CS4624: Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/18655
This collection contains the final projects of the students in in the course Computer Science 4624: Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access, at Virginia Tech. This course, taught by Professor Ed Fox, is part of the Human-Computer Interaction track, the Knowledge, Information, and Data track, and the Media/Creative Computing track. The curriculum introduces the architectures, concepts, data, hardware, methods, models, software, standards, structures, technologies, and issues involved with: networked multimedia (e.g., image, audio, video) information, access and systems; hypertext and hypermedia; electronic publishing; virtual reality. Coverage includes text processing, search, retrieval, browsing, time-based performance, synchronization, quality of service, video conferencing and authoring.

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    Dynamic Optimizations of Irregular Applications on Many-core Architectures (CS Seminar Lecture Series)
    Parton, Eric; Zehr, David; Wellington, Jake; Zhang, Zheng (2012-03-02)
    Enhancing the match between software executions and hardware features is key to computing efficiency in terms of both performance and energy consumption. The match is constantly complicated by emerging architecture features in computing systems and has become a continuously evolving problem. In this talk, I will present some recent findings in the implications of three prominent features of modern systems: the heterogeneity, the rapid growth of processor-level parallelism and the increasingly complex interplay among computing units. In particular, I will focus on how to streamline computations containing dynamic irregularities for General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs), a broadly adopted many-core architecture. The talk will begin with the theoretical foundations of GPGPU program-level transformation techniques, and further describe a runtime optimization system, named G-Streamline, as a unified software solution to irregularities in both memory references and control flows. The system enables on-the-fly elimination of irregularities through adaptive CPU-GPU pipelining and kernel splitting schemes. Working in a holistic fashion, it maximizes whole-program performance by resolving conflicts among optimizations. In the end, I will briefly describe my other work which includes a study of the influence of shared cache on multicore and a new paradigm, named shared-cache-aware optimizations, for parallel software locality enhancement. Bio: Zheng (Eddy) Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Computer Science Department of the College of William & Mary. She received her M.S. in Computer Science at William & Mary with a Computational Operations Research (COR) specialization. Her research generally lies in the area of compilers and programming systems, with a focus on revealing and exploiting the implications of emerging hardware features on the development, compilation, and execution of software. She is the lead author of a paper that won the Best Paper Award at PPoPP'10, and a recipient of a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
  • Virginia Techniques Gymnastics Promotional Video Project
    Galligan, Rachael; Thumann, Lauren; Oatneal, Germond; Lopez, Blaise (2012-04-30)
    This project contains seven different videos. Two for the preschool programs offered, three for the instructional programs, and two for the open gyms. Each video contains clips of the specified class in action showing what is involved in each class in a hyped manner. The videos advertise what each class can gives you, and what can be learned in their different classes.
  • OpenDSA Mergesort Visualization and Exercise
    Breakiron, Daniel (2012-05-02)
    This is a snapshot of the OpenDSA project taken to exemplify the work done on mergesort-av.html and mergesort-proficiency.html as part of a semester-long project for CS-4624 Multimedia / Hypertext. More information about OpenDSA can be found at http://algoviz.org/OpenDSA/ and the up-to-date source code is available at https://github.com/cashaffer/OpenDSA. To view the work completed for CS-4624 please see OpenDSA/AV/mergesort-av.html and OpenDSA/AV/mergesort-proficiency.html. The help file for the proficiency exercise was also created as part of the semester-long project and can be accessed at OpenDSA/AV/MSprofHelp.html or through the proficiency exercise interface.
