Undergraduate Research

Summer 2008

  Student:  Avantika A.    

  Advisor:  Prof. Kostas Daniilidis     

            Avantika is working on the integration of graphical information as well as of  older pictures into street-view images.

            This is a mixed reality problem and requires the detection of features in street-view images and their use in geometric

            alignment between pictures taken at different times or between pictures and virtual content.

  Student:  Michael C.

  Advisor:  Weiss Tech House

            Michael is working on an Events System in the Weiss Tech House.  His tasks are to revamp the RSVP system, add

            features for uploading pictures, and updating the main website.   Once completed, he will then continue on to other WTH

            projects.

  Students:  John D., Grace F., and Ian P.                  

  Advisor:   Prof. Norman Badler        

            John and Ian are building software for a novel instruction system for physical tasks.  Based on a client-server architecture,

            the system will include an action database for extensible and reusable task elements, a searchable wiki for instructional
            and anecdotal materials, a "virtual coach" agent who monitors student actions and task selections and who can illustrate

            via video or simulation proper or improper procedures, a multi-user environment for coordinating across tasks, and a

            physical simulator for hazard illustration.     Grace is providing 3D modeling, animation and video content support.

  Student:  Chinawat I.  

  Advisor:  Prof. Sanjeev Khanna       

           Chin is working on the problem of universal semantic communication.  Is it possible for two intelligent beings, say Alice and

           Bob, to communicate meaningfully, when they do not share a common language? One way to capture the notion of

           meaningful communication is for Bob to receive "computational wisdom" from more powerful Alice to solve a problem that

           is intractable for Bob. Building on the recent work of Juba and Sudan, Chin is studying conditions under which such a

           communication can be accomplished.

  Student:  Chris J. 

  Advisor:  Prof. Ben Taskar 

           Chris is helping to develop a system for robust face recognition and tracking in videos and movies in order to enable

           annotation of videos based on characters and their actions.  Standard face detection techniques degrade outside lab settings,

           in the presence of motion blur, occlusion, non-frontal poses, drastic illumination changes.  Chris is building a face detector

           using boosting with larger and more robust contextual features, including torso and using color and motion segmentation cues. 

           He is also helping to develop a face and eye pose estimation system for recognizing the direction of a character gaze.  Using

           robust gaze and pose tracking will enable following the character's focus to identify salient objects and actions. By combining

           this information with screenplay and closed captions of movies and television, visual elements such as people, objects and

           actions can be efficiently indexed and searched.

  Student:  Amin L.

  Advisor:  Prof. C.J. Taylor

  Student:  Alex L.

  Advisor:  Prof. Insup Lee

            Alex is involved in the development of a tool for supporting compositional  schedulability analysis techniques in hierarchical

            scheduling frameworks. He is responsible for the development of a front end input specification mechanism through text based

            (using xml schema) and graphical editors. The front end also has features for displaying the processed outputs. He is also

            involved in the design and development of a back end support mechanism for storage and processing of inputs. He is using

            Java as the main programming language with support from various open source packages.

  Student:  Josh M.

  Advisor:  Michael Kearns

            Josh is working on statistical modeling for keyword auctions.

  Student:  Bill M.                

  Advisor:  Prof. Boon Loo                 

           Title: Distributed Trust Management with LogicBlox
           This project is in collaboration with LogicBlox, a company based in Atlanta that is developing LB, a Datalog-based query

           engine for enterprise software.  The first half of the project involves developing a declarative access control framework

           using LB, specifically focusing on utilizing the extensible type system of LB.  The second half of the project involves adding

           distribution capabilities to LB, in order to perform access control in a distributed environment.

  Student:  Noe M.             

  Advisor:  Prof. C.J.  Taylor   

           Noe will be working on developing graphical simulations of robotic actors for integration into one of our ongoing funded

           research projects. This will involve developing robot animations on top of an existing simulation package such as Gazebo

           or the Microsoft Robotics SDK to demonstrate the output of various robot interaction simulations.

  Students:  Zachary M. , Joy X., and Antony V.

  Advisor:   Prof. Lyle Ungar              

           As two people are speaking (or skyping), the computer listens and continually displays potentially relevant text or images. 

