Engineering Commons^™

Mechanism Design For Optimizing On-Chain Sell Order In Market Without Market Maker, Nico Pei

CMC Senior Theses

The absence of market makers alters the microstructure of the market. It’s difficult to get exposed to time-weighted prices in markets without market makers. In this paper, we delve into three mechanism designs – discrete gradual dutch auction, continuous gradual dutch auction, and variable rate gradual dutch auction – to study how to execute time-weighted sell orders on blockchain in a market without market makers. To make it simpler for readers to understand, we imagine an example of helping a close friend of Picasso to sell his 100 Picasso paintings in the next 10 years since 1970, with the private …

Towards Algorithmic Justice: Human Centered Approaches To Artificial Intelligence Design To Support Fairness And Mitigate Bias In The Financial Services Sector, Jihyun Kim

CMC Senior Theses

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has positively transformed the Financial services sector but also introduced AI biases against protected groups, amplifying existing prejudices against marginalized communities. The financial decisions made by biased algorithms could cause life-changing ramifications in applications such as lending and credit scoring. Human Centered AI (HCAI) is an emerging concept where AI systems seek to augment, not replace human abilities while preserving human control to ensure transparency, equity and privacy. The evolving field of HCAI shares a common ground with and can be enhanced by the Human Centered Design principles in that they both put humans, the user, at …

Blockchain Games: What On And Off-Chain Factors Affect The Volatility, Returns, And Liquidity Of Gaming Crypto Tokens, Sumer Sareen

CMC Senior Theses

Blockchain games took the internet by storm as they offered a new way for users to play video games, own the assets in those games, and benefit monetarily from their efforts. Through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies, new, Web3 games ushered in a unique asset class for retail and institutional investors to diversify into and benefit from. This paper uses cross-sectional data from 30 blockchain gaming companies to identify on and off-chain factors that affect the company’s token volatility, returns, and liquidity. A multiple linear regression found the percentage of tokens dedicated to a company’s private sale and rewarding users, …

Stem Education And Retention For Black Women Using High-Impact Practices: Historically Black Colleges And Universities Vs. Predominantly White Liberal Arts Colleges, Annette Njei

CMC Senior Theses

Black women are significantly underrepresented within the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). To address this, the Association of American Colleges & Universities crafted ten high-impact practices to increase student engagement and promote retention. This research paper examines how three specific high-impact practices (learning communities, mentoring, and undergraduate research experience) are utilized in STEM education.This research paper explores and compares the best high impact approaches that successfully teach and retain Black women within the various fields of STEM within the differing academic environments of historically Black colleges & universities ( HBCUs) and predominantly white liberal art colleges (PWLACs). …

Optimizing Router Performance, Bradley Newton, Radon Rosborough, Miles President, Hakan Alpan

CMC Senior Theses

To support its development of networking hardware and software, Juniper Networks conducts research into enhancements to the protocols used on the Internet, in coordination with standards bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force. We helped Juniper Networks with two specific research objectives. The first was to design and implement an improved algorithm by which Internet hosts can establish the appropriate packet size to maximize bandwidth while avoiding packet fragmentation. We produced a working implementation of the improved algorithm in the Linux kernel. The second objective was to measure the effect of different Internet Protocol extension headers (specifically, Routing Header …

Gravity-Drawing Flexible Silicone Filaments As Fiber Optics And Model Foldamers, Katherine Snell

CMC Senior Theses

Here, we present a method of gravity-drawing polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) silicone fibers with application as fiber optics and as model foldamers. Beginning as a viscous liquid, PDMS is cured using heat until its measured viscosity reaches 4000 mPa•s. The semi-cured elastomer is then extruded through a tube furnace to produce thin (diameters on the order of hundred micrometers) filaments with scalable lengths. PDMS is biocompatible, gas-permeable, flexible, and hydrophobic. Additionally, the PDMS surface hydrophobicity can be modified via UV exposure, O2 plasma, and corona discharge. We demonstrate the patternibility (i.e patterns of hydrophobicity) of PDMS fibers, adding complexity to potential foldamer …

The Need For Enhanced Physical Infrastructure In The United States, Tanvi Gandham

CMC Senior Theses

An examination of necessary infrastructure improvements in the United States.

