ABSTRACT. Utah State University’s ACM-W’s long-running mission is to stimulate the surrounding community towards the enchantment regarding technology, more specifically computer science. According to statistics provided by Gallup only one out of four k-12 schools offer computer science courses when 90% of parents want their children to learn programming. Introducing a child early on to technology allows them to learn and grow comfortably increasing their chances of picking a technology related field of study or career in the future. ACM-W put together a project that would allow us to reach out to the children of our community and exploit their curiosity with Squishy Circuits.

ABSTRACT. This talk presents work on a study on using perception as a way to enhance training in virtual reality. Previous research has shown that the perceptions people have in the moment can actually influence their performance on a task, in that moment. For example, if an individual is performing poorly at a task which they have to hit a baseball with a bat, then that individual actually views the ball as smaller, or harder to hit. If an individual is performing excellent at the same task, that individual perceives the ball as smaller, or easier to hit. In this research, we seek to understand how this phenomenon can be used to enhance virtual reality training. In this study we collect initial data on a participant’s perception on a task in the real world. Then, have the participant complete the task in VR where the objects are manipulated to change perception. Finally, we test the participant’s performance in the real world after training exposure to see what manipulation of perception had a positive influence on performance. Our results could have implications for how virtual reality training is used in just-in-time scenarios.

ABSTRACT. The Great Salt Lake has great economic and ecological value, yet is often seen in a negative light. Microbialites, sedimentary structures formed by microorganisms, are key to the Great Salt Lake’s continued health. The structures’ activities are not well documented. This project follows a collaboration between the Great Salt Lake Institute and Utah Museum of Natural History through which an embedded system is developed to measure and display microbialite activity for both research and public education purposes. The results showed trends in microbialite activity that can be followed. The prototyped system is on display at the UMNH in an exhibit.

ABSTRACT. The number of women in computing is growing, but is still a dismal percentage of the number of people in computing. In order to rectify this, our society needs to focus on both generating interest and retaining women in computing. Utah State University’s (USU) chapter of ACM-W has worked on these pursuits through mentorship at a local after school STEM program, Cache Makers.

Throughout the spring of 2016, USU’s ACM-W taught a six week mobile app development course to middle school girls at Cache Makers. The course introduced students to basic programming concepts and mobile app development through MIT’s App Inventor platform. Students participating in the course were carefully mentored by college computer science students in an environment that encouraged learning, creativity, and exploration.

The benefits to both students and mentors were tremendous. Students were encouraged to and would often explore beyond the program requirements, becoming better and more creative programmers. The students were excited about their new knowledge, and began helping each other build apps and would collaborate on ideas to expand their apps.

The mentors’ also became better programmers. Their understanding deepened because they had to explain difficult computer science concepts in a simple, understandable way. It was uplifting to see the impact on the students, and refreshed the mentors’ love of computer science.

This course was incredibly valuable to both the students and the mentors. Everyone involved felt their knowledge increased. This program also established friendships and a support system for both middle school and college women in computing. Utah State University’s chapter of ACM-W will continue to lead programs like these to interest, encourage, and retain women in computing.

ABSTRACT. Virtual Reality, although the concept is old, has recently become more readily available for developers to use their critical thinking and creativity to design a project themselves and with little help from support due to its recent prevalence in the modern tech market.

We wanted to change the rules of how games are played, and give the player more choices with their controllers than just a computer screen and a handheld controller. Instead, we wanted to use the Oculus DK2, the Leap Motion controller, and the XBox Kinect V2 controller to create a game that allowed the gamer to fully immerse themselves in a game of our own design.

In order to make the game challenging and fun, we wanted to pit players against their friends over a local network as well, and immediately got a positive response from our peers to this proposed addition.

We wanted to focus on using the Leap Motion controller most of all, so we chose Unity as our game development environment because it has essentially exclusive Leap Motion support, as well as support for the Oculus DK2. Using previous experience in gesture recognition from work with the Kinect, we developed several gestures using the fine motor controls that the Leap Motion registers.

We then turned to the networking side of the project, which took a small amount of time to get working but a very large amount of time to get working correctly. We used Photon for networking setup.

The progress of our project was mostly done by constant trial and error, along with seemingly endless hours of testing and debugging for gestures and networking.

Our project has the capability of accurately tracking the users hands as controls in a fully virtual environment over a local network against friends. Players can damage and ‘kill’ each other, all in the scope of a virtual world.

