Abstracts 2006
Atmel
Atmel is a large semiconductor manufacturer with a worldwide
distribution of products. The company is currently undergoing a company
wide attempt to increase efficiency. As part of this effort, it has
asked this team to write a user friendly replacement for its
photolithography program. This new tool will be a web browser based
application and include functionality not available in the current
program. The core features will include the following:
- Database search functionality for all data fields
- Database entry creation and updates
- Historical records of all changes made to the database, including
the time the change was made, by what user, and why it was necessary.
- Notification to all relevant departments regarding each database
change, including a comment box detailing the reasons for the
adjustment.
- User authentication for security purposes and privileges of
database access.
- An intuitive graphical user interface
Time permitting, the team will add functionality for the following:
1)Graphing capability using the historical data logged in
the database.
2)Database support for the current photolithography program. This will
allow both the web based program and the older telnet program to be
used simultaneously.
Avaya
Avaya has data relating to Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for various
projects. They lack a sufficient way to update and monitor this
information whenever an error is encountered. We will implement a
web-based solution to this problem.
This application will make use of Java Servlets and MySQL. The
interface will be a website and will access a database. The database
will consist of a Problem Record, Symptom Data, and Root Data. Each of
these tables will hold RCA information pertaining to all of the
projects.
The website will allow for three types of users: Administrators, RCA
team members, and developers. Each of these users will have separate
privileges. The administrators will have the ability to view and modify
privileges on all the data, as well as modify privileges for the
databases and users. The RCA team members will have the ability to view
and modify privileges for the symptom data and root data. The
developers have limited modification privileges on the symptom data and
viewing privileges on the root data.
BLM
The Bureau of Land Management(BLM) uses the Land and Realty
Authorization Module(LRAM) as an internal database program. The LRAM is
an intranet module that allows access to the database with which the
authorization and billing for Right of Way(ROW) land rentals is
located.
The user provides appropriate search criteria and the corresponding
report is generated. The user is capable of making modifications,
printing, and saving the report. The database query is done using Brio
Query or Hyperion Designer and uses an ODBC connection to the Data
Warehouse. If time permits, this data will be made viewable via
intranet using Macromedia(Adobe) Dreamweaver.
Cherry Creek Physical Science
Ethan Dusto is a teacher at Cherry Creek High School who tasked our
team to design and create an interactive web page for his Physical
Science class. The text for the freshman level course is recommended
for students in grades 12+, so Mr. Dusto would like a web site that
provides the students with material that will supplement his class
lectures. The main focus for the web site will be to create interactive
units using Java applets so that the students can get a firm
understanding of the more complex material. There will also be
interactive quizzes and tests created using HTML and JavaScript so that
the students will be able to test their knowledge of the course
material prior to upcoming quizzes and exams in the classroom. Time
allowing, the web site will also contain links to chapter summaries,
keywords and a brief question and answer sections for each topic being
discussed. Lastly, Mr. Dusto will be given a template for the website,
so that he may update or change the website as needed, or even create a
new website for other classes that he teaches.
CSM 1 – Technology Camp
CSM 2 – Quantum Tunneling
We use a multi-band Bose-Hubbard model to study the quantum dynamics of
ultracold bosons in a tilted two-well potential. We describe the energy
eigenstates in detail. These consist of oscillator-like solutions and
entangled states, including extreme cat states. The ground state ranges
from a single number state to a coherent, or superfluid, state. We also
describe the dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) initially
localized in one
well.
We show how the oscillation frequency depends on the hopping strength,
interaction potential, tilt, and the number of particles in the system.
In the presence of high barriers the oscillation becomes exponentially
slower as the number of particles increases. We find modulated
oscillation in the presence of low barriers. Furthermore, we
characterize the destruction and revival of entangled stationary states
and, consequently, tunneling in the presence of high barriers.
We are currently expanding the model to allow particles to occupy
excited states
in order to study the macroscopic quantum tunneling of node-like
structures, or dark solitons, through a potential barrier. Eventually
we will include a third degenerate band to study the behavior of
vortex-like structures in a tilted two-well potential.
CSM 3 - Prime Research
Dr. Jason Liu and Alex Probst from PRIME research group have presented
a project for creating a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the SSFNet
simulator. The simulator involves creating and allowing real
distributed applications to interact with the virtual network
environment. Requirements for the project include the following: read
and write Data Modeling Language, graphical representation of the
network, and the ability to modify attributes in network layout. Well
written documentation, portability, with maintainable and expandable
characteristics will lead to project success. Our goal is to complete
and deliver the tools and documentation to the client within the given
time frame.
CSM 4 – Geophysics
The Geophysics department at the Colorado School of Mines is developing
a Java toolkit that can be used in programming scientific visual
applications. Specifically, it provides graphics tools that allow
display and interactive manipulation of 3-D surfaces. This is important
to scientific applications, particularly in the field of geophysics,
because the ability to interact with surfaces and manipulate joints and
faults can greatly increase understanding of a material, such as the
Earth's subsurface. Current applications do not provide good
interactive models, and for this reason Mines is developing tools that
will assist in development of better applications.
