Computer Engineering Commons^™

Chronic Kidney Disease Android Application, Paul Le

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Chronic kidney disease is increasingly recognized as a leading public health problem over the world that affects more than 10 percent of the population worldwide, where electrolytes and wastes can build up in your system. Kidney failure might not be noticeable until more advanced stages where it may then become fatal if not for artificial filtering or a transplant. As a result, it is important to detect kidney disease early on to prevent it from progressing to kidney failure. The current main test of the disease is a blood test that measures the levels of a waste product called creatine …

A Memory Contention Responsive Hash Join Algorithm Design And Implementation On Apache Asterixdb, Giulliano Silva Zanotti Siviero

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Efficient data management is crucial in complex computer systems, and Database Management Systems (DBMS) are indispensable for handling and processing large datasets. In DBMSs that concurrently execute multiple queries, adapting to varying workloads is desirable. Yet, predicting the fluctuating quantity and size of queries in such environments proves challenging. Over-allocating resources to a single query can impede the execution of future queries while under-allocating resources to a query expecting increased workload can lead to significant processing delays. Moreover, join operations place substantial demands on memory. This resource’s availability fluctuates as queries enter and exit the DBMS. The development of join …

Sovia: Sonification Of Visual Interactive Art, Lauryn Gayhardt

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Therapeutic Computational Creativity is an emerging domain that challenges us to explore applications of Computational Creativity systems to mental health and wellness. This work presents SOVIA, an interactive system that endows Claude Monet’s art with responsive auditory experiences. SOVIA uses computer vision trained on Monet’s artwork to take the user “into the painting.'' When the user interacts with a digital version of Monet's landscapes, their mouse positions are mapped to sounds that artistically represent the objects that the user is currently exploring in the art. These interactive musical journeys have the potential to make classical art more captivating for modern …

On Sparse Coding As An Alternate Transform In Video Coding, Michael G. Schimpf

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

In video compression, specifically in the prediction process, a residual signal is calculated by subtracting the predicted from the original signal, which represents the error of this process. This residual signal is usually transformed by a discrete cosine transform (DCT) from the pixel, into the frequency domain. It is then quantized, which filters more or less high frequencies (depending on a quality parameter). The quantized signal is then entropy encoded usually by a context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding engine (CABAC), and written into a bitstream. In the decoding phase the process is reversed. DCT and quantization in combination are efficient tools, …

Capturing The Social Experience Of Scu Campus Housing Options In Virtual Tours, Eva Stenberg, Kian Malakooti, Matthew Gates

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

For incoming students at Santa Clara University, it can be challenging and stressful to choose which campus housing to live in. Is it a social dorm or a quiet one? What types of students live here? Will we get along? Will I feel comfortable in the place I’ll call home for the next nine months? Santa Clara University offers very limited resources for choosing campus housing. With the overhead 2D room layouts and the “selfie stick” dorm tours that focus more on the resident director than the rooms, it is hard to discern the sociality of each space which is …

Dreamtemp: A Platform For Sleep Monitoring And Improvement, Michelle Lim, Kyle Pedersen, Will Cockrum

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

With 70 million Americans suffering from chronic sleep disorders and only 7500 board-certified sleep physicians, a clear logistical problem exists that technological solutions may be able to address. The proliferation of IoT devices in homes and on our person presents a unique opportunity to improve sleep quality by leveraging the data they produce, and the control they provide to us over our everyday lives. DreamTemp is a platform for sleep monitoring and improvement that aims to improve an individual’s quality of sleep by dynamically adjusting the room temperature based on the user’s sleep cycle using a smart wearable and thermostat. …

A Digital Twin Of The Scu Campus: Telling Immersive Stories About Student Life, Marianne Yamazaki Dorr, Hasmik Galstyan, Venus Li, Trisha Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This senior design project aims to explore the use of digital twins of physical spaces to capture the social feel of a space and in the process turning that space into a place, in order to truly convey ‘what it’s like’ to be somewhere. However, existing digital twins of physical spaces often fail to capture the social meaning and behaviors that turn a space into a place. This project aims to address this problem by using spatial capture technology to create a 3D model digital twin of the Santa Clara University campus and using it as a foundation for exploring …

Obujulizi Share - Enabling Voices For Rural Ugandan Communities, Aastha Khare, Sravani Polkampalli

