Computer Engineering Commons^™

Metascriptura: A General Data Provenance Framework, Maria Joseph Israel

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Digital technology makes it easy to generate and distribute large volumes of data. However, it has also complicated the process of verifying and validating sources of data and their derivatives risking obfuscation of truth amidst the deluge of data. To address this issue, I trace and develop an approach based on data provenance tracking. Specifically, I make it possible to deep trace the origins and lineages of data, by applying state-of-the-art data provenance technologies, which I extend beyond traditional data provenance applications. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that with the right data infrastructure it is feasible to grant greater agency …

Container Migration In Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks, Gagan Gupta, Kyle Fenole, Siddharth Venkatesh

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project aims to implement container migration on an ad hoc mesh network, which would allow for a mobile fog computing mesh network in areas with no connectivity. This kind of system would allow for a rapidly deployable and mobile compute cluster that could be used in rural scenarios or situations where existing connectivity infrastructures are out of commission i.e. disaster recovery. We use technologies like Docker, CRIU, and batman-adv to create a mesh compute network that is decentralized, flexible, and consistent. Docker with CRIU facilitates container live migration by checkpointing a container in one network node and restoring that …

Velachain: A Decentralized Exchange Built For Cross-Chain Communication, Connor Callahan, Bradley Lostak

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The blockchain industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world right now. Billions of dollars of venture capital money is being put to work to innovate in this new space. One of the problems that has plagued the blockchain space since its inception is the lack of interoperability between blockchains. A single blockchain is great at dictating its own state but they rarely contain functionality to communicate with other blockchains. Furthermore, users on these blockchains have limited ways to swap cryptocurrencies from one blockchain to another. For this project, we built a cryptocurrency decentralized exchange built on …

Brilliance Bias In Gpt-3, Ashley Troske, Edith Gonzalez, Nicole Lawson

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Language has a profound impact on how we perceive the world. With GPT- 3’s rise in popularity, present in 300 applications averaging 4.5 billion words per day, it is critical for us as programmers to identify and correct biases in its generations. A variety of biases have been identified in generative language models, spanning biases based on gender, race, and religion. Our project pioneers the study of the Brilliance Bias for generative models. This implicit, yet powerful bias imposes the idea of “brilliance” being a male trait and in turn, sets back women’s achievements starting as young as 5-7 years. …

Database Of Non-Government Organizations On The Global Scale, Jeremy Mekker

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Currently in the world, there are about 10 million non-profit/non-governmental organizations. In order to find these organizations, one must diligently scour the Internet for hours on end. Most research into helping refugees or those in need results in only finding larger organizations that cover many different tasks in the targeted area. This is an active problem. While larger organizations tend to help a wider audience of people, often the help that one would like to give does not get delivered as urgently as the donor would hope. In order to combat this, the primary objective would be to optimize the …

Neural Network Interpretability For Autonomous Driving Neural Networks, Raghav Kapoor, Casey Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In the field of neural networks, there has been a long-standing problem that needs to be addressed: gaining insight into how neural networks make decisions. Neural Networks are still considered black boxes and are often difficult to understand. This lack of understanding becomes an ethical dilemma especially in the domain of self-driving cars. Given the limited number of works geared towards unravelling neural network logic for autonomous driving vehicles, our team seeks to create a novel neural network interpretability method to influence the neural network during its training process.

Deep Neural Networks have demonstrated impressive performance in complex tasks, such …

Improving Diversity In Journalistic Sources With Computer Vision, Austin Johnson, Carlos Mercado, Sabiq Khan

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

News is a constant part of our lives, and has a significant impact on how we see the world. Simply put, journalistic sources are not diverse enough, and typically are only those in the majority. Newsrooms have made passionate declarations about wanting more diversity in their news sources. Our project aims to help with that. Building on top of the DEI toolkit, we aim to help newsrooms increase the diversity of their sources by analyzing their sources using a google search to pick an image and facial recognition software to determine the gender and race of the image.

