Journal of Undergraduate Research

Ryan Cheatham and Dr. William A. Barrett, Computer Science Introduction Genealogists across the world face a unique and challenging problem. They attempt to sort through obscure historical data in order to find information about their ancestors, then they have to keep track of all the data they have found in an organized way. In today’s […]

Joseph Park and Dr. David Embley, Computer Science The disambiguation of person names in web people searches is a long standing problem within the semantic search community. A query such as the name “Henry Eyring” would produce thousands of results with references to more than one entity with that same name. In order to mitigate […]

Chris Dalton and Dr. Dan Ventura, Computer Science Prime factorization is the breaking down of a composite number into prime numbers that, when multiplied together, equal the number. There is not a known algorithm that accomplishes this task in sub-exponential time. For my ORCA project, I worked with Dr. Dan Ventura and sought to develop […]

Julius Adebayo and Dr. Sean Warnick, Computer Science A system-level understanding of the functioning behavior of a cell requires an accurate representation of the underlying networks of gene and protein interactions. Network reconstruction is an area of systems biology that attempts to reconstruct the network of regulatory interactions from available measurements using a mathematical framework. […]

Michael Christensen BYU’s Fulton Supercomputing Lab (FSL) is a centralized campus resource whose mission is “to facilitate and enhance computationally-intensive research at BYU by providing reliable, state-of-the-art, high performance computing resources to faculty and students.” As part of that mission, Supercomputing provides large compute clusters and other systems for researchers to use as needed. If […]

Thomas Howard and Dr. Bryan S. Morse, Computer Science Introduction When performing image quantization, palette selection has always been a difficult problem. All methods, although they may produce acceptable result for some images, perform poorly on others. The problem lies in deciding which colors are best to include in the quantized palette. For example, when […]

Darwin Baines and Dr. Robert P. Burton, Computer Science Overview Voxel-Selected Ray Tracing (VSRT) is a technique that uses undersampling to reduce the computation time necessary to render realistic looking animations. Although undersampling tends to reduce the quality of an image, VSRT includes error checking techniques that minimize the reduction in quality of the animation. […]

Michael Jones, Department of Computer Science As computer systems become an integral part of society, ensuring that systems perform correctly will become more important. Proofs of correctness based on formal logic are one approach to the correctness problem in computer system design. Unfortunately, these proofs are often large and difficult for industrial size projects. The […]

Kevin Steele, Computer Science ABSTRACT Chaos theory and fractal science is a recently developed technology. Julia Sets, a class of deterministic fractals, have been defined and rendered using computer software in only two and four dimensions. In my Research and Creative Work Scholarship application, I proposed to develop a software system to create and render […]

Alen Peacock and Dr. J. Kelly Flanagan, Computer Science Popular Internet web sites experience a common problem: as the number of people trying to access a site grows, the wait for page downloads for each of those users grows accordingly. In extreme cases, the site becomes completely inaccessible as the server refuses connections over a […]