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Rural communities in Uganda currently lack proper technical infrastructure to effectively communicate their issues and find support within their communities. For our project, we collaborated with Rose Academies, a nonprofit organization that aims to empower and aid impoverished communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. We intend to help them by creating a centralized, secure, and accessible system that allows members of the communities they serve to share their experiences. Our project consisted of three parts: an interview application, where Rose Academies’ creative team can take and record interviews, a content managing application to allow the creative team to select compelling interviews and …

Wyclef: A Rational Reconstruction Of Versu Social Engine, James Dameris, Rosaura Hemandez

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Video games often lack an accurate representation of the person playing the game, causing a disconnect between the player and the character’s story. With Versu, a proprietary social simulation engine, not only did choices become more connected to the player, but the player could choose to take the place of any of the characters present in the story. This allows the player to find themselves in the story, while also giving vast replayability to the game. Wyclef is an open source, rational reconstruction of Versu providing increased authoring speed of stories and availability of the social engine to more people. …

Developing An Open-Source Tool For Systematic App Reviews For Non-Technical Researchers, Lauren Xie, David Truong, Tino Theodoropoulos, Jason Vu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Researchers in many fields, from psychology to privacy studies, want to understand the mobile app ecosystem. The process of reviewing mobile apps is called a ’systematic app review’ (SAR). In a systematic app review, researchers analyze app metadata (e.g., the description, user reviews of the app, the app’s permissions list) and/or the experience of the app itself (e.g., the user interface, the content it contains). Unfortunately, this process does not yet have clearly defined best practices and the process of scraping data from app stores is costly, challenging, and time-consuming for researchers, especially ones without a technical background. Researchers lack …

Safehome, Meryem Esa, Siddarth Raj

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The SafeHome app was developed to address the significant communication challenges in refugee camps, where outdated methods such as flyers and intercoms limit the efficiency and reliability of information dissemination. Through extensive research and user-centric design, we developed a dual-interface application on the Firebase platform, featuring a web-based portal for camp administrators and a mobile application for refugees. The results showed effective functionality and enhanced communication, with refugees now able to receive timely updates, access crucial resources, and store personal documents securely. The successful implementation of SafeHome underscores the potential of leveraging technology to solve real-world challenges and enhance the …

Avalanche Predictions Based On Ml, William Olson, Matthew Davenport, Ben Airola

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Our Avalanche Prediction Model utilizes machine learning to analyze weather and climate data in order to provide users in the Northern California back-country with accurate probabilities of avalanche occurrences. Snow forecasts only provide information relating to how much snow will fall. Current avalanche danger ratings only provide the potential level for injury there is if an avalanche will occur. Our system, Avy Safe ML, let’s users survey geographic terrain and see direct probability indicators for precise geo-locations of mountain faces and ranges. These indicators are represented as variably-shaded geo-polygons that indicate avalanche risk classifications. Our data visualization allows access to …

A Hardware Platform For Wireless Beehive Monitoring, Erik Wrysinski, Jonathan Stock, Collin Paiz, Daniel Blanc

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Traditional beehive monitoring systems suffer from many challenges. These monitoring devices are expensive to set up, difficult to implement, and lack cross compatibility with each other. Preexisting beehive monitoring solutions face all of these shortcomings. Our beehive monitoring platform aims to overcome these issues by using inexpensive, off-theshelf, open-source hardware paired with a computer vision machine learning model to accurately monitor the ingress and egress of bees into and out of the hive. This data is presented to the beekeeper in a simple GUI which allows them to track hive activity over time, and by extension, the overall health of …

A Study Of Processing Beehive Monitoring Data In Edge And Cloud, Yen-Jung Lu, Jason Fong, Cheng Zhang, Chan Nam Tieu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Bees are vital pollinators for numerous crops and plants, playing an essential role in maintaining the world’s ecosystem and food security. Without bees, the global food supply would be threatened, potentially leading to food shortages and increased food prices. Current beehive monitoring solutions in the market are often prohibitively expensive, some commercial beehive monitoring solutions can cost upwards of thousands of dollars. This makes them inaccessible to many small-scale beekeepers. To help protect bee health and ensure the survival of thousands of plant species worldwide, this project aims to create an accessible solution for individuals to monitor the health and …

Automated Retail Checkout By Computer Vision: Arc-Ai, Griffin Ellis

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

There is some opportunity to apply AI and computer vision techniques to the problems in the retail industry. This paper presents a possible solution to the problem of accurate automated check-out in a retail store setting, a difficult problem due to the possibility of occlusion of hand-held products by the customer and the possible similarity of different products. This solution will identify objects being purchased frame-by-frame, propose tracks that follow individual objects across multiple frames, then determine when and where the object was brought over the region of interest, which will be determined at the start of the task. At …