  • LectureCapture
    Elliott, Patrick; Herzer, Brian (2012-05-02)
    The following problem was addressed by our project: How can we easily visualize the content of a body of text without manually analyzing its content? The initial goal was to be able to visualize captioned college lectures, but ended up being any section of text. Our client, Mr. James Barker of Aptigent, supplied us with a large collection of captioned news reports for us to create visualizations. These television news reports were a good examples for us, since they can usually be summarized with just a few key words and relationships between words. This obviously makes them optimal for visualizing. There were a few specifics about our task for this project. We had the ability to use a clustering program which would take a given body of text and generate, among other things, a list of keywords, which we called 'concepts,' and a list of tags. The concepts were words that the clustering program believed to have more importance, while the tags were generally words or phrases that were tied directly to one or more concepts. Our solution needed to be web-based. In order to best accomplish this task, we chose to design our solution using HTML and JavaScript. We choose to use Raphael, a JavaScript library, to draw the visualizations. Our solution puts a heavy emphasis on the proximity between each concept and tag. Whether or not the two appear in the same sentence is also taken into consideration.
  • VTechWorks Interface Proposal and Prototype for Media Records
    Dockery, Brandon; Battersby, Kevin; Steele, Christopher (2012-05-02)
    This project is a prototype/proposal for how to present media (particularly) records in VTechWorks. It must be placed on a webserver to run, with its file structure preserved. It provides an AJAX prototype of VTechWorks that demonstrates a number of suggested changes to the interface, including the inclusion of an HTML5 video player, lightbox display of images, and asynchronous loading of data to prevent unnecessary page loads.
  • Group1- ADS Photo & Video
    Martyres, Christopher; Pero, Robert; Dave, Shashwat; Kasireddy, Rithvik (2012-05-02)
    The files included showcase our work done on the ADS Photo & Video project that we undertook for the Virginia Tech Adult Day Services organization. We created written and video tutorials for them to assist them in accomplishing their needs for video conferencing, tagging pictures, and sharing files.
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    Library Projects - Secure Streaming
    Kania, Robert; Gusukuma, Luke (2012-05-02)
    The main purpose of this project was to find a secure streaming solution for audio files within the VT Library, specifically regarding the recital collection audio files that were donated by the Department of Music. Within the context of this project, the definition of secure streaming is a method of online streaming that ensures that copyrighted audio files are streamed while respecting copyright law. The practical application of solving this problem has partially to do with advancement in mobile and internet technology as well as copyright issues (as stated above). In regards to mobile technology, many mobile devices currently being used are able to stream internet content such as audio and video, provided that the content is streamed efficiently. With regards to the internet technology, there has been increasing push towards using HTML5. Also with regards to internet technology, there has been a push for going away from Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) due to internet security issues. After researching several methods that are used for streaming media content on the web, including things such as URL hashing, Kaltura, a Linux implementation of HTTP Live Streaming, etc, we decided to use Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming. Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming, which favors Apple products over other products, is both a practical and easy to implement solution for the library staff. In this document, we will go over three main points. The first point is the implementation of HTTP Live Streaming which includes the use of HTTP Live Streaming with regards to client side use, server side use, and the installation utility software. The second point is our procedure and project timeline. The third point will be the main problems that we confronted regarding both inherent issues (such as copyright issues, efficiency, etc) as well as implementation and research issues (such as system requirements and false leads in research).
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    Mathematics Education Recruitment Video
    May, Daniel; Gates, Greg; Zhang, Jeff (2012-05-02)
    This video was created to help recruit graduate students for the Mathematics Education program at Virginia Tech.
  • Upward Bound and Talent Search Video
    Srivastava, Arunima; Muralidhar, Nikhil (2012-05-03)
    Upward Bound and Educational Talent Search are both national programs housed at Virginia Tech to encourage and assist high school students in college admission preparation. This project was assigned with the goal of updating and revamping their very first recruiting video for current high school students.
