Systems

Project Panoptyk is a game engine designed to run Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games with information creation, sharing, and exchange as the central gameplay focus. This engine is a work in progress, intended to serve as a platform for simulating human/robot interaction, as well as automatic generation of game assets, quests, and real-estate. The project also aims to create an open platform allowing indie and research communities to experiment with MMO concepts.

We present a study using the Digital Democracy transcription tool. Human transcribers work to up-level and annotate California state legislative proceedings using the tool. Four phases of UI and functionality improvements are introduced and for each phase, the resulting change in efficiency is measured and presented.

This research concerns the perceived need for and benefits of an algorithmically generated, personalizable tip sheet that could be used by journalists to improve and expand coverage of state legislatures. This study engaged in two research projects to understand if working journalists could make good use of such a tool and, if so, what features and functionalities they would most value within it. This study also explored journalists’ perceptions of the role of such tools in their newswork.

Legislative proceedings present a rich source of multidimensional information that is crucial to citizens and journalists in a democratic system. At present, no fully automated solution exists that is capable of capturing all the necessary information during such proceedings. Even if professional-quality automated transcriptions existed, other tasks such as speaker or rhetorical position identifications are not fully automatable. This work focuses on improving and evaluating the transcription software used by the Digital Democracy initiative, named Transcription Tool.

The Internet-of-things promises sweeping change through increased connectivity and ubiquitous integration of technology into our lives. However, as we create economies of scale for data aggregation and processing, we also create attractive targets for various adversaries. In this work we design a lightweight, probabilistic intrusion detection system, or PIDIoT. We design PIDIoT to use operational measurements from IoT devices, with lightweight hash functions and Bloom filters to perform fuzzy anomaly detection.

We are developing PolyFS, a polymorphic file system assignment and corresponding storage device emulator compatible with a variety of operating systems. PolyFS specification includes a very basic block-device emulator making it easy to use regular Unix files, or even web-based services, as emulated disks. The file system itself is intentionally under-specified to allow instructors to focus on particular aspect of file systems in their assignments and students to actually design and implement important sub-systems using algorithms covered during lecture.