Undergraduate Works

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Browsing Undergraduate Works by Subject "2020 URS Data Stories"

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    Learning to learn: Making sense of electrophysiology data
    Leriche, Ryan; Swann, Nicole
    With no previous signal processing background, I began to study how electrical brain waves vary with movement speed and uncertainty. I learned when fleshing out the details or just seeing the big picture made sense for the techniques I used. My lab uses scalp-electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain activity. EEG data can be noisy, but there are methods see through this notice. After some pre-processing, I ran an independent component analysis to decompose a complex signal into its sub-signals. I removed the eye movement sub-signals as I just was interested in brain activity. With kurtosis values—the sharpness of a signal—I could remove artifactual trials. I was uncomfortable using ICA and kurtosis measures without knowing exactly how they worked. Learning every nuance would have halted my analysis progression. So, with a conceptual understanding, I used these tools to generate a cleaner EEG signal. With a clean signal, I began my time-frequency analysis. This would describe how well a sine wave at a given frequency represents my signal. I could not get a conceptual hold on this topic. After pausing my analysis and taking an online course—at my PI’s suggestion—my progress accelerated. I now could examine how electrical brain activity changes with movement uncertainty and speed. My analysis suggests that brain activity increases with slower movements; however, now I need to learn how to statistically verify this result.
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    New Capabilities for Self-Driving Networks
    Rudolph, Nolan; Durairajan, Ramakrishnan
    Granted the annual trends in increasing internet usage, the University of Oregon Networking Research Group preemptively researches the concept of Self-Driving Networks (S-DNs) to create a self-remediating, high-performance network. In efforts of accomplishing this project, the lack of S-DN compatible software compels new research to be conducted on new capabilities for a self-driving network. In this project, we accomplish a light-weight visualization framework for flow level data accompanied by a scalable flow to packet generator usable by S-DNs.
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    Transmission of Ecological Knowledge Through Star Myths
    Dieni, Caryssa; Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise
    Ethnoastronomical research indicates that early agricultural societies used regular changes in the positions of asterisms to predict seasonal change and determine when to plant crops, and that this knowledge was encoded, in part, in myth. Our project investigates whether hunting-and-gathering peoples used the stars to predict seasonal availability of wild resources and, if so, whether narrative was used to transmit this knowledge. If so, we would expect star narratives to identify key stars/asterisms, associate them with seasonal change, and reference important seasonal resources (or environmental cues associated with their availability). To test this, we surveyed a cross-cultural sample of forager story collections for etiological star narratives: we found story collections for 74 different forager culture regions, 44 (59.5%) of which contained star narratives. These narratives were then coded for the presence of the predicted information. Results indicate that star narratives consistently (1) provide information that facilitates identification of targeted asterisms, and (2) associate these asterisms with seasonal change and key resources. However, the information that asterisms can be used to predict seasonal change and/or resource availability tends to be implicit; thus, for each region, we checked the ethnographic record to ascertain whether asterisms were indeed used for these purposes. These complementary lines of evidence strongly suggest that star myths performed an ecological function in hunter-gatherer societies.
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    “What does being Latino/Latina/Latinx mean to you?”: A Thematic Analysis of Oregon Latinx Students and Their Ethnic Identity
    Auld, Maya; McWhirter, Ellen
    The current study uses inductive thematic analysis to derive themes from responses to an open-ended question. This study was set in Oregon where 23% of k-12 students are Latinx (Gill et al., 2019). Data for the present study, collected in spring of 2019, is written responses to the question "What does it mean to you to be Latina/o/x?" Participants were 495 Latinx high school students attending a one-day leadership conference. Themes present in open-ended responses represent all levels of the ecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) and include themes of internal characteristics, interpersonal interactions, and sociocultural influences and codes such as culture, pride, community, family, language, and resistance that inform how Latinx youth conceptualize their ERI. Exploration of relationships between themes of pride, a component of positive regard and ethnic racial identity (ERI), academic achievement, and participation in M.E.Ch.A. (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) revealed a significant relationship. between M.E.Ch.A. participation and responses coded for pride in which students that participated in M.E.Ch.A. were more likely to respond to the open-ended question in a way that would be coded for pride. The exploration of relationships was done with chi square tests.