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    Boy Scout Medical Record System for Blue Ridge Mountain Council
    Kurlak, John; Whelan, Pat; Greer, Zack; De La Barra, Mauricio (2012-05-03)
    For this semester project, our team decided to partner with the Boy Scouts of America in Pulaski County. Our coordinator, Gregory W. Harmon, works for the Boy Scouts and manages all of their camping facilities. Since they serve over 120,000 users per day, they were looking for ways to improve their medical recording procedures for filing injuries and accidents. For them, currently everything is written by hand into a log book and supplemented with various forms. Our project is basically a web-based digitalization of this recording procedure. This system has one main form that goes into a database. This main form has the ability to create arbitrary reports with electronic signatures (for legal reasons) as well as the ability to auto populate other form fields. The technologies we used for this project include object-oriented PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, phpass, CSS, and HTML5 (appcache/localStorage). The website that we developed has a home login page. After the user has successfully logged in with his or her user account information, there are multiple things he or she can do. The user can create a new user account with user information, delete an existing user, change the password of the currently logged in user, file an injury report (and upload photos of the injury), view previous injury reports, search reports (which can be downloaded and printed), manage backups (manually and automatically), access forms offline, and contact support for help. Some of the other features of the website include automatic output minification (for CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and fonts), client- and server-side input validation, and robust error handling. Our final website solution ended up being 7,141 lines (158 pages) of code long. Our website is divided up into nine directories (root, backend, backups, css, fonts, form-templates, images, js, and photos), and the code is split up across 55 files. The root folder contains all of the website views and controllers. The backend folder contains all of the website models. The backups folder stores all manual and automatic backups in gzip format. The css folder stores all CSS. The fonts folder stores all custom web fonts. The form-templates folder stores RTF templates for each of the output forms. A user can easily modify these RTF templates, which have variable placeholders, to change the way the report forms look. The images folder contains all of the icons and images used by the website. The js folder stores all of the front-end JavaScript and jQuery code. The photos folder contains all of the photos that users have uploaded with injury forms. Our database stores user account information and injury forms. We developed and normalized the database design in MySQL Workbench. We ended up with seventeen tables. Each injury form is broken up across a series of tables. A report table stores foreign keys to each of these injury tables. We managed our tables in phpMyAdmin, a web control panel. We perform database backups using mysqldump, a binary executable that comes with MySQL. To make the website secure, we used the phpass library, which effectively combats rainbow tables and password crackers by using salted, per-user bcrypt password hashes. We also prepared SQL queries to prevent SQL injections. Finally, we sanitized output to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Overall, the website we developed provides a nice alternative to the current paper solution that the Blue Ridge Mountain Council is using. It is our hope that the Blue Ridge Mountain Council can continue to use and modify our system for the years to come.
  • Carilion Case Simulator Project
    Rajasekaran, Vikram; Goldberg, Aaron; Murphy, Ryan (2012-05-03)
  • Apple Ridge Farms Corporate Retreat Video
    Vernon, Tyler; Dallachie, Charles; Mykich, Andrew; Duval, Matthew (2012-05-03)
    Apple Ridge Farms, a NPO in the Roanoke area, sponsors an academic summer camp for underprivileged youths in the Roanoke area. They also host corporate retreats and other events on their grounds in the off-season. They requested a short video for internet distribution to increase revenue from their corporate retreat portion of their business. We filmed the grounds on April 27th, 2012, and created a video for them using captured video, images, and audio, as well as images they provided.
  • AnimalRescue
    Schneier, Neal; Highman, Zachary (2012-05-04)
  • Valley Interfaith Child Care Center CMS
    Kramolisch, Andrew; Mack, Nate (2012-05-04)
    The project consisted of revamping Valley Interfaith Child Care Center's website to be more modern and feature media. The goal was to cater to two diverse audiences: the families that needed their services and the investors who helped them keep running. This system is the result of efforts to do that. To run this software locally requires: Ruby 1.9.2 or newer, the bundler gem and either SQLite or PostgreSQL. The software can also quite easily be run from a Heroku instance. The website can be viewed in any browser, but the best experience will be had in a recent version of Chrome, Safari or Firefox.
