Computer Engineering Commons^™

Analysis Of The Duration And Energy Consumption Of Aes Algorithms On A Contiki-Based Iot Device, Brandon Tsao

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

With the growing prevalence of the Internet of Things, securing the sheer abundance of devices is critical. The current IoT and security landscapes lack empirical metrics on encryption algorithm implementations that are optimized for constrained devices, such as encryption/decryption duration and energy consumption. In this paper, we achieve two things. First, we survey for optimized implementations of symmetric encryption algorithms. Seconds, we study the performance of various symmetric encryption algorithms on a Contiki-based IoT device. This paper provides encryption and decryption durations and energy consumption results on three implementations of AES: TinyAES, B-Con’s AES, and Contiki’s own built-in AES. In …

Extreme Image Compression With Deep Learning Autoencoder, Licheng Xiao

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Image compression can save billions of dollars in the industry by reducing the bits needed to store and transfer an image without significantly losing visual quality. Traditional image compression methods use transform, quantization, predictive coding and entropy coding to tackle the problem, represented by international standards like JPEG (joint photographic experts group), JPEG 2000, BPG (better portable graphics), and HEIC (high efficiency image file format). Recently, there are deep learning based image compression approaches that achieved similar or better performance compared with traditional methods, represented by autoencoder, GAN (generative adversarial networks) and super-resolution based approaches.

In this paper, we built …

The Fog Development Kit: A Platform For The Development And Management Of Fog Systems, Colton Powell

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing has emerged to help traditional cloud computing in meeting scalability demands. Fog computing makes it possible to fulfill real-time requirements of applications by bringing more processing, storage, and control power geographically closer to end-devices. How- ever, since fog computing is a relatively new field, there is no standard platform for research and development in a realistic environment, and this dramatically inhibits innovation and development of fog-based applications. In response to these challenges, we propose the Fog Development Kit (FDK). By providing high-level interfaces for allocating computing and networking resources, …

Mnews: A Study Of Multilingual News Search Interfaces, Chenjun Ling

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

With the global expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web, users are becoming increasingly diverse, particularly in terms of languages. In fact, the number of polyglot Web users across the globe has increased dramatically.

However, even such multilingual users often continue to suffer from unbalanced and fragmented news information, as traditional news access systems seldom allow users to simultaneously search for and/or compare news in different languages, even though prior research results have shown that multilingual users make significant use of each of their languages when searching for information online.

Relatively little human-centered research has been conducted to …

Sparse General Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Based On Left Semi-Tensor Product, Zigang Chen, Lixiang Li, Haipeng Peng, Yuhong Liu, Haihua Zhu, Yixian Yang

Computer Science and Engineering

The dimension reduction of large scale high-dimensional data is a challenging task, especially the dimension reduction of face data and the accuracy increment of face recognition in the large scale face recognition system, which may cause large storage space and long recognition time. In order to further reduce the recognition time and the storage space in the large scale face recognition systems, on the basis of the general non-negative matrix factorization based on left semi-tensor (GNMFL) without dimension matching constraints proposed in our previous work, we propose a sparse GNMFL/L (SGNMFL/L) to decompose a large number of face data sets …

Homebook, Stephen Poth, Simon Stauber, Jake Vargas

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Having a reliable address system is something that is often taken for granted, but simply having one comes with immense benefits. People can easily find locations of friends and family, services like taxis know exactly where to pick customers up, and emergency response units can accurately find the scene of emergencies quickly. However, in many developing countries, these are luxuries only afforded by the wealthy and privileged neighborhoods. Locations are given haphazardly through description, often leading to late arrivals. In some cases this can be a dire possibility. Our solution aims to change this by developing a mobile application that …

Trippit: An Optimal Itinerary Generator, Andrew Nguyen, Osama Shoubber

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Travelers often lose interest and joy when traveling in tourist-packed areas around the world. As more restaurants and attractions open up in popular cities, the wait and travel time from one location to another inevitably increases. Each attraction has certain hours throughout the day where visitors surge and the wait times increase. In addition, traffic and travel time is an important factor to consider when looking to optimize ones trip. However, with large amounts of attractions, it is difficult to calculate and consider the most optimal routes and times an individual should use to visit each possible attraction. Travelers ultimately …

