Computer Engineering Commons^™

Best Trade-Off Point Method For Efficient Resource Provisioning In Spark, Peter P. Nghiem

Computer Science and Engineering

Considering the recent exponential growth in the amount of information processed in Big Data, the high energy consumed by data processing engines in datacenters has become a major issue, underlining the need for efficient resource allocation for more energy-efficient computing. We previously proposed the Best Trade-off Point (BToP) method, which provides a general approach and techniques based on an algorithm with mathematical formulas to find the best trade-off point on an elbow curve of performance vs. resources for efficient resource provisioning in Hadoop MapReduce. The BToP method is expected to work for any application or system which relies on a …

A Framework For Detecting Injected Influence Attacks On Microblog Websites Using Change Detection Techniques, Vishnu S. Pendyala, Yuhong Liu, Silvia M. Figueira

Computer Science and Engineering

Presidential elections can impact world peace, global economics, and overall well-being. Recent news indicates that fraud on the Web has played a substantial role in elections, particularly in developing countries in South America and the public discourse, in general. To protect the trustworthiness of the Web, in this paper, we present a novel framework using statistical techniques to help detect veiled Web fraud attacks in Online Social Networks (OSN). Specific examples are used to demonstrate how some statistical techniques, such as the Kalman Filter and the modified CUSUM, can be applied to detect various attack scenarios. A hybrid data set, …

Image Classification On Iot Edge Devices: Profiling And Modeling, Salma Abdel Magid

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

With the advent of powerful, low-cost IoT systems, processing data closer to where the data originates, known as edge computing, has become an increasingly viable option. In addition to lowering the cost of networking infrastructures, edge computing reduces edge-cloud delay, which is essential for mission-critical applications. In this thesis, we show the feasibility and study the performance of image classification using IoT devices. Specifically, we explore the relationships between various factors of image classification algorithms that may affect energy consumption such as dataset size, image resolution, algorithm type, algorithm phase, and device hardware. Our experiments show a strong, positive linear …

Energy Measurement And Profiling Of Internet Of Things Devices, Immanuel Amirtharaj

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

As technological improvements in hardware and software have grown in leaps and bounds, the presence of IoT devices has been increasing at a fast rate. Profiling and minimizing energy consumption on these devices remains to be an an essential step towards employing them in various application domains. Due to the large size and high cost of commercial energy measurement platforms, the research community has proposed alternative solutions that aim to be simple, accurate, and user friendly. However, these solutions are either costly, have a limited measurement range, or low accuracy. In addition, minimizing energy consumption in IoT devices is paramount …

Applying Block Chain Technologies To Digital Voting Algorithms, Vishanth Iyer, Nathan Kerr, Justin Meeken, Alex Seto

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Voting is a fundamental aspect to democracy. Many countries have advanced voting systems in place, but many of these systems have issues behind them such as not being anonymous or verifiable. Additionally, most voting systems currently have a central authority in charge of counting votes, which can be prone to corruption. We propose a voting system which mitigates many of these issues. Our voting system attempts to provide decentralization, pseudoanonymity, and verifiability. For our system, we have identified the requirements, implemented the backbone of the system, recognized some of its shortcomings, and proposed areas of future work on this voting …

Hedhi Help, Sarah Pagnani, Kelsey Pasco, Brandon Smith, Sarek Sotelo-Jimenez

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

A culture of social taboos and silence leaves many young women beginning menarche in isolation, without complete understanding of the changes occurring in their bodies. There is a widespread stigma surrounding menstruation all around the world. These stigma impose significant barriers to education and proper hygiene for young girls during a critical time in their lives. Not having the proper support and resources to manage this process, 1 in 10 girls in sub-Saharan Africa miss school during their period, and therefore are more likely to drop out altogether. In Kenya specifically, menstruating girls miss an average of 4.9 days of …

Spotme Emergency Location Service, Arya Faili, Zain Umerani, Kunal Bhimjiyani

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This document delves into our disaster relief application that allows people who are helpless due to a natural disaster to find a way out and get help. The purpose of this document is to explain how the application works, but more specifically the design of the application, use cases, and conceptual models. Starting with a brief introduction, this paper will dive into the necessary requirements needed to build an application at this scale while presenting several use cases. To help the reader understand the application at a finer detail, activity diagrams will be shown along with models. Lastly, the document …