Mysyllabi: An Online Syllabus Repository, Aristos Xanthus

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College students need more information when selecting coursework. During the time of course registration, students are limited to the course name, time, description, and professor. To make the best course selection, students need access to the syllabus which provides a comprehensive overview of the course as well as course-specific details such as the structure, workload, and teaching style. However, syllabi are hard to obtain before the first day of class, and they are seldom found online. Therefore, I propose MySyllabi, an online syllabus repository as a quick, accessible, and reliable location to find syllabi for a university’s classes/professors that will …

Donation Pick-Up And Tracking App For Columbian Food Bank, Alex Fang, Arren Leung, Adrian Ramirez Lopez, Rodrigo Mejia

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Banco de Alimentos Cali is responsible for picking up food donations from local businesses, organizing by perishable dates, and distributing them to the communities in need. When donations are picked up from the donor, the bank is responsible for sending their donors a certificate with the donation's information, including the dollar equivalent of their donation. This certificate is sent out only if the donor requests it for tax deduction purposes. While this plan may seem simple in theory, the food bank often struggles to get the necessary information from their drivers in regards to the donation, which ultimately delays the …

Expanding Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence For Strategic Learning, Dorian Clay

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Today, artificial intelligence is used to solve problems as varied as driving cars to diagnosing diseases. However, it still has major pitfalls. The most common form of AI today, machine learning, can produce near-certain predictions for some tasks, yet completely fail at a related but different task. Additionally, such algorithms cannot do reasoning for complex problems, are not well explainable, require massive training datasets, and are sensitive to new data.

One solution to these problems is combining today’s cutting-edge neural networks with an older idea in AI: symbolic AI. Such so-called “neuro-symbolic AI” systems can be understood at a high …

Netcon: Dynamic Resource Allocation To Containers Running On Network Switching Appliances, Siena Hanna, Justin Lee, Tania Pham

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

A WiFi Access Point (AP) is an important technology that switches data packets to transmit and receive wireless signals to create WiFi. These Access Points (AP) can have powerful processors, but they are idle most of the time [1]. Instead, these idle processing resources could be redirected to run containers for low-latency applications. However, it is essential to ensure that the AP does not suffer performance issues as a result of running containers. The main function of APs is to switch packets, and this function must be preserved while containers are running. In this thesis, we propose a method, NetCon, …

Smartnic Compatible Blockchain, Gavin Jampani, Eish Kapoor, Vivek Ponnala

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The intent of our Senior Design Thesis was to develop a software infrastructure for Blockchain applications that is compatible with SmartNIC (smart network interface card) hardware to contribute to the future of edge computing and Blockchain. The demand on network infrastructure is exploding, with there estimated to be 41.2 billion active network connections in 2025, 30.8 of those being IOT [13]. Of these active network IOT connections, a growing plurality will contain SmartNICs, which add valuable compute into the crucial intersection between the network and individual server. With it forecasted that three-fourths of all enterprise data will be processed at …

Enhancing The Quality Of Service And Energy Efficiency Of Wifi-Based Iot Networks, Jaykumar Sheth

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The 802.11 standard, known as WiFi, is currently being used for a wide variety of applications including Internet of Things (IoT). However, the contention between the traffic of IoT stations (STAs) as well as the contention between these flows and regular user-generated traffic reduces the energy efficiency and timeliness of IoT communication. To remedy this problem, in this thesis, we take the following approaches for mitigating the challenges faced by WiFi-based IoT networks: First, we highlight the importance of observability with respect to WiFi networks and how it helps the researchers to better examine the dynamics of issues and its …

Wage Wizard, Jack Davey, Kyle Felip Mondina, Brett Rimmer

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Wage theft is a severe problem in Santa Clara County, with the Santa Clara Wage Theft Coalition identifying more than 25,000 local wage theft cases as of 20211. In this study we will be addressing the issue of wage theft particularly in the Santa Clara County caregiving industry. Wage theft is prevalent in the caregiving industry for several reasons. First, the industry employs many migrant Filipino workers who are unaware of their legal rights and protections or even the fact if they are experiencing wage theft or not. Second, the sizable undocumented portion of these workers are coerced to lower …