Deaddropbox: A Time-Locked Safe For Data, Robert Herriott, Peter Paulson, Nathaniel Kragas

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project is a proof-of-concept for software which would allow users to securely store sensitive data in such a way that it is difficult or impossible for third parties to compromise the data, even when the user is compelled to assist them. It will operate by storing data across multiple devices in a unreadable form so that it is inaccessible until the data is reunified. The user may specify the circumstances under which different pieces of the data may be accessed, so that it is impossible to access under circumstances of duress.

A Questioning Agent For Literary Discussion, Robbie Culkin, Tim Shur

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Developing a compelling and cohesive thesis for analytical writing can be a daunting task, even for those who have produced many written works, and finding others to engage with in literary discussion can be equally challenging. In this paper, we describe our solution: Questioner, a discussion tool that engages users in conversation about an academic topic of their choosing for the purpose of collecting thoughts on a subject and constructing an argument. This system will ask informed questions that prompt further discussion about the topic and provide a discussion report after the conversation has ended. We found that our system …

Doorbell For The Hearing Impaired, Shannen Edwin, Dominic Magdaluyo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Doorbell options for hearing impaired individuals is seriously limited. Affordable solutions are not scalable while other solutions are expensive. With this in mind, we designed a scalable and affordable system that will be beneficial to hearing impaired individuals in a small aspect of their life. Our solution takes advantage of affordable IoT devices and software to build a proof of concept. Due to the scope of the project, we only designed a proof of concept, in the hope that a company can design a viable product that will not only benefit hearing impaired individuals but bring a powerful IoT system …

Keyboard Hero, Connor Lucier

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Learning the piano is a complicated process that involves a lifetime of practice. For many new musicians, however, this task is overwhelming and discouraging because of the many skills involved in playing the piano. To solve this problem, I aim to create a computer game compatible with MIDI keyboards that gives novice pianists an alternative to the typical learning process and gives experienced pianists a new and useful practice tool. The game I created is inspired by two popular video games, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, featuring instant accuracy feedback against imported MIDI tracks, high score tracking, and the ability …

The Labyrinth, Derek Nakamura, Marko Trapani, Liam Walker

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Labyrinth is a puzzle video game meant to be experienced with a virtual reality headset. It aims to differ from typical puzzle games by being simultaneously fun, immersive, and mentally stimulating. The game consists of three unique level types, with room for further development to create more complex versions of said levels. In this document, we discuss how we developed the game environment to effectively engage the player in enjoyable and engaging problem-solving challenges. The game has been rigidly tested and play-testers were surveyed on their experiences, in order to improve the game.

The Original Beat: An Electronic Music Production System And Its Design, Eli Yale, Christian Quintero, Matt Kordonsky

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The barrier to entry in electronic music production is high. It requires expensive, complicated software, extensive knowledge of music theory and experience with sound generation. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are the main tools used to piece together digital sounds and produce a complete song. While these DAWs are great for music professionals, they have a steep learning curve for beginners and they must run native on a user’s computer. For a novice to begin creating music takes much more time, eort, and money than it should. We believe anyone who is interested in creating electronic music deserves a simple way …

Justrun - Social Gps Running Game, Riley Bergin, Maggie Cai, Simran Judge, Grace Ling

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

With advances in technology allowing people to live more sedentary lives, more and more people are struggling to live a healthy active lifestyle. In the efforts to combat unhealthy styles of living, we wish to introduce a mobile app that takes advantage of motivational game mechanics to motivate players will make go on runs regularly.