Cryptki: Mobile Hardware Wallet, Derrick Chan, Rowan Decker, William Nguyen, Yuya Oguchi

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Cryptocurrencies are rapidly receiving mainstream attention and adoption. As a result, new technologies are developing to store and transact cryptocurrencies to keep up with a rapidly developing market. We have developed a way to utilize a mobile phone to communicate with the Ethereum blockchain in order to monitor and initiate cryptocurrency transactions. The project allows users to create new Ethereum addresses and to send arbitrary amounts of Ether to existing Ethereum addresses, while maintaining security for the end user. We conclude that this method of communication with the Ethereum blockchain is viable and is an avenue for exploration in the …

Diagnostic Color Strip Reader For World Health Partners Clinics, Steven Hu, Jisoo Park, Geminiano Romano Yabut

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Despite the advancement of medical technology, many people in developing countries like India and Kenya still suffer from treatable diseases. In many of the health clinics in these areas, color strips are used for checkups and diagnosis of diseases. However, a big problem with these color strips is that the diagnosis of color strips take a long time because they have to be manually checked. Currently, World Health Partners (WHP) works with doctors and hospitals in India and Kenya to provide more accessible healthcare through telehealth networks to get consultations from rural clinics to specialists at hospitals. We are working …

Pet Watch, Jb Anderson, Rachel Hale

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This paper outlines our project of building Pet Watch. Pet Watch is a device similar to a Fit Bit except that it tracks your pet’s activity instead of your own. You can then access this data on our website. This paper defines our requirements, how the system works, and how we built this system.

Presentvr: Defeating Public Speaking Anxiety With Virtual Reality, Gurneev Sareen, Hamilton Coke, Reece Jackson

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In today’s society, the vast majority of individuals are afraid to speak in front of a public crowd. This could range from a classroom presentation to a thousand person amphitheater, and it is because of this fear that people are more anxious in public settings where they present their own idea. In the past, people would try to tackle this problem by practicing in front of a mirror, or having friends help practice. However, there was no convenient way of practicing in front of a live audience, and we believe that with the advances in technology, especially virtual reality, that …

Vr Empathy Training Tool, Helen Chan, Zheqing Li

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

A person’s resilience to adversity and trauma is developed early on in his or her childhood. When parents display stress in front or neglect emotions of their children consistently, their children will form neural connections between areas of pain and stress. It is important to educate parents to properly handle children’s emotions and also control their own emotions and mindfulness during these interactions.

We developed an iOS VR application accompanied by a Google Cardboard and a Mio Alpha fitness watch to record and display the stress level of the parent using his/her heart rate data. The progress of the users …

Virtual Reality Sherlock: A Crime Scene Reconstructor, Ellen Tseng, Ken Wakaba

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

When an investigation team arrives to the scene, they only have a limited amount of time to gather as much evidence as they can. Evidence can include, but is not limited to: fingerprints, pictures/videos, blood samples, or any other biological evidence. Due to the limited amount of time, a few risks arise; they may not have collected enough evidence, the evidence itself may not have captured the full scope of the scene, and the possibility that the evidence itself may have been damaged or destroyed. Our aim is to develop a low-cost, customizable VR crime scene reconstructor. This software allows …

Camera-Based Distance Sensor, Kai Schmidt, Evan Holmes

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

While working on a robotics project at the electrical contracting company for which we work, we discovered a gap in the electronic distance sensor market in terms of range, accuracy, precision, and cost. We designed and constructed a prototype for an electronic distance sensing component which utilizes a camera, laser, and image processor to measure distances. The laser is pointed at a surface and an image of the laser dot is captured. An image processing algorithm determines the pixel position of the dot in the image, and this position is compared to a lookup table of known values to determine …

B.O.G.G.L.E.S.: Boundary Optical Geographic Lidar Environment System, Miguel Chapa, Evan Hoerl, Isaac Jorgensen, Carl Maggio

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The purpose of this paper is to describe a pseudo X-ray vision system that pairs a Lidar scanner with a visualization device. The system as a whole is referred to as B.O.G.G.L.E.S. There are several key factors that went into the development of this system and the background information and design approach are thoroughly described. B.O.G.G.L.E.S functionality is depicted through the use of design constraints and the analysis of test results. Additionally, many possible developments for B.O.G.G.L.E.S are proposed in the paper. This indicates that there are various avenues of improvement for this project that could be implemented in the …