Our project has expanded the ways that users can interact with a virtual world. We hope that it will pave the way for further expansion and that more detailed, professionally made games can be produced with our work. We hope to see the echoes of our project in the virtual reality games of the future.

ABSTRACT. Tele-Collaboration refers to a joint task performed by remotely located users. These users may work from heterogeneous physical environments like a CAVE, a 3DTV or a Desktop, but once inside the Virtual Environment (VE) they all share the same virtual space.

Tele-Collaboration is not simple to accomplish and requires specialized programming environment that enables the display of the same VE or visualization to multiple remote displays. This talk will present how we are harnessing capabilities in multiple platforms, such as VRUI and Unity to provide for these collaborative immersive environments.

This is a joint effort between the University of Wyoming (UWYO) 3D Interaction and Agents (3DIA) research lab, UWYO School of Energy Resources Shell 3D Visualization Lab, Idaho National Lab, and Indiana University. This talk will present current and future work about the applications we are implementing and challenges we are solving for.

ABSTRACT. In 2016, Westminster College ran an outreach project to help increase female students’ participation in AP Computer Science A. Of the 550 Utah students taking Computer Programming 2 in 2015-2016, only 54 were female. After we contacted the high school teachers, only 12 girls registered the project. We expected more female students would be interested, but many Computer Programming 2 teachers were not teaching Java. Utah high school teachers and students seem more interested in participating in concurrent enrollment (in C++) rather than the AP Computer Science A course (in Java). 5 female students participated in the in-person sessions at Westminster College and 1-2 girls participated in each of the biweekly online webinars. Webinars covered topics like 2D Arrays, List, Inheritance, Recursion, Searching and Sorting, and answering free response questions on the AP CS exam.

ABSTRACT. Problem: Since debugging programs manually is one of the most expensive tasks in software development, researchers are investigating automatic program repair techniques. Automatic program repair involves locating the faulty statements, applying appropriate program modification operators, and performing regression testing to verify that the modified program is a valid repair. Traditional research focuses on repairing programs containing a single fault. This work attempts to understand the complexity of locating faults in a program containing multiple faults. Approach: We create programs with two faults by systematically creating second order mutants using a program mutation tool called MuJava. We categorize the mutants in four groups that are defined based on the closeness of the faulty statements that are in the same basic block or different basic blocks. We compute the suspiciousness scores and determine the closeness of the suspiciousness scores for the mutants in each category. Results: According to our analysis, the closer the faults are, the higher suspiciousness scores they tend to have. The localization might be harder when the faults are closer. Significance: Understanding the closeness of the suspiciousness scores of the two faulty statements will help us extend existing single fault repair approaches by determining the type of program modifications that will be needed. Evaluation: The approach was evaluated by creating over 5000 second order mutants of a program and calculating the suspiciousness scores of the statements using GZoltar.

ABSTRACT. Entertainment Arts & Engineering (EAE) is one of the top program in game development. After I got bachelor's degree in Computer Science, I joined engineering track in EAE and start to learn game development. We create a game engine by ourselves, and learn different software for making game, such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Visual Studio. We also learn diferent languages for specific game engine, including C++, C#, Lua, and XML. During these two years, I learned how to make games with team, and we created several prototypes and a thesis game which has been published on Steam Store. It's my pleasure to share my experience and what I learn from EAE

ABSTRACT. 1. Introduction We present a versatile smartphone based system that uses text messages to communicate with a remote MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) server and enable populations without Internet connection to access online education. Today, more than 50% of the world population has no reliable access to education. While the use of technology has been heralded as an effective and affordable avenue for increasing access to education, more than 50% of the world population does not have reliable Internet connection. On the flip side, more than 80% of the world population has established cellular connection. Our system leverages this pervasive cellular connection to effectively deliver MOOC based education. In particular, we have developed this system for The Open University of West Africa (OUWA). Earlier, OUWA students accessed MOOC materials using Google Drive, with pre-downloaded content. There were multiple problems with this system. Users had little experience with digital technology, and there was no way to test and track student progress. Our system provides an easily navigable app and allows users to watch lectures and take tests, and the data (test scores, battery, etc.) is sent using SMS.

