Honors Projects
Showing 231 - 240 of 662 Items
Real-Time Object Recognition using a Multi-Framed Temporal Approach
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Corinne Alini
Access: Open access
- Computer Vision involves the extraction of data from images that are analyzed in order to provide information crucial to many modern technologies. Object recognition has proven to be a difficult task and programming reliable object recognition remains elusive. Image processing is computationally intensive and this issue is amplified on mobile platforms with processor restrictions. The real-time constraints demanded by robotic soccer in RoboCup competition serve as an ideal format to test programming that seeks to overcome these challenges. This paper presents a method for ball recognition by analyzing the movement of the ball. Major findings include enhanced ball discrimination by replacing the analysis of static images with absolute change in brightness in conjunction with the classification of apparent motion change.
Geochemical and Stratigraphic Analysis of the Linnévatnet Sediment Record: A Study of Late Holocene Cirque Glacier Activity in Spitsbergen, Svalbard
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Graham Harper Edwards
Access: Open access
- Morainal and lacustrine sediments in Linnédalen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, record the fluctuations of a glacier in a currently unglaciated mountain cirque during the Little Ice Age (LIA). This study attempts to reconstruct Late Holocene glacial activity within this cirque from geochemical, physical, and visual stratigraphic variation of the Linnévatnet lacustrine sediment record. A 57 cm lacustrine sediment core (D10.5) from Linnévatnet was analyzed at a high-resolution for variations in X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF)-measured elemental composition, spectral reflectance, and magnetic susceptibility. The visual stratigraphy was observed at a microscopic scale. An age-depth model for D10.5 is developed by extrapolating sedimentation rates from dated horizons, measured by 239+240Pu radionuclide fallout dating and chemostratigraphic enrichment of atmospheric anthropogenic pollutants. Visual stratigraphy of the sediment record indicates two periods of cirque glacier sediment delivery to Linnévatnet during the LIA (1329-1363 CE, 1816 CE-Present) and a third period of sediment delivery during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; 984-1082 CE). During non-glacial periods, stratigraphic variation in XRF-measured Ti and K appear to be associated with fluctuations in North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)-regulated precipitation. Within the LIA glacial intervals, decadal-scale variations in sediment Ti and K geochemistry may result from advance and retreat of the cirque glacier ice-margin or fluctuations in precipitation. Stratigraphic variation in Fe content indicates complex erosional and hydrological processes associated with MCA precipitation and glacial meltwater. Stratigraphic and geochemical variations in the lacustrine record of Linnévatnet indicate that both cirque glacier activity and sediment transport in Linnédalen are more sensitive to climatological change than previously thought.
Teaching Computers to Teach Themselves: Synthesizing Training Data based on Human-Perceived Elements
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: James Little
Access: Open access
- Isolation-Based Scene Generation (IBSG) is a process for creating synthetic datasets made to train machine learning detectors and classifiers. In this project, we formalize the IBSG process and describe the scenarios—object detection and object classification given audio or image input—in which it can be useful. We then look at the Stanford Street View House Number (SVHN) dataset and build several different IBSG training datasets based on existing SVHN data. We try to improve the compositing algorithm used to build the IBSG dataset so that models trained with synthetic data perform as well as models trained with the original SVHN training dataset. We find that the SVHN datasets that perform best are composited from isolations extracted from existing training data, leading us to suggest that IBSG be used in situations where a researcher wants to train a model with only a small amount of real, unlabeled training data.
Economic Analysis of the Critical Habitat Designation Process for Endangered and Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Katherine Fosburgh
Access: Open access
- Habitat destruction is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in the US. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), habitat deemed essential to endangered and threatened species recovery is proposed as critical habitat (CH). CH areas are subject to regulations that could alter land development plans or increase costs. The potential economic opportunity cost created by CH regulations may lead to the exclusion of land proposed for CH designation, thereby reducing the conservation benefits of the CH rule. In this paper, I use a unique dataset collected from Federal Register (FR) documents to estimate the reduction in CH acreage from proposed to final ruling, both on the extensive and intensive margin. I find a negative relationship between the level of household income in an area proposed for CH and the probability that a CH gains acreage or maintains acreage during the establishment process. I also find some evidence that higher household income in a CH area is associated with a greater relative loss in acreage between proposal and finalization. I also find that private land proposed for CH designation is less likely to be in the final designation than federal land. Overall, my results suggest that economic considerations influence CH allocation decisions. Whether reducing the amount of private land subject to CH designations is socially efficient depends on the unknown economic benefit of private land exclusions versus the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss that may result from not protecting all land deemed vital to species recovery.