Computational Music Biofeedback For Stress Relief, Jason Capili, Mark Hattori, Maile Naito

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The purpose of our project is to use EEG technology to combat stress in our daily lives. One of the most accessible EEG technologies that targets this challenge is the Muse headband, a wearable device that pairs with a phone application to help users train their brains to relax. The applications main goal is to help users train their brain to be more relaxed by monitoring and reporting their levels of stress. However, one of the shortcomings we noticed is that the constant notifications of how stressed we are actually adds to the level of stress as opposed to helping …

Scu Events, Kellen Bryan, Danno Mayer

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

As students at Santa Clara University for the past four years, we have noticed a lack of student participation in school-sponsored events. Sporting events, art exhibits, student performances and so on do not draw the desired participation from the Santa Clara community. Part of this problem is that the university’s event calendar page is unorganized, lacks a comprehensive list of SCU events and has a poor user interface. Without a comprehensive, centralized place to find information on Santa Clara events, it is difficult for people to attend events and even more challenging to increase awareness about what is happening on …

Snap-N-Snack: A Food Image Recognition Application, Stephen Hoff, Patterson Jaffurs, Michael Enriquez, Quintin Wilde

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Many people desire to be informed about the nutritional specifics of the food they consume. Current popular dietary tracking methods are too slow and tedious for a lot of consumers due to requiring manual data entry for everything eaten. We propose a system that will take advantage of image recognition and the internal camera of Android phones to identify food based off of a picture of a user’s plate. Over the course the last year, we trained an object detection model with images of different types of food, built a mobile application around it, and tested their integration and performance. …

Symptom Search: Predicting Symptom And Product Correlations Using Fda Adverse Effects Reports, Isabela Figueira, Neesha Godbole, Angelina Poole, Kelly Wesley

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Prescription and over-the-counter drugs are abundant now more than ever, and many people use them on a regular basis. These drugs come with a variety of side e↵ects, ranging from common to very rare. However, the symptoms listed on drug packaging might not be the only symptoms that a consumer might experience when taking a specific drug. When experiencing a symptom, consumers might think they have a disease, turn to the Web for answers, and attempt to diagnose themselves when a disease is not necessarily the cause. Instead, these symptoms might be reactions to medications; however, the first thought that …

Virtual Museum For Nacha, Sonali Chaudhry, Alisa Hawthorne

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Our team worked with the Nso’ Arts and Cultural Heritage Association and created a virtual museum in order to increase awareness of the unique culture of the Nso’ people in Cameroon, Africa. A lot of information from this region is in danger of being lost due to political tension and poor artifact conservation, and many people, including the Cameroonian youth, are not prioritizing the preservation of their culture and history. Creating a website where individuals can view the art, history, and culture found in Cameroon is the best way to increase the availability of knowledge of the Nso’ people. Such …

Authenticated Authorship, Andrew Leonard, Mikhail Smelik, Stephen Chuang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Recently there has been an increase of fake news which makes it so that people have a more difficult time of understanding if the article that they are reading is real or not. In addition, it is significantly easier for people to fabricate an article and pose it as if it was created by another person. Our solution to these problems is to create a system which will allow authors to sign their documents and publish them with a generated signature. This signature will allow readers to see if the article has not been tampered with as well as find …

Halo - A Personal Iot Air Monitor Powered By Harvested Energy, Benjamin Lampe, Taylor Mau, Samantha Morehead, Naeem Turner-Bandele

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Urban air pollution leads to widespread respiratory illness and millions of deaths annually. PM2.5, particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, is the product of many common combustion reactions and poses a particularly serious health risk. Its small size allows it to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Existing air quality monitors are aimed at scientific research, di↵erentiating between pollutants and providing high accuracy in measurement. These devices are prohibitively expensive and cannot easily be carried around. Due to the highly localized nature of air pollution, and in order to allow individuals and institutions to …