2. Design and Implementation The proposed system consists of three parts: client, OUWA database, and Twillio server. The client runs on users’ Android smartphones that sends and receives relevant information using text messaging (SMS). To facilitate communication with a MOOC server that uses HTTP, a Twillio server is introduced that translates SMS messages into HTTP messages and HTTP messages into SMS messages. This allows exchange of commands and data between the SMS-based client and the HTTP-based server. Aside from the overall architecture, there are some important features that need to be addressed. The user interface has to be easily understandable and usable by users without any previous technical experience and very low literacy levels. The Android app has to be able to update itself, and send and receive messages. The OUWA server has to be able to receive and send messages to individual clients, as well as track data for individuals.

3. Results and Evaluation This system has been beta tested by about fifty users spread out among refugee camps and villages in Ghana and Burkina Faso. While client data cannot be released per the request of the company and users, qualitative data indicates that the results are largely positive. Clients stated that the system is much easier to navigate and understand than the old google drive system. Students are able to take tests and the server is able to track their data. Tracking and using the data from the server has proven to be successful and useful so far, almost mimicking full connectivity levels. The overall evaluation of this project is a success, with room for improvement. Currently, communication is limited to 140 characters, bottle-capping a significant portion of the communication. Also the cost of SMS currently greatly heightens the overall cost. Nevertheless, the project has worked to solve a very pressing problem using little to no infrastructure, and has generally achieved the goals it set out to accomplish.

ABSTRACT. For patients with Type I diabetes, manually controlling blood glucose levels can be risky and burdensome. The artificial pancreas has provided a solution by automatically delivering insulin to the patient using blood glucose measurements and a control algorithm to vary insulin delivery. The algorithm, however, must be verified using computer simulations and clinical trials. Testing artificial pancreas control algorithms is an integral part of getting the devices to patients. This requires patient blood glucose data, which is difficult and expensive to obtain. To ease this burden, artificial data can be generated using ordinary differential equations to model blood glucose trends. The problem with this method is that the ordinary differential equations do not accurately model children’s blood glucose data. The objective of this project was to design and write a new algorithm to create blood glucose data that is more universal by using actual patient data to predict the trajectory of artificially generated data. In order to relate artificially generated data to actual patient data, patient data needs to be reconstructed so that a prediction can be made about the artificially generated patient data in the future. This was done using delay coordinate embedding. Using time series analysis techniques and the TISEAN software package the optimal embedding could be stored as data points and be used as the prediction for the next artificially generated data point. A k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm was used to find the closest embedded data point to the artificial data and predict the next blood glucose level. Splines were then fit to the data to interpolate between predicted data points. The algorithms successfully predict and generate nighttime blood glucose data. This data can be used in conjunction with S-Taliro, a tool developed to test artificial pancreas controller algorithms.

ABSTRACT. FPGAs are incredibly advantageous for projects that require reconfigurability of hardware and/or parallel processing power in hardware. For example, applications that require a substantial amount of digital signal processing can make use of that processing in the FPGA hardware. While FPGA applications can be run on bare metal, running a Linux operating system on top of the FPGA design allows for a more user-friendly environment. Linux has advantages such as a ready-to-use file system, Ethernet protocols for secure shell and file transfer capabilities, memory management, portability, and drivers. Two of the projects being developed in BYU’s Configurable Computing Lab, the BYU Obstacle Avoidance Radar Analysis Carrier Card (BOARAC) and JTAG Configuration Manager (JCM) have had needs that were met with Linux drivers. For the BOARAC project, a Linux driver was developed for data logging purposes; it managed direct memory access (DMA) transfers from multiple channels of ADCs to files stored on a microSD card in order to meet high data transfer rates. The JCM project made use of a driver to handle interrupts coming from hardware to signal when the JTAG interface was ready for use. These Linux drivers have successfully enabled the software to interact with custom hardware from the FPGA systems in effectively real-time.

ABSTRACT. SmartHomes are becoming more popular and more devices are being made to connect to Wi-Fi. This increases automation in homes and allows consumers to get access to each device in one place, however, this also makes the SmartHome more vulnerable to hackers. Hackers can view video feeds, change settings on a thermostat, see passwords and other private information, can unlock doors, and turn off alarm systems. Some SmartHome exploitations are based on "brute-forcing" (trying all combinations of passwords and pins) and some by monitoring ports and receiving packets. Consumers can help prevent some of these exploitations by changing default router username and passwords, by making their Wi-Fi range smaller, by updating firmware frequently, by filtering MAC addresses, and by having a good password.