Galápago!, Jeffrey Nguyen, Sally Park, Manuel Sanchez

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Galápagos Islands are the tourism hub in Ecuador. The islands greatly benefit economically from the tourism industry, but tourism also affects the conservation of the islands and the local businesses. Locals are suffering due to the impact of tourism. Tourists from around the world go to the archipelago seeking the beauty of the islands. People come on cruise ships to ports, but many aren’t aware of the local businesses and etiquette on the islands, preferring to stay on the ship or near the ports. GalápaGo! is the solution for locals and tourists on the Galapagos Islands. The goal of …

N.O.V.I.: Note Organizer For The Visually Impaired, Axel Perez, Cesar Tesen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Visually impaired students face extra challenges when it comes to the basic necessity of note-taking. Current assistive technology is fragmented in function. These students often need to combine solutions such as voice recording lectures, hiring someone to transcribe notes to braille, hiring a reader, etc. The amount of time and money they need for these solutions proves to be a great disadvantage, and we wish to provide an easier solution that will give these students a more independent and productive learning experience.

Our solution is an application that can offer intuitive, convenient, and comprehensive access to notes for the visually …

Lactic Acid Threshold Stimulator, Justin Brackett, Karen Carreon, Fernando Guerra, Malyna Sanchez

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

As a person works out, the threshold of lactic acid will build causing anywhere from discomfort to pain. Reducing the discomfort caused by lactic acid could greatly improve an individual’s performance while working out. Reducing this discomfort may be done through Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS), which is the procedure of contracting muscles through sending electrical signals. Our team’s goal is to create LATS, a wearable and mobile application that alleviates discomfort and aids muscle recovery during the intense parts of a workout. The system consists of a heart rate monitor to measure lactic acid levels, a garment that is worn …

Synergy: An Energy Monitoring And Visualization System, Sarah Johnson, Pearce Ropion

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The key to becoming a more sustainable society is first learning to take responsibility for the role we play in energy consumption. Real-time energy usage gives energy consumers a sense of responsibility over what they can do to accomplish a much larger goal for the planet, and practically speaking, what they can do to lower the cost to their wallets. Synergy is an energy monitoring and visualization system that enables users to gather information about the energy consumption in a building – small or large – and display that data for the user in real-time. The gathered energy usage data …

Top Level Mesh, Matt Jasaitis, Tristen Islam

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This paper will cover our report on the Top Level Mesh. We have built a web-based system for mesh network management. This system allows network utilities to be used from a web-based interface to monitor and manage the transfer of data. The system runs primarily on Raspberry Pis using Raspbian Linux. Users can access the system through web browsers to both configure the system and interact with the data on the network. We discuss our motivation for the project, design decisions made, technologies used and more throughout this report. We conclude with some lessons learned and future work to be …

Galápaguide, Neel Sampemane, Stephen Pacwa, Mason Bruce, Paul Ahrens

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In collaboration with the the Ministry of Tourism of Ecuador, the Association of Guides on the Galápagos, and Santa Clara University’s Frugal Innovation Hub, we developed a mobile application and administrative website connected through a REST API to a backend database as tools to assist naturalist guides on the Galápagos archipelago in conservation efforts. The goal of this system is to enable the naturalist guides and administrators to report issues with greater efficiency and view the data in a more useful way. This report outlines our design for this project and the reasoning behind our design decisions.

Virtual Reality Physics Scenarios, Patric Zhang, Thomas King

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Many students taking physics early on in their education find that it may be difficult to associate the theory they learn in class with how physics works in real world scenarios. Through various experiments in class, students are able to see examples of physics phenomena, but those experiments are limited by equipment, and do not offer precise data. To combat this, we are creating a virtual reality application for students to use to help learn physics. This report details the requirements the system will meet, as well as the use cases and subsequent activity diagrams for all users. We have …

H.E.A.R.T., Jacob Day, Yutong Li, Samuel Rietz, Brendan Watamura

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Healthy parenting and family resilience in early childhood has been shown to be an important factor in building emotional resilience for the children: it illustrates that when parents have higher emotional resilience, their children tend to have higher emotional resilience as well. However, the tools that available in the market right now only teach people what emotional resilience rather than how to practice it in daily life.