ALGOrhythms: Leveraging Markov Chain-Based Generation of Functional Harmonies with User-Defined Musical Corpus as a Compositional Tool
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Coleman Brockmeier
Access: Open access
- Music forms the soundtrack to daily life and serves as an important cultural marker for people around the world. As the world becomes digitized and connected via the internet, the opportunity is increasingly accessible for anyone to share music with the world and to create chart-topping music that defines the cultural vernacular. Many prominent producers have little to no formal musical training, especially in Western music theory. As a result, loop-based music dominates the lists of most-played music on the radio and streaming services, often not deviating from basic functional harmony. With this project, I have created a compositional tool in the form of an iOS app which identifies the harmonic “fingerprint” behind a given set of songs. The app then leverages this understanding to create sequences of chords in the style of that fingerprint. To accomplish this, the app employs web scraping to create a corpus of musical information in the form of Markov chains — a transition table which underlies the data set. I introduce the idea of musical “chunks” defining a harmonic “fingerprint” and various methods of traversing the transition table to create chord progressions employing the fingerprint as a guide. The tool allows for specification of corpus, chunk size, traversal method, and the ability to listen to, share, and save generated results. The resulting app is a tool that allows the user to answer the question: “What would happen if Stevie Wonder and Billie Eilish wrote a song together?”
Transcending the Clinical: Empathic Care Work, Moral Injury, and the Community Health Worker in Rural Maine
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Anneke Halliday
Access: Open access
- The Maine Mobile Health Program is a federally qualified health center and community health organization that provides healthcare to migrant and seasonal farmworkers in rural Maine. The MMHP employs community health workers to act as negotiators between unjust systems, physicians, and patients. This thesis investigates the ways in which community health workers provide patients with “empathic care” and details how this happens in practice based on field observations and interviews. It also addresses how empathic care benefits patients by creating empowerment, building trust, and giving patients agency in their healthcare decision making. Furthermore, this thesis discusses the cost of providing empathic care as “moral injury” and considers how community health workers are emotionally and psychologically impacted by the work that they do. Ultimately, this thesis illuminates the transformative capacity of empathic care and the burden it imposes on community health workers operating within inequitable systems.
Where the Dead Leave No Trace: The Darién Gap, Bare Life, and the Afterlives of Prevention Through Deterrence This record is embargoed.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Mariana Silvano Blay
Access: Permanent restriction
Crystal Engineering Pharmaceuticals: Combining Cocrystals and Additives to Tune Morphology Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Brendan J. Hill
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
The Scientists of The Dawnland: Reframing the Boundaries of Knowledge Through Wabanaki Epistemologies
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Jonah Bussgang
Access: Open access
- This honors project explores how Wabanaki scientists navigate and reshape dominant paradigms of science, land use, and education by strategically integrating Western science with Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Through theoretical and historical analysis alongside three ethnographic interviews, I show how Indigenous knowledge is not simply surviving within colonial systems but actively transforming them from within. Framing the work through the concept of etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing), I examine how my interviewees—Dr. Suzanne Greenlaw, Sam St. John, and Tyler Everett—use science as a relational, spiritual, and community-based practice to support cultural continuity and natural resource protection. Their work challenges the dominant binaries between science and religion, objectivity and identity, and knowledge and responsibility. They engage with Western institutions on their own terms to support their communities and uphold Wabanaki sovereignty. While the work of Indigenous scientists is increasingly studied across the U.S. and globally, Wabanaki communities remain underrepresented in this discourse. This project helps fill that gap and calls on Bowdoin College to invest more seriously in reciprocal relationships with Wabanaki communities, including institutional collaboration and the hiring of Indigenous faculty.
The Revolutionary Body & the Marxist Feminism of Wages for Housework, WITCH, and the Third World Women’s Alliance
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Talia Traskos-Hart
Access: Open access
- The Revolutionary Body traces three Marxist feminist groups which emerged in the late 1960s and organized through the 1970s: Wages for Housework, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and WITCH. These three groups have yet to be combined in secondary historical scholarship, and their grouping here evidences similarities in anti-capitalist organizing across demographic differences. This project delves into the groups’ conceptions of the home and the body as dual sites of oppression and sources of liberation. Through studying such issues as imprisonment, housework, and forced sterilization, this project uncovers the intensity of capitalist violence unto the body and the ensuing mysticism revolutionary women’s bodies were seen to hold.