ABSTRACT. University Students are faced with many difficult and time-consuming tasks as they work toward graduation. One of the first major tasks of each semester is to gather a pile of syllabi that outlines the due dates and other important information for the next 4 months of their lives and organize it into a single cohesive schedule. Although some professors take the time to add assignments to student calendars via online learning management systems such as Canvas, often, the student is left to complete this duty themselves. However, to manually type every due date or piece of important information into a phone calendar can be tedious, time-consuming and prone to human error, even for classes with fewer assignments. For classes with multiple assignments due per week, the problem becomes exponentially more challenging and may even cause students to fall behind schedule. A more efficient option would be to create an app specifically to extract deadlines from digital documents and create events in common calendar software solutions. Such software may contribute to increased University student course completion and retention rates.

ABSTRACT. We are part of a small team of students at BYU working on the Passive Inspection Cube Satellite (PICS). Our overall mission is to take, at minimum, 5 quality images of the exterior of the launch vehicle. We work specifically on the processing end, and we needed to pick a processor and an operating system for that processor that would meet our needs. Specifically, we required a processor that was low power and could boot up instantly. We had several options. We could go with a full embedded Linux distribution, which would be more familiar to us and easier to develop on, or we could go with an RTOS, which would easily be able to meet our real-time constraints. We leaned towards having Linux on our machine, but as we were researching potential processors, the processors that were really attractive to us, such as the Micro CSP, were a little risky to our power budget. We eventually settled on the SmartFusion2 because it consumed so little power; however, it only supported a stripped down version of Linux called μClinux. μClinux was new territory for us. The biggest difference between Linux and μClinux is that it is specifically designed and works best on small embedded systems that lack an MMU, or Memory Management Unit. But we've discovered that aside from the way it handles the absence of virtual memory, μClinux can otherwise support many of the features of Linux, and has many advantages to Linux, most notably the fact that it is significantly faster due directly to its lack of MMU. If the absence of virtual memory can be handled correctly, then essentially, μClinux gives us the speed and efficiency of an RTOS with the versatility and power of a Linux kernel. So far our results of using μClinux have been positive. We’ve been able to successfully make, load, and run custom kernel configurations. We’ve been able to enable I2C drivers, write and run C programs for these drivers, and communicate with other devices. We have also been able to enable necessary UNIX utilities to run on our system and successfully created device nodes that appear on our target as well as configured a working network file system and tftp. The significance of our research has been to prove, using μClinux, that we will be able to meet our mission requirements. Its fast run and boot up time are critical to mission success as the satellite will be powered off until ejection and then must immediately begin imaging after ejection. The successful use of I2C drivers was also critical for communication between the subsystems and the processor. In addition, we have learned about the many features and capabilities of μClinux. Our evaluation of μClinux has been that in the absence of a full Linux operating system, μClinux provides a sufficient and satisfactory alternative. It provides many of the benefits of a full Linux system as long as the lack of MMU is carefully worked around.

ABSTRACT. At Southern Utah University(SUU), recruiting students to a major is an essential task that is often carried out by departments and students. One approach to recruiting is to host booths at events for prospective students. These booths are supposed to show students what the major has to offer and allow them to ask questions. For example, the biology department frequently runs booths with animals such as lizards, snakes, and turtles as well as student leaders. The Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) department by contrast has historically only had boring booths with professors, bad pens, and glossy brochures. We expect that a few fun robots and students will help more students sign up for computer science classes and reverse our current negative enrollment trends in CS1. Many of our students have not had an opportunity to develop an appreciation for math, science, and technology. Although they often have access to cell phones, many of our students go to high schools that do not offer calculus or programming. We hope to bridge the gap for these students and help them to appreciate these vital subjects regardless of which major they choose. Tech Ambassadors will introduce high school students to technology and computer programming with short, fun encounters expected to last approximately 5-10 minutes. Tech Ambassadors will use a near peer mentoring model where undergraduate students will engage with high school students. Tech Ambassadors will support existing student clubs in the CSIS department by providing funding to attend regional conferences/competitions. Initially, we will target a university event for prospective students called Red Riot where high school students can come to learn more about SUU. We aim to staff each Red Riot booth with 3 tech ambassadors and provide 3 activities—creating a simple app/ game, controlling a robot, and creating music. Each activity will have a simple challenge that encourages students to write approximately 5 lines of code in order to win a fun-size candy bar.