Can A Comprehensive Transition Plan To Barefoot Running Be The Solution To The Injury Epidemic In American Endurance Runners?, Michael A. Scarlett

CMC Senior Theses

Fossils belonging to the genus Homo, dating as far back as two million years ago, exhibit uniquely efficient features suggesting that early humans had evolved to become exceptional endurance runners. Although they did not have the cushion or stability-control features provided in our modern day running shoes, our early human ancestors experienced far less of the running-related injuries we experience today. The injury rate has been estimated as high as 90% annually for Americans training for a marathon and as high as 79% annually for all American endurance runners. There is an injury epidemic in conventionally shod populations that …

Developing A Recurrent Neural Network With High Accuracy For Binary Sentiment Analysis, Kevin Cunanan

CMC Senior Theses

Sentiment analysis has taken on various machine learning approaches in order to optimize accuracy, precision, and recall. However, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) account for the context of a sentence by using previous predictions as additional input for future sentence predictions. Our approach focused on developing an LSTM RNN that could perform binary sentiment analysis for positively and negatively labeled sentences. In collaboration with Mariam Salloum, I developed a collection of programs to classify individual sentences as either positive or negative. This paper additionally looks into machine learning, neural networks, data preprocessing, implementation, and resulting comparisons.

Fog Computing With Go: A Comparative Study, Ellis H. Butterfield

CMC Senior Theses

The Internet of Things is a recent computing paradigm, de- fined by networks of highly connected things – sensors, actuators and smart objects – communicating across networks of homes, buildings, vehicles, and even people. The Internet of Things brings with it a host of new problems, from managing security on constrained devices to processing never before seen amounts of data. While cloud computing might be able to keep up with current data processing and computational demands, it is unclear whether it can be extended to the requirements brought forth by Internet of Things.

Fog computing provides an architectural solution to …

One-Bit Compressive Sensing With Partial Support Information, Phillip North

CMC Senior Theses

This work develops novel algorithms for incorporating prior-support information into the field of One-Bit Compressed Sensing. Traditionally, Compressed Sensing is used for acquiring high-dimensional signals from few linear measurements. In applications, it is often the case that we have some knowledge of the structure of our signal(s) beforehand, and thus we would like to leverage it to attain more accurate and efficient recovery. Additionally, the Compressive Sensing framework maintains relevance even when the available measurements are subject to extreme quantization. Indeed, the field of One-Bit Compressive Sensing aims to recover a signal from measurements reduced to only their sign-bit. This …

A Dna Computer For Glioblastoma Multiforme Diagnosis And Drug Delivery, Sumaiya F. Hashmi

CMC Senior Theses

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a debilitating malignant brain tumor with expected patient survival of less than a year and limited responsiveness to most treatments, often requiring biopsy for diagnosis and invasive surgery for treatment. We propose a DNA computer system, consisting of input, computation, and output components, for diagnosis and treatment. The input component will detect the presence of three GBM biomarkers: vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), caveolin-1α (CAV), and B2 receptors. The computation component will include indicator segments for each of these genes, and ensure that output is only released if all the biomarkers are present. The output component …

Energy Efficiency Technologies For Buildings: Potential For Energy, Cost, And Carbon Emission Savings, Bukola S. Jimoh

CMC Senior Theses

Buildings are a significant energy consumer and are responsible for an increasingly large percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, currently between 30 and 40 percent. Energy efficiency presents unique opportunities for building owners to reduce their environmental footprint and add value through cost savings, tax deductions, and increased market value. An analysis of 183 samples of efficiency measures in seven technology categories found that 74% of efficiency investments had a positive net present value. Building automation system and chiller plant improvements had the highest mean energy and carbon dioxide savings per square foot. Additionally, building automation systems had, on average …