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    FFMPEG on the IBM Cloud
    Ishairzay, Rishi; De, Puloma; Hwang, Andrew (2012-05-06)
    This module aims to introduce FFMPEG to students in a linux environment (IBM Cloud)
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    Save the Penguins
    Avant, Joey; Merryman, David (2012-05-06)
    The purpose of this project was to create a promotional video for Studio STEM's after school 'Save the Penguins' program. This program was created to get middle school aged students interested in critical thinking and performing experiments using the scientific method. Students would have an ice cube which represented a penguin, and they would construct a house for it out of different materials to protect it from the sun (a heat lamp). The materials would be tested to see which are the most effective at insulating the house from the heat lamp. The students would design their house based on data they obtained from experiments, and then further refine their design based on how well it fared in tests.
  • Catawba Multimedia Website
    White, Aleksi; Dancy, Zac (2012-05-07)
    The website for the Catawba Sustainability Center (CSC) was in its infancy, and it needed to be expanded with descriptions for onsite land demonstrations, showcases for student and faculty projects, and spotlights of the businesses on site. The lead content director for the site is Christy Gabbard, and the head of website development is Joe Gabbard
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    Disaster Video Gallery Project
    Fesseha, ZeleAlem (2012-05-10)
    The goal of this project was to collect YouTube videos for carefully selected events. The videos were manually collected and verified to be relevant to the specific events. The collection together with short description included with each video can later be used to automate the process of collecting videos pertaining to past disasters. We hope that the sample video collection presented here can help build a successful model relating metadata with relevance of video.
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    Focused Crawling
    Farag, Mohamed Magdy Gharib; Khan, Mohammed Saquib Akmal; Mishra, Gaurav; Ganesh, Prasad Krishnamurthi; Collins, Wil; Dickerson, Will (Virginia Tech, 2012-12-11)
    Finding information on the WWW is a difficult and challenging task because of the extremely large volume of content in the WWW. Search engines can be used to facilitate this task, but it is still difficult to cover all the webpages on the WWW and also to provide good results for all types of users and in all contexts. The focused crawling concept has been developed to overcome these difficulties. There are several approaches for developing a focused crawler. Classification-based approaches use classifiers in relevance estimation. Semantic-based approaches use ontologies for domain or topic representation and in relevance estimation. Link analysis approaches use text and link structure information in relevance estimation. The main differences between these approaches are: what policy is taken for crawling, how to represent the topic of interest, and how to estimate the relevance of webpages visited during crawling. We present in this report a modular architecture for focused crawling. We separated the design of the main components of focused crawling into modules to facilitate the exchange and integration of different modules. We present here a classification-based focused crawler prototype based on our modular architecture. We also describe how it can help with a particular event-oriented crawl. Note: Mr. Collins and Mr. Dickerson, in CS4624 in the spring of 2013, extended the prior work by the other co-authors from CS5604, from the fall of 2012.
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    Virginia eSports Association Video Project
    Simonarson, Sigurdur; Case, Sean (YouTube, 2013-05)
    The Virginia eSports Association (VeSPA) held a League of Legends tournament from January 27 - February 12, 2013 called The Hokie Grail. The tournament consisted of 24 teams, and over 75 games were played with over $1000 cash prizes and raffles. This project group set out to use both footage from the live event as well as in-game footage in order to promote the organization. The promotional material generated by the project is meant for two distinct audiences. The first is the collection of the companies that VeSPA contacts in order to obtain sponsorships for future events. To appeal to this audience the project group created a promotional video consisting of footage from the live event. This footage highlights the sponsors for the Hokie Grail and shows attendees interacting with resources provided by those sponsors. The second audience is the gamers who the organization hopes will attend future events. The live event promotional video achieves this goal to some degree by exciting players, but a top 10 plays video also was created to better appeal to this audience. The top 10 plays video consists of in-game footage that highlights some of the best players who competed in the tournament. This is meant to excite and inspire gamers, as well as provide a forum for high level play to be recognized.