Easycompost: Using Augmented Reality To Improve Reality, Jonathan Nguyen, Andrew Bredar

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In the United States, a significant portion of landfill is undiverted compost and recyclable material. Instead of being sent to landfills, compostable material can be used as nutrient rich fertilizer and soil in local communities. Likewise, recyclable material can be processed at appropriate facilities to reuse materials and reduce the demand for unsustainable resources, like plastics. We seek to reduce the portion of undiverted recyclable and compostable waste by aiding in the proper sorting of waste at common sites of disposal, particularly trash cans in cafeterias and restaurants. We have designed a mobile, augmented reality, 3D object detection model that …

Deep Learning Pseudocode Generation: A Qualitative Analysis, Colin Rioux

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Pseudocode is a traditional teaching tactic in computer science, yet it is not standardized and programming language dependent. Thus, it can be quite time consuming to write it. With the advancement of AI methodologies in NLP, AI could help address this problem. This work investigates the quality of AI generated pseudocode from source code. Five studies are conducted in this work to measure pseudocode quality, where each study modifies model input to observe accuracy and generalizability. The results show that there is an association between pseudocode quality and training and test set similarity. Furthermore, a sizable and diverse training set …

Orient: Teaching Object Oriented Programming With Augmented Reality, Shivangi Kar, Stephanie Lu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In our technologically advanced society, computational thinking is a critical skill for students to develop. Our project, ORIENT, is a mobile application that uses augmented reality to teach object-oriented programming(OOP), a fundamental concept in computer science. ORIENT is designed for novice programmers from the middle school level up, and it consists of a three-part tutorial series that teaches class creation, inheritance, and polymorphism-three of the most important tenets of object-oriented programming. ORIENT, which was built in Unity and made specifically for the iPad, includes a series of interactive tutorials with immediate feedback; it encourages students to explore OOP in a …

Brass: Bandwidth Reservation On Arista Switching Systems, Angelus Mcnally, Conrad Park, Tyler Tivadar

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

As networking technologies in the fields of Cloud, Fog, and Edge computing continue to gain popularity and widespread adoption, their contributions to network traffic load and congestion in their respective data processing layers are expected to increase. The implication of this inevitable change is that overall traffic congestion is expected to increase as more devices are connected. As a consequence of this congestion, network performance is expected to decrease, and the best effort nature of network traffic means that there is no guarantee that applications will continue to communicate at rates required for operation. This could prevent certain networking applications …

Emt: Software-Based Energy Management Tool For Wifi Iot Devices, Aastha Chawla, Sreya Goyalia, Nidusha Kannan

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Many WiFi-based IoT (Internet of Things) devices rely on limited energy resources such as batteries or energy harvesting. Although monitoring and studying the energy consumption of these devices is essential, the use of external, hardware-based energy measurement tools is costly, non-scalable, and introduces many challenges regarding the connectivity of such tools with devices. In this thesis, we propose EMT, a novel tool to collect, analyze, and monitor the power cycles of IoT devices without the need for any external tools. The basic idea is to modify the WiFi Access Point's software to keep track of the power status of devices …

Learning With Your Buddies: An Investigation Of Community Based Ux Design Learning On Discord, Grace Ling

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Online communities have been a major part of how people connect with others to learn about different perspectives. In this thesis, I examine ways people use Discord, one of the major online community platforms, to learn UX design.

In this research, I designed a study, collected data from the Design Buddies Discord, and conducted semantic content analysis to investigate the community learners, job seekers, and mentors’ dialogues. I then used social network analysis to uncover patterns in connections. Lastly, I conducted a qualitative evaluation to survey and to understand the usefulness of Design Buddies.