           Relevant information could be drawn from both personal and public sources: my calendar, address book, Facebook

           (and friends), Flickr, e-mails, desktop searches, Wikipedia, IMDB, gapminder, and Google query results.  Information

           presented could include mousable images, summaries of extracted facts, and interaction graphs of related people or

           concepts as obtained from friends lists.

  Student:  Sneha P.

  Advisor:  Stephanie Weirich

           Sneha is working with Prof. Weirich this summer through the CRA Distributed Mentorship Program.  Her home institution

           is Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX.   Sneha is researching the design of advanced type systems found that are

           likely to be incorporated into future programming languages. In particular, she is focussing on the expressiveness of dependent

           type systems and their application to the lightweight verification of program properties and invariants.

  Student:  Ramkrish R.           

  Advisor:  Prof. Alla Safonova 

           Title:  Interactive Control of Human Characters
           Ramkrish will be working on improving interactive control of human characters.  Interactive control of synthesized human

           characters is used in a wide range of  applications including video games, simulation based training, virtual environments

           and others. The first part of the project will be design of a game-like environment that can be used to test various human

           motion synthesis algorithms. In the second part of the project Ramkrish will work on the algorithms for improving interactive

           character control in the setting of the game designed in the first part.

  Student:  Michelle R.

  Advisor:  Prof. Aravind Joshi

   Student:  Damon R.          

  Advisor:  Dr. Amaravadi @ HUP (and Prof. Norman Badler)

   Student:  Victoria S.     

   Advisor:  Prof. Mitch Marcus

            Victoria is extending a web-based environment for collecting a corpus of dialogues of pairs of individuals working together

             to solve simple cooperative tasks, with the goal of understanding how individuals understand the implicit intentions of each

             other during the course of solving each task.   This work is part of a large Army-sponsored MURI project to understand

             how bots and humans can communicate using natural language.

  Student:  Stephanie S. 

  Advisor:  Prof. Stephanie Weirich   

           Stephanie is working on educational materials for CIS 120, Programming Languages  and Techniques I. Her work involves

           developing and revising homework assignments, researching additional readings, and evaluating laboratory exercises.

   Student:  Paul T.               

   Advisor:  Prof. Max Mintz 

             Title: New Theoretical Frameworks for Quantum Information Science

             The primary purpose of this project is the unification of Quantum Information Science and aspects of Quantum Field

             Theory (from both a category-theoretic and topological viewpoint). Having spent the last two years researching aspects

             of canonical models of Quantum Computing and Quantum Information theory, this work moves in a more fundamental

            direction, and aims to answer what other theoretical frameworks can be applied.

  Student:  Antony V.

  Advisor:  Sridhar Hannenhalli

            Antony is working in Hannenhalli lab at the Penn Center for Bioinformatics. His main project involves developing a database

            for "Post-Translational modification of transcription factors and their target genes". This database is intended to be the first

            publicly available resource for such data.

  Students:  Michael W. and Joy X.        

  Advisor:  Weiss Tech House    

           The project is a web application that will be built using PHP and MySQL. The aim of the project is to create a platform

           that promotes interaction between users interested in innovation and entrepreneurship. The application will provide a better

           social network for current students, alumni, mentors, and industry leaders involved with the Weiss Tech House. Some of the

           goals of  this project will be to allow students to 1) connect with other students who share similar ideas; 2) find people with

           the skills they are looking for; 3) get the resources they need to further their innovative projects. Michael will be developing

           and testing modules for this application.  Joy will first learn the programming skills necessary (PHP and MySQL) and then

           start developing modules for this application.

  Student:  Luke Z.                 

  Advisor:  Prof. Steve Zdancewic      

           Luke is implementing a security-oriented programming language called AURA.  AURA provides features for access control

           that treat ordinary programming  constructs (e.g., integers and recursive functions) and authorization logic constructs       

           (e.g., principals and access control policies) in a uniform way.

           AURA's authorization logic is based on polymorphic DCC and uses dependent types to permit assertions that refer directly

           to AURA values while keeping computation out of the assertion level to ensure tractability.