easily in future versions of the program. This application was created using the Java programming language so that it can be installed on any computer that supports java applications.

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The Eastern Forest Threat Assessment Center is an organization dedicated to providing science and technology for early detection and assessment of environmental threats. EFETAC recently began a project with the purpose of developing an information system that would use existing environmental data to aid in the early detection of threats to forests. The EFETAC project team, operating under James Fox and Karin Lichtenstein, is faced with the need to organize, categorize, index, and search through information relating to the risks threatening forests in the Eastern United States. In addition, the project team needs to be able to add to, update, delete, and view this data, and this data also needs to be viewable by other key groups and individuals. These needs are complicated by a couple factors. First, the paths leading to these data sources are often times disconnected or simply hard to follow. Secondly, the information the team is seeking is often times incongruent; that is, it comes from a wide variety of sources and is composed of differing data types.

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