Flowview: A Web Application For Hydrologic Predictions, Marcus Chavez, Sean Leininger, Joseph Pham Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Santa Clara Valley Water District, or Valley Water, provides water management resources to the two million residents in Santa Clara County. A few of their services include supplying safe water, ownership of streams, and flood protection. However, given the evolving conditions of the climate throughout the state of California, Valley Water seeks to include machine learning analytics as part of its water management services. Additionally, the increased access to the Internet has expanded the use of web applications, which provide a flexible platform to integrate the

predictions of machine learning models. In this paper, we design and implement a …

Warn: Wi-Fi Attack Recognizer And Notifier, Sudhish Sewpaul, Roshan Sevalia, Jaden Ngo, Tate Musante

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Wi-Fi Attack Recognizer and Notifier (WARN) aims to establish a wireless network monitoring system for detection of attacks on Wi-Fi IoT devices. Millions of homes use smart home devices, and many of these are for security. However, these devices are vulnerable to attacks that can disable them or compromise their data confidentiality. WARN is capable of detecting two of these attacks: deauthentication and key reinstallation (KRACK). Deauthentication attacks hoax devices into disconnecting themselves from a network, and KRACK manipulates the authentication protocol of Wi-Fi devices to see unencrypted data. WARN uses Raspberry Pis equipped with long range Wi-Fi antennas …

Twigeenglish, Brian Burnett, Jillian Coveney, Kristin Tong, Nanki Sekhon

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

TwigeEnglish is an educational platform aimed to teach English in a fun and interactive way. It comprises a mobile application for students and a web application for pre-determined administrators. The mobile application offers three key features which include: a pictionary-like game, a dictionary flash card game, and a user-friendly interface for uploading photos to be used in both games. The web application will primarily focus on providing administrators with an interface to manage the student-photo database. With moderation powers, administrators can seamlessly review and make decisions to approve or deny the inclusion of photos in the active pictionary and dictionary …

Climate Cloud, Atiyut Khemkhon, Dylan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The increasing frequency and intensity of drastic climate change events have underscored the urgency for a comprehensive understanding of climate dynamics and the development of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. In this context, our thesis addresses the critical issue of drought category prediction in Western America using machine learning techniques. We recognize the interconnectedness of efforts aimed at combating climate change and strive to make a meaningful contribution to the broader understanding of climate change, even if our impact may seem comparatively smaller. By leveraging the power of machine learning algorithms and utilizing a wide range of climatic and environmental …

Whether-Weather, Lucas Voron, Graham Purvis, Malcolm Weaver, Josh Kelleran

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The WhetherWeather project is a comprehensive weather and traffic forecasting system that provides real-time insights and predictions. It utilizes Python programming language and various data sources, including Inrix data for traffic information and weather data from Meteostat. The system employs machine learning techniques, specifically XGBoost, to train models on historical data. Once trained, the models can accurately forecast traffic conditions based on weather data. To visualize the results, a Flask API is available, allowing users to access the system's functionalities through a web interface. For more information and to access the WhetherWeather website, visit WhetherWeather.org.

Singular Value Decomposition And Transformer-Based Image Super Resolution, Andy Qin, Chen Zhang, Timothy Cui

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Image super-resolution (ISR) is a prominent field in computer vision that aims to enhance the quality and resolution of low-resolution images. It finds widespread applications in various domains, including surveillance, satellite imagery, medical imaging, and media. The primary objective of ISR is to improve the visual quality and level of detail in low-resolution images. In this paper, we propose the Singular Value Decomposition and Transformer-based Image Super Resolution (SVDTIR) model, which combines both traditional and deep learning approaches to achieve image super-resolution. The SVDTIR model consists of three stages: image pre-processing, which employs the singular-value decomposition (SVD) algorithm to decompose …

Coastal: Crowdsourcing Reports Of Phenomena On The Santa Cruz Coast, Will Maddrey, Daniel Schott, Michael Zetino

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Every day, beachgoers witness important environmental phenomena that go completely undocumented. Huge amounts of potential data that could be used for research are lost because people don’t have the means to report them, or simply don’t understand their significance. Additionally, many of these phenomena are potentially harmful, and are relatively unknown to the public. In this paper, we develop an iOS and Android mobile app called Coastal, with the goal of crowdsourcing reports of phenomena on the Santa Cruz coast. We hope that in the future, applications like Coastal can be used for both collecting data for environmental research, and …