Our task is to design and implement methods for creating and displaying
3D triangulated surfaces. We will be using graphics tools from the
OpenGL library that have been wrapped in Java, along with advanced data
structures such as scene graphs. Several of the problems we will need
to solve involve selection of optimal divisions in a bounding sphere
hierarchy, as well as ways to interact with 3D surfaces using a 2D
mouse.
CSM 5 – Chemistry #1
A protein is a complex, high molecular weight organic compound that
consists of amino acids joined by peptide bonds. Protein sequencing
refers to the task of ordering the amino acids in a protein of
interest. The amino acid sequencing has traditionally been determined
for unknown proteins through a complex process of enzymatic digestion
and mass spectrometric analysis. As this is a very time-consuming
process, Voorhees et. al. are attempting to modify the process by
replacing the enzymatic digestion with a pyrolytic breakdown procedure.
The doctoral thesis of Meetani [1] has demonstrated that proteins can
be thermally degraded by pyrolysis in a selective and reproducible
process. With a known protein structure, he was able to reconstruct the
sequence of the original protein based on the mass spectrometry data of
the thermal fragments. Unlike enzymatic digestion, where a protein is
completely cleaved at well-known and predictable sites, the pyrolysis
procedure yields a much more complex fragment solution. The
corresponding spectrum contains information corresponding to a wide
range of protein fragments in both cyclic and straight chain
conformations.
The client, Dr. Kent Voorhees, has requested the design of a method to
reconstruct an original and unknown protein from the spectra of the
original and pyrolyzed solutions. The spectra to be used in the
development of this project were obtained via MALDI-TOF-MS (Matrix
assisted Laser Desorption Ionisation Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry)
in the course of the doctoral research conducted by Meetani [1]. The
following protein spectra have been supplied by the client in both
digital and hardcopy format: melittin, insulin, insulin chain B,
insulin chain B (fragment 22-30), and methionine enkephalin-Arg-Phe.
1. Meetani, Mohammed A. 2003. Bacterial Proteins Analysis Using Mass
Spectrometry. Golden, Colorado:Colorado School of Mines. (Applied
Chemistry Thesis) pp.79-119
CSM 6 – Chemistry #2
Chemistry Solver ’06 is an application that will allow the user to
input an unbalanced chemical equation and output the correct balanced
equation, if one or more equations are available. Our group has been
asked to convert a legacy program originally designed to perform this
task that is not fully functional. The new application will be
web-based, instead of an executable application. In order to balance
the chemical equations, this application will need to be able to count
the charges of reactants and products, and deal with them
appropriately. It must also have a data store to evaluate the different
chemical elements.
This task will be completed using Java Server Pages (JSP) and Servlets,
a data store that will contain the chemical elements and properties,
and an intuitive user interface. The goal of this project is to create
a functional web application, which will allow chemistry enthusiasts
from around the world to quickly balance complex chemical equations.
CSM 7 – Analysis of Aerosol Surface Data
The variability in aerosol detection produces problems with detecting
climate variability, and climate trends around the world. The
measurement of aerosols has a history of variability at a factor of two
or greater. Aerosols are particle matter that are suspended in the
atmosphere and are not supposed to be there. Aerosols are defined to be
less than 10 micrometers in diameter. These include CFCs, carbon-oxides
and nitrogen-oxides. The three general ways of obtaining aerosols
concentrations is direct air samples taken from a plane, remote sensing
samples from a satellite and from the ground (direct and remote sensing
samples). We will be concentrating on the measurements taken from the
ground. We can retrieve the data for both locations, Bondville, IL and
Southern Great Plains, OK, via the internet. We will have to
distinguish the variability of the measurement techniques, the
variability in different times, and the variability in space.
We will have to generate a model that will identify and quantify the
uncertainties. These uncertainties can be seen in daily patterns,
seasonal patterns, spatial patters and weather patterns. In this
project our goals are as follows:
1)characterize the ground level data
2)describe the ground level variability in the data
3)statistically analyze the models
These goals will be for sites with a long history of measuring ground
aerosol data. For the given project we will also be learning new
statistical tests in theory and in practice with ‘R’. We have also
decided to learn another program designed to display mathematical
reports called LaTeX. Our research project is joint work with Dr.
Reinhard Furrer.
CSM 8 – Parametric Model for Oil Production
The world's dependence on fossil fuels has led to much debate regarding
the remaining extractable crude oil. Many argue that the annual
production of oil has declined in the past years and will continue to
decay. A well-known method of approximating the growth, peak, and
decline of finite, nonrenewable resources, such as oil, is the Hubbert
model created in 1956. Other alternative methods have been suggested
since, based on non-linear statistical models.
The team will attempt to approximate the time, quantity, and nature of
decline of the world's peak crude oil production given specific data
sets. In order to determine this information, we will attempt to model
the data with analytical, non-linear curves. We will develop parametric
families of functions that describe our curves and eventually simulate
oil production for a theoretical world. To accomplish these tasks, we
will be using the programming environments of R and LaTeX.
