Urban sprawl has been a continued problem in many rural communities, including Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. This is why, every year, they choose to legally protect select agricultural lands to curb the effects of growing urban populations, namely from the Northeast part of the county near State College. We have been asked by the Huntingdon County Conservation District to rank the lands that have applied to be protected in order to determine which ones will be chosen. There is a specific set of criteria that we are given, and each land is given a score. The criterion is based on how likely a parcel is to be developed by contractors or businesses etc. Examples of criteria include; a property's road frontage, distance from developments or businesses, distances from other farmlands, and the percentage of land used for agricultural purposes. Using ArcGIS, we mapped out each of the farmlands and determined their potential for development as well as agricultural use. These lands were then given a score, ranked from highest to lowest, and given to the Huntingdon County Conservation District for them to choose which parcels they should preserve.  

The steady progress of computing power, as predicted by Moore's Law, has stagnated in recent years, leading the industry to focus on parallelism as the primary means of driving performance improvements. While parallel computing offers significant potential, it also introduces challenges related to non-deterministic behavior, especially in object-oriented programming languages like Java.

To address these challenges, researchers have developed Deterministic Parallel Java (DPJ), an extension to the Java programming language that enforces deterministic parallelism by default. However, current implementations of DPJ are primarily software-based, relying on the underlying hardware to provide the necessary performance and efficiency.

In this research project, I aim to explore the potential of implementing the DPJ approach in hardware, specifically on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. By mapping the DPJ concepts directly onto reconfigurable hardware, I seek to achieve significant performance and energy efficiency gains, as well as investigate the hardware-software co-design opportunities that this approach offers.

The primary goals of this research are to (1) design and implement the first FPGA-based architecture for DPJ, and (2) contribute to the broader body of knowledge in the field of computer architecture. Additionally, this project provides a valuable opportunity for me to gain hands-on experience with graduate-level research and to represent the hardware aspects of computer science at the Liberal Arts Symposium.

I will be presenting on a possible app design that uses system modeling to suggest the best hiking trails to users

This session will feature student work that has occurred as a result of partnerships with the community and will feature presentations that reflect on the projects, research and/or relationships built while taking a CEL course.

Mommy's Monsters started as just a name. It was the title of the Text-Based Ethical Game I knew I wanted to create for my English class, Ethical Game Design. I played with a text-based game creating software, Twine, and pretty quickly discovered that I had fallen in love with it. Not only had I fallen madly in love with this software, but I had, through creating this little text-based horror game, started to unpack deeply buried childhood trauma. Having an addict mother was something that shaped me, built me, and forever changed and inspired me. This project wasn't just variables and branching on Twine; this was therapeutic. In this presentation, I will take you through my creation process and explore how games, specifically horror games, can allow you to do things and process trauma as profoundly personal and special as what Mommy's Monsters did for me.

“Domestic students are not interested in international students.” My international friend confessed to me her feelings. While I struggled to respond at the time, I believe that the presence of international students has a positive impact on domestic students’ academic productivity. This study is about measuring the correlation between social interaction with international students and domestic students’ academic burnout. The purpose of this research is to gain a greater understanding as to how interaction with international students benefits domestic students’ academic producibility in order to verify the hypothesis that true social cohesion of immigrants into local society lifts all boats in society. This mixed-methods, exploratory study employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches, utilizing surveys with both closed- and open-ended questions to evaluate the experiences of domestic students. Through the analysis of their opinions on academic burnout, the research will examine whether stronger social interactions with international students lead to greater academic motivation, while a lack of such interactions correlates with higher levels of burnout. Given the pressing issue of exploitation and mistreatment of unskilled immigrants in my home country of Japan, as well as the global nature of immigrant abuse, this study seeks to highlight how fostering immigrant integration, rather than marginalizing or exploiting them, benefits society as a whole.