The results show that a balance …

Machine Learning Fmri Autism Classifier, Nicholas Luckenbach

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is typically understood by observing patient behaviors. Advances in neuroimaging research and data collection have made it possible to investigate the neurobiological basis for ASD, and differences between subjects with ASD and healthy controls (HC) have been found using a variety of methods. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in particular has provided evidence for and against certain cognitive models of ASD based on measuring the functional connectivity of subjects’ brains. Various techniques have been explored for applying machine learning (ML) to fMRI data in order to find unique patterns and differences between ASD and HC subjects. …

Amber: Ai Music Based Emotion Regulation, Xavi Anderhub, Uma Bahl, Betty Hou, David Krakauer

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Music recommendations from apps are traditionally based on attributes like popularity or trendiness. While this method of recommending music may work for finding music in general, it does not address the granularity with which human emotions can change day to day, or even hour to hour. AMBER provides an accessible way to discover and listen to new music that matches one’s emotions in real time using the Spotify music platform and AI. Preliminary test results indicate that users found the music AMBER recommended to be more in line with the emotions they were feeling or wanted to feel. Future developments …

Collage Art Therapy Bot, Roland Afaga, Dyllon Au, Jeremy Victor Reyes, Alayna Wong

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Our Collage Art Therapy Bot is an application that utilizes collage therapy to help users navigate their feelings and give them a better understanding of themselves. Unlike other forms of art therapy, collage therapy is much more inclusive and does not require any artistics skill that may intimidate users from participating. The user interface is split into three sections: the photo library, the chat bot, and the photo collage. The user can scroll through the library and pick the photos that they feel connected to. Then, the chatbot prompts the user to tell it what made them choose the photo. …

Large Scale Database Audio Collection Of Tuberculosis Patients: : The Ekifuba Test, Jt Vinolus, Daniela De La Torre, Aimee Kerr, Jordan Randleman

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

One of the top 10 causes of death, 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis (TB) every year. And yet, in 2018, 1.7 billion people were infected with the disease (“Global Health - Newsroom - Tuberculosis.”). This 99.99% recovery rate demonstrates that, when treated with antibiotics, TB is an extremely curable condition, but an early diagnosis is critical to surviving the illness. Developing countries face the largest hurdles to accessing TB screening technologies, and they make up a disproportionately high fraction of worldwide TB deaths. A possible solution to this problem would be to use machine learning (ML) to detect TB …

Oliveai, Beckett Johnson, Alex Lewis, Ben Kummert

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Generative adversarial networks are being used to make original, AI generated content in many contexts, whether they are generating new works of art from a text description, or a completely fake person. Currently this technology is not being implemented in a way such that a user can practically interact with it in a way where users can actually use what is generated to improve their lives. We introduce OliveAI to explore a possible implementation of generative AI technology that users can practically and usefully interact with. OliveAI is a web app where users can provide a desired type of food …

Santé Le Match, Krizia Mae Araracap, Evan Chou, Matthew Isaac Tolosa

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In Senegal, many children are unaware of the importance of common hygiene practices due to limited health education on sanitation and personal hygiene. As a result, the repercussions of not following these practices are not clearly understood. This is an issue because some of the most common diseases in Senegal can be prevented through better sanitation practices and other basic preventative measures. Developing hygienic habits at a young age is critical—especially in a developing country such as Senegal. We have created a mobile application that educates and empowers children with the basic knowledge of WASH—water, sanitation, hygiene. Because Senegal often …

Personalized Memory Transfer For Conversational Recommendation Systems, Naga Archana Godavarthy

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Dialogue systems are becoming an increasingly common part of many users' daily routines. Natural language serves as a convenient interface to express our preferences with the underlying systems. In this work, we implement a full-fledged Conversational Recommendation System, mainly focusing on learning user preferences through online conversations. Compared to the traditional collaborative filtering setting where feedback is provided quantitatively, conversational users may only indicate their preferences at a high level with inexact item mentions in the form of natural