Dominican Republic Greenhouse Automation, Ryan Le, Erik Mitchell, Mark Castillo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Dominican Republic's Instituto Politécnico Loyola (IPL) needs a wirelessly connected network of sensors for their greenhouses. Our project uses long-range (LoRa) communication to receive data from sensors within the greenhouse on the recorded temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and light values; stores and organizes these measurements in a database and backup text file; and displays appropriate recordings on an interactive application. We collaborated with a team of two General Engineering majors, with our focus on data retrieval and display functionality. Aside from basic data senders used solely for testing purposes, our final design serves as a central hub remotely accessible …

Film Viability Evaluator, Caitlin Lopez, Kulsoom Sabit

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Filmmaking is a financially high-risk field of work. There are multiple variables that contribute to a movie’s success or failure, however the most impactful ones have yet to be identified. In this paper, we used publicly available datasets in combination with several forms of analysis models to determine common factors associated with historically successful movies. Our results narrowed the top categories to include the runtime, the production budget, the release year, the genres, and the primary language. The final round of analysis yielded an 84% accuracy, after the usage of XGBoosting and gradient boosting. Further improvements to this project could …

Monster Maker, Harrison Bui

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

3D modeling and rigging are necessary steps when it comes to 3D animation. However, not everyone has the time and patience to learn and practice these skills. Monster Maker provides an accessible way to create creatures from their imaginations by assembling pre-made 3D body parts. The option to dynamically alter the skeleton and modify body parts opens the door to hundreds of thousands of monsters each with their own unique design. Future developments of Monster Maker could provide users with options to control specific sub-components of the currently established body parts while also providing a more appealing UI.

Nutrition Visualization For Mindfulness, Jake Tsuchiyama, Jarin Simon, Landis Fusato, Ryan Wong

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In today’s world, users face multiple obstacles obtaining relevant nutrition information for the foods they consume. While nutrition information is provided on some foods like a standard candy bar, this label is typically hard to read and inconveniently located. For other foods such as an apple, this nutrition label is not provided at all and the burden is placed on the user to go out and find this information themselves. We hope to address this inaccessibility of nutrition information to help users ultimately make more informed decisions about their eating habits.

Immersive Scu Campus Tour With Augmented Reality, Tristan Limawan, Axel Perales, Alfredo Perry

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Santa Clara University has hosted numerous guided campus tours as a way for students to understand better and immerse themselves in the university's culture and environment. However, group sizes for these tours are limited and may fill up quickly, leaving students to compete for these tour slots. As such, accompanied by the continual growth in admissions reaching new highs each year, the situation presents a great need to help first-year and prospective students navigate the campus grounds and understand and learn about the campus history and culture.

To resolve this problem, we have developed an augmented reality web application allowing …

A Submodular Optimization Framework For Imbalanced Text Classification With Data Augmentation, Eyor Alemayehu

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

In the domain of text classification, imbalanced datasets are a common occurrence. The skewed distribution of the labels of these datasets poses a great challenge to the performance of text classifiers. One popular way to mitigate this challenge is to augment underwhelmingly represented labels with synthesized items. The synthesized items are generated by data augmentation methods that can typically generate an unbounded number of items. To select the synthesized items that maximize the performance of text classifiers, we introduce a novel method that selects items that jointly maximize the likelihood of the items belonging to their respective labels and the …

Embride: A Madhubani Art Creator, Jui Banik

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Creative machines are playing an increasingly important role in the art world and society at large. This gives rise to the need to consider the ethical dimensions of artistic machine agents. Whose art are we amplifying, or more importantly, who is being left behind? Computational Creativity offers the opportunity to bring awareness and visibility to art forms that have been systemically suppressed due to a range of longstanding societal biases. In this paper, we introduce EMBRIDE, a system that creates Madhubani art, practiced by women in the villages of India and Nepal. We hope that this work will encourage further …

Acat 2.0: An Ai Transformer-Based Approach To Predictive Speech Generation, Kairan Quazi

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

While constituting a rare family of diseases that afflicts 268,000 people worldwide, motor neuron diseases carry a high fatality rate with one-third of people dying within a year of diagnosis and 50% of people dying within two years (MND Association, 2022). MNDs rapidly and progressively impair muscle movement, making everyday activities like walking, chewing, and speaking almost impossible. In collaboration with famed physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking, Intel Labs developed an assistive communications platform known as ACAT to simulate speech and facilitate electronic tasks. However, the original ACAT can be slow to use, leading to awkward pauses in conversations. This paper …