This report describes our project to create a virtual reality tool that can not only teach the importance of emotional resilience, but also help the parents develop personal resilience. The system is based …

Bronco Books: Textbook E-Commerce Platform, Vineet Joshi, Terry Shih, David Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College students purchase textbooks for the classes they take every quarter, but current solutions for selling back those textbooks are insufficient, requiring that the student pay to utilize the selling platforms or that the student build rapport within a given community. Our project, Bronco Books, offers a solution by being a native mobile application open to only SCU students. Bronco Books will be free to access and will act as an e-commerce platform where students go to sell their textbooks. We were motivated to create Bronco Books primarily because we wanted to help alleviate the financial burden that comes with …

Mindmusic: Brain-Controlled Musical Improvisation, Rachel Goldstein, Andy Vainauskas

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

MindMusic explores a new form of creative expression through brain controlled musical improvisation. Using EEG technology and a musical improviser system, Impro-Visor (Keller, 2018), MindMusic engages users in musical improvisation sessions controlled with their brainwaves. Brain-controlled musical improvisation offers a unique blend of mindfulness meditation, EEG biofeedback, and real-time music generation, and stands to assist with stress reduction and widen access to musical creativity.

Solemate: A Music App For Runners, Arshi Jujara, Samantha Lee, Samantha Song

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Solemate is a mobile application designed to enhance the running experience through music. Our feed-forward algorithm sets the runner’s pace by playing music that varies in tempo. By encouraging the user to match their steps to the beat, our application cultivates a run that feels natural and inspires intrinsic motivation, especially for the beginner runner.

Overhead Management Strategies For Internet Of Things Devices, Kavin Kamaraj

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Overhead (time and energy) management is paramount for IoT edge devices considering their typically resource-constrained nature. In this thesis we present two contributions for lowering resource consumption of IoT devices. The first contribution is minimizing the overhead of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) authentication protocol in the context of IoT networks by selecting a lightweight cipher suite configuration. TLS is the de facto authentication protocol for secure communication in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the processing and energy demands of this protocol are the two essential parameters that must be taken into account with respect to the resource-constraint nature …

Agora Teaching App, Sam Burns, Daisuke Kurita, Casey Xuereb

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Professional development of teachers normally ends after formal collegiate education. Agora desires to help educators continually train, to learn the skills of good teaching in classrooms by using various, non-traditional methodologies. By translating Agoras current platform to an app, Agora can widen their scope and serve Latin American countries outside of Peru, where they are currently based. We will simply take their current business and course platform and provide a mobile user interface for it. By expanding the reach of Agora, Latin American teachers will be well equipped to teach their classes with innovation and effectiveness.

Promarc: An Online Skills And Projects Marketplace, Connor Carraher, Victor Yu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Technical projects can vary greatly in terms of cost, complexity, and time. Project leads spend a lot of valuable time and energy making sure that their teams are organized and on-task. A major part of their responsibilities includes putting together a team with the right skills in order to maximize efficiency. Having a platform where project leads can quickly find team members with the right skills would save them a lot of stress and trouble. The goal of this project is to deliver such a platform, where users can make posts about their projects and the technical skills that they …

Deep Learning For Recommender Systems, Travis Akira Ebesu

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The widespread adoption of the Internet has led to an explosion in the number of choices available to consumers. Users begin to expect personalized content in modern E-commerce, entertainment and social media platforms. Recommender Systems (RS) provide a critical solution to this problem by maintaining user engagement and satisfaction with personalized content.

Traditional RS techniques are often linear limiting the expressivity required to model complex user-item interactions and require extensive handcrafted features from domain experts. Deep learning demonstrated significant breakthroughs in solving problems that have alluded the artificial intelligence community for many years advancing state-of-the-art results in domains such as …

Interoperable E-Infrastructure Services In Arabia, Salem Al-Agtash, Roberto Barbera

Computer Science and Engineering

e-Infrastructures became critical platforms that integrate computational resources, facilities and repositories globally. The coordination and harmonization of advanced e-Infrastructure project developed with partners from Europe, Latin America, Arabia, Africa, China, and India contributed to developing interoperable platforms based on identity federation and science gateway technologies. This paper presents these technologies to support key services in the development of Arabia networking and services platform for research and education. The platform provides scientists, teachers, and students with seamless access to a variety of advanced resources, services, and applications available at regional e-Infrastructures in Europe and elsewhere. Users simply enter the credentials provided …