Browsing by Subject "Software"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    AVR PWM to I2C
    (2014-07-28) Murch, Austin
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    Development of a Multiple-Camera Tracking System for Accurate Traffic Performance Measurements at Intersections
    (Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2013-02) Tang, Hua
    Automatic traffic data collection can significantly save labor work and cost compared to manual data collection. However, automatic traffic data collection has been one of the challenges in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). To be practically useful, an automatic traffic data collection system must derive traffic data with reasonable accuracy compared to a manual approach. This project presents the development of a multiple-camera tracking system for accurate traffic performance measurements at intersections. The tracking system sets up multiple cameras to record videos for an intersection. Compared to the traditional single-camera based tracking system, the multiple-camera one can take advantage of significantly overlapped views of the same traffic scene provided by the multiple cameras such that the notorious vehicle occlusion problem is alleviated. Also, multiple cameras provide more evidence of the same vehicle, which allows more robust tracking of the vehicle. The developed system has mainly three processing modules. First, the camera is calibrated for the traffic scene of interest and a calibration algorithm is developed for multiple cameras at an intersection. Second, the system tracks vehicles from the multiple videos by using powerful imaging processing techniques and tracking algorithms. Finally, the resulting vehicle trajectories from vehicle tracking are analyzed to extract the interested traffic data, such as vehicle volume, travel time, rejected gaps and accepted gaps. Practical tests of the developed system focus on vehicle counts and reasonable accuracy is achieved.
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    eCos Libraries v1
    (2014-06-26) Taylor, Brian
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    eCos Libraries v2
    (2014-07-09) Taylor, Brian
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    Evaluating the information content of human microbiomes
    (2022-03) Hillmann, Benjamin
    Microbes vastly outnumber all other organisms on earth and are integral to many aspects of the ecological fitness of the earth’s soils, oceans, animals, and plants. Unfortunately, most of the microbes in these communities cannot be cultured, so to observe these communities’ biological functions, we must study their DNA. After a researcher sequences a microbial community, they utilize informatics methods to correlate the taxonomic and functional profiles to their traits of interest. However, these methods assume that the underlying taxonomic and functional profiling are accurate. If procedures are developed to identify the profiles of a community more accurately, the increased precision will enable higher power testing of hypotheses and detection of these communities’ causal roles. We propose novel, accurate, and data-efficient methods for taxonomic and functional profiles in shotgun metagenomic datasets.
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    Flight Code Baseline 2014 v1
    (2014-07-10) Taylor, Brian
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    Ground Station
    (2014-06-27) Taylor, Brian
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    History of science and technology.
    (2012-02) Zepcevski, Joline
    Changes in computer programming methods were responses to specific stimuli, and that (contrary to much existing analyses) the development of programming methods does not fit an ideal of "progress." I focus on the rise of two fundamental computing problems: complexity, or the proliferation of people and methods; and verification, which is the (in)ability to verify that a program functions as intended. Complexity and verification were the catalyst for the development of automatic coding systems but also increased exponentially as a result of automatic coding systems like FORTRAN and COBOL. These systems have English-like commands that simplify programming. The adoption of automatic coding systems opened up the programming field to more software engineers and allowed the creation of more elaborate software systems, creating ever more complexity in the discipline. I argue that since the introduction of automatic coding systems in the 1950s, methodological changes and new programming languages have been attempts to solve long standing problems faced by programmers. Not, as the traditional insider narrative suggests, a steady evolution based on a better understanding of programming. In this dissertation, I focus on the changes motivated by two stimuli -- complexity and verification.
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    Improvement of Driving Simulator Eye Tracking Software
    (Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2019-06) Davis, Brian; Morris, Nichole L.; Achtemeier, Jacob D.; Easterlund, Peter
    This work focuses on improving the eye tracking analysis tools used with the HumanFIRST driving simulator. Eye tracking is an important tool for simulation-based studies. It allows researchers to understand where participants are focusing their visual attention while driving. The eye tracking system provides a nearly continuous record of the direction in which the driver is looking with respect to real-world coordinates. However, this by itself does not give any information about the objects at which the driver is looking. To determine when a driver is fixated on a given element in the simulated world (e.g., a vehicle or sign), additional processing is necessary. Current methods to process this data are time and resource intensive, requiring a researcher to manually review the eye tracking data. This motivates an automated solution that can automatically and programmatically combine eye tracking and simulator data to determine at which object(s) (either in the real world or the simulated world) the driver is looking. This was accomplished by developing and implementing software capable of providing useful eye tracking data to researchers without requiring time and resource intensive human intervention and hand coding of data. The data generated by the analysis software was designed to provide a set of summary statistics and metrics that will be useful across different simulation studies. Additionally, visualization software was created to allow researchers to view key simulator and eye tracking data for context or insight or to identify and characterize anomalies in the analysis software. Overall, the software implemented will increase the efficiency with which eye tracking data can be used alongside simulator data.