Perfect Snap, Manoj Adhikari, Colby Harper, Sean Karstein

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Taking group photos during important events is a common practice. Group photos are taken to remember cheerful times when people had an opportunity to meet many other people. However, an unappealing facial expression of one person can easily ruin the entire photo. Capturing the wrong moments when a person doesn’t look attractive can leave him/ her displeased from the complete event experience. A solution is to develop a mobile app that captures the moment when everyone is smiling with eyes wide open. Our solution aims to develop an iPhone app that will preclude users from worrying about not having a …

Vplot, Dante Dalla Gasperina, Kush Mahajani, Alex Martin, Collin Walther

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Robotic systems under development in the Santa Clara University Robotic Systems Laboratory (RSL) generate large amounts of data that must be interpreted in real-time. Many dimensions of this data must be visualized at once, such as temperature, location, and certainty of the measurement. Current data visualization softwares (such as Mathematica and Simulink) are ill-suited to visualize this much data, due to lack of customization. To solve this, we propose a system that allows users to view real-time streaming data in a virtual reality environment. This allows the user to easily interpret large, detailed datasets through an intuitive interface.

Human Attention Region Of Interest In Video Compression, Olayinka Sylvia N’Guessan

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

In this thesis, we propose a generic human attention region-of-interest (Generic- HAROI) algorithm to improve video compression while preserving subjective quality. Precisely, this algorithm performs a perceptual adaptive quantization algorithm on video frames as a function of the distribution of their luminance, motion vector, and color saturation. Our research incorporates a psycho-visual study that demonstrated that human attention automatically enhanced perceived saturation. As a result, the adaptive quantization phase of our compression algorithm is characterized by a luminance and saturation-aware just noticeable distortion (JND) function. After running multiple experiments on 18 videos with various resolutions ranging from QCIF to 4K, …

Rf Roaming System Locator: A Modular Omnidirectional Antenna System, George Stathakis, Josh Sullivan, Christian Ayscue

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Drones are increasingly common in everything from entertainment to delivery services. Currently, GPS and wireless triangulation are the two main methods of tracking drones and collision avoidance. The main problem with these two methods are accuracy and mobility. This thesis goes into building a system that is able to solve the two main drawbacks, by using a completely contained antenna system. The system is robust and can work in a variety of environments and situations. While the thesis focuses on drone tracking, the system is built with modularity in mind and can be adapted to track other RF signals with …

Scu Evals, Fredrik Blomqvist, Joseph Théberge

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Evaluating professors and classes is a common task at universities across the United States. It helps professors improve courses, and guides students when choosing classes tailored to their learning style. The current available evaluation platforms do not offer intuitive, up-to-date, and encouraging solutions to this problem; thus, SCU Evals was launched. Our platform has a production-ready foundation with a significant amount of optimized features to maximize the user experience. Furthermore, it utilizes the latest technologies, and the project is fully open source to increase its overall lifetime. The end goal is to provide a platform that would improve the academic …

Communication System For Firefighters, Nicholas Goodpaster, Steven Booth, Griffin Moede, John-Paul Hurley

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Currently firefighters use two-way radios to communicate on the job, and they are forced to write reports based on their memory because there is not an easy way to record the communications between two-way radios. Firefighters need a system to automatically document what happened while they were responding to a call. To save them a significant amount of time when creating reports, our solution is to implement an application that allows firefighters to take pictures, record video and communicate in real time with their team of on-site responders. The proposed system will use a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) hosted …

Musical Casual Creator For Easy Self-Expression, Louis Lin, Ian Santillano

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

People with autism often struggle with the ability to communicate. As a result, many people with autism become frustrated in their attempts to express their thoughts and feelings fully. Current forms of music therapy are designed to improve the lives of patients with autism, but are inefficient at developing their communication skills. Our project is designed to help music therapy patients express themselves through the creation of music. A patient will be able to “write” a song through the power of his or her feelings. With our system, music therapy patients can actively drive the entire creative process and learn …

Machine Learning Models For Context-Aware Recommender Systems, Yogesh Jhamb

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The mass adoption of the internet has resulted in the exponential growth of products and services on the world wide web. An individual consumer, faced with this data deluge, is expected to make reasonable choices saving time and money. Organizations are facing increased competition, and they are looking for innovative ways to increase revenue and customer loyalty. A business wants to target the right product or service to an individual consumer, and this drives personalized recommendation. Recommender systems, designed to provide personalized recommendations, initially focused only on the user-item interaction. However, these systems evolved to provide a context-aware recommendations. Context-aware …