Equizitive
eQUIZitive's primary product, medQ, is a web based application used by
hospitals
and medical staffing companies to keep track of employee's documents
and
certifications. Currently a majority of these documents are transmitted
via
FAX. While this method is fast and reliable, document quality can be
poor and
at times unreadable. Our project is to design a windows program through
which
users can scan documents and transmit them to the server via the
internet with
as much ease of use as the current FAX system. This program must be
easy to
use with a simple yet robust user interface that allows additional
information
about each document to be entered prior to sending the documents to the
server.
Medtronic
Medtronic Navigation is a company that specializes in adapting advanced
localization techniques, used by doctors for more precise, less
invasive surgeries. To that end, they have requested that our team
develop software for use in testing an infrared camera based
localization application.
Initially our software will record actual data sent from a camera to
their application and be able to play this back in order to simulate
normal operation. The software can also be used to stress their
application, both by introducing faulty data and through performance
testing. The final aspect is to synthesize normal and fault conditions
of the camera in order to streamline testing of their application over
a wider spectrum of behaviors.
Toilers # 1
The study and implementation of wireless sensor networks is an emerging
field in computer science, with applications in fields from
environmental monitoring to national defense. These networks consist of
individual sensor nodes which typically collect and transmit data to a
central server. Due to the distributed nature of these networks, energy
consumption and latency are the primary determinants in network
efficiency. Algorithms optimizing these two factors are an area of
intensive research and the subject of this project.
The goal of this project is to evaluate one such algorithm using the
open source network simulator ns2. LEACH, or Low Energy Adaptive
Clustering Hierarchy, consists of a percentage of randomly chosen nodes
to act as cluster heads. Once these heads have been determined, they
broadcast a signal notifying other nodes within range. These nodes can
then calculate their optimal cluster head. These heads act as a middle
layer between individual nodes and the server, relaying data and
optimizing packet size. By definition, the LEACH model ensures that
only two hops separate the node from the database. A network consisting
of 100 randomly deployed nodes implementing the LEACH model will be
used to test programs for node management.
The implementation of this algorithm using ns2 will enable the study of
the performance of three different programs for node management:
Active-Listening, Active-Sleeping, and Active-Listening-Sleeping. In
Active-Listening, the node is either transmitting or listening for an
update request from the server. AL results in relatively low latency
but high energy consumption. In Active-Sleeping, the node is active
only for transmissions triggered by its sensors and toggles to a sleep
state upon completion of the transmission. In its sleep state, the node
is unable to respond to queries from the server. If an arbitrary time
interval T passes without communication with the server, the node is
programmed to initiate a source-initiated update regardless of its
sensor state. During this update, the node is active and the server can
in turn initiate consumer updates as needed. Active-Listening-Sleeping
is a hybrid of AS and Al: after a source-initiated update, the node
toggles to a listening state for an arbitrary time interval. At the end
of this interval, the node toggles to a sleeping state where it behaves
as an AS programmed node.
The simulation data obtained by implementing these algorithms using ns2
will depict which is the most efficient in terms of energy consumption
and latency. These data will give researchers a better understanding of
which models produce particular results, thus facilitating the goal of
this project.
Toilers # 2
The Toilers Research Group is a graduate student research group at CSM
focusing
on wireless sensor networks. They have been developing a piece of
software
called iNSpect (interactive NS-2 protocol and environment confirmation
tool) that
graphically maps a set of nodes in a wireless network based on an
existing trace
file in one of three formats.
As our field session project, we will be adding a few features to the
existing
software:
1) adding parsing capability for .NAM file format (a common
format for
this type of trace),
2) allowing users to change the color scheme of the nodes
displayed on the map as the simulation is taking place,
3) alter the .viz format
to include mobility information, merging elements from a mobility trace
and the
existing .viz format and
4) fix as many known existing bugs as possible.
If time
allows, we may attempt to add an ongoing statistics feature to the
program, and
alter the data structures and functions to allow unordered read-in of
node data.
Toilers # 3
Wireless sensor networks are useful for collecting large amounts of
data from an
environment. Usually, all of the data are collected in a database and
analyzed
offline. However, by the time the scientist has a chance to evaluate
the data,
it is outdated and may not be useful. The goal of this project is to
make
wireless sensor networks more interactive by allowing scientists to
define data
events of interest, a small subset of the data stream, and receive
notification
for only those events online.
To accomplish this task, we will write software for the wireless
sensors and the
data collection server. Our sensors in BB 154 can collect information
on light,
temperature, and humidity. The software will define when a sensor
should send
back data and possibly what data to send. The application on the server
will
decide when events occur, such as considerable changes in temperature
or light
readings, and publish an RSS feed for the client. Scientists will be
able to
define events and subscribe to the RSS notifications through a web
interface.
The final deliverable will be a demo which involves walking into a
sensor
network with a laptop, specifying interesting events, and then
monitoring those
events in real time. This demo will be submitted to ACM SenSys 2006,
one of the
top conferences in sensor networks.
The software for the sensors will be written in nesC as a TinyOS
component,
meaning that any TinyOS application can easily include it and utilize
our
application. The server application will be written in Python due to
portability, availability of preexisting modules, and rapid development
time.