Abstract
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Universities use low resolution cameras as a means to promote campus image and monitor public areas. These cameras can be used as a means to predict social patterns and eating habits of students to better accommodate them through out their college career. This could possibly be of interest to psychologist, campus administration, and various services students use in order to reach a maximum amount of students, host various events, or provide food services at the appropriate times of the day.
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Introduction
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Webcams can be used in university to record social habits of students on a given day. This data could be quite important in setting up meal plans, informing students of events on campus, and raise overall school spirit. By recording this data, this could help improve student lifestyles and increase attendance of major events on campus.
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Methods
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The webcam is located in The Hub, which is the center for food, studying, and socializing for Pennsylvania State University. Data is collected data on the amount of visible students on the screen and weather conditions in hour long chunks of time and the average number of students and student peak times will be calculated. The actual data collection will be done by human observation of the pictures collected by the webcam.
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Results
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The peak time of students was during the lunch hours of 12:00pm – 2:00pm and the lowest times were during the late night and early morning of 1:00am – 6:00am. There were a significant lower number of students on the days that were cloudy comparatively to the nice days which supports that weather has an effect on the outgoingness of students However, the evening peak time hasn’t shown a significant peak comparatively.
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Privacy
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Issues that arise are the possibility of identifying an individual if viewed multiple times throughout the project. This did not happen in this study but the possibility still exists and might concern students being observed even though it’s a public web camera.
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References
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Camera: https://146.186.221.189/cgi-bin/jpg/image.cgi?resolution=704x480,
also available through https://www.psu.edu/ur/cam.html
Project Paper (PDF)
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