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    Reducing waste in issue tracking for regulated software development
    (2013-12) Drew, Touby Austin
    Issue tracking in software development for the medical device industry is the process of converting issues into documentation and product to be delivered to such stakeholders as regulatory agencies, clinicians, and the medical device business itself. Issues track and document the concern, its resolution, and associated review. Issue tracking is essential to rigorously documenting, guiding, and exposing the story of the work completed as part of each issue. A significant amount of effort is spent in the issue tracking process and the problem of reducing waste in it is the focus of this thesis.The work described in this thesis makes contributions in the form of improved support for issue tracking and advances in theory for addressing sources of waste within the medical device industry. This thesis examines sources of waste identified by issue analysis and ethnography. It also describes novel capabilities developed into advisor agent software to address these sources of waste. Then it describes and evaluates the practical use and impact of targeted education and the advisor agent software capabilities for issue tracking over a number of months within the world's largest medical device manufacturer. Finally, evidence of significant improvements in the rate and nature of issue rejection are presented along with data showing greater improvements associated with use of the advisor agent.
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    Response Modification for Enhanced Operation and Safety of Bridges
    (University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies, 2011-08) Gastineau, Andrew; Schultz, Arturo; Wojtkiewicz, Steven
    This report shows that safe extension of the service life of existing bridge structures is possible through bridge health monitoring and structural response modification. To understand bridge health monitoring and structural response modification and control, it is necessary to examine: 1) common bridge vulnerabilities, 2) bridge loading models, 3) response modification devices, and 4) bridge monitoring systems. The efficacy of response modification techniques on a realistic bridge system were demonstrated using the Cedar Avenue Bridge in Minnesota as a specific example. The Cedar Avenue Bridge is a steel tied arch bridge which means that it is fracture critical. Due to the non-redundant nature of a fracture critical bridge, fatigue failure could be catastrophic and is of concern. Previous research has shown that stress concentrations exist at the joints where the hangers and floor beams are attached to the box girder [7]. Using a simulation of response modification on the Cedar Avenue Bridge model, stress ranges have been reduced on these specific details that are of concern. Modeling using a scissor jack and simple damping device has shown that stress ranges can be reduced by approximately 39% which can lead to life extension of as much as 346%.
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    Wrangling Software: computing professionals and the interpretation of software ownership in the University computing environment.
    (2011-02) Cleveland, Lara L.
    This project explores the way information about law is transformed into organizational policies and practices. Existing literature emphasizes the state and organized professional groups as primary interpreters of the law and as creators of legal implementation strategies in the organizational setting. This case study of university responses to software-related intellectual property protections focuses on the role of computing professionals in the creation and implementation of university policies and practices related to software ownership. This case challenges and extends existing research about professional construction of the law by examining a loosely organized profession, computing, and a law for which the state provides little or no regulatory enforcement. This research finds that professional boundary maintenance among computing professionals is difficult in a labor force environment where demand for professionals outpaces the availability of persons to do the work. Professional boundaries remain undefined or fluid, and credentialing efforts fail, in markets for which labor supply cannot meet the demand. However, control over physical machinery serves as an alternative boundary maintenance mechanism within the organization. Managing usage rights, and consequently software ownership permissions, through the digital protections already provided in the software and hardware systems is often justified to `protect users from themselves,' but with consequences for information exchange. Organizational emphasis on data privacy, file sharing, and security compete against pressures toward information openness in the university setting. The closed-machine system of dealing with privacy, security, and consequently ownership, align with the professional boundary maintenance efforts of computing professionals and is reinforced by bureaucratic organizational concerns of the university in desired outcome, if not fully in terms of philosophy or justification. Academic and technological scripts of openness and autonomy present opportunities for computing professionals to broadly interpret the increasingly restrictive policies on who can have full access to computing machinery. Rather than resist closed systems through rule breaking, copying, "stealing," or "piracy," computer professionals resist closed systems through active support of open source technologies, through extra efforts at ensuring interoperability among different computing platforms and programs, and primarily for those computer users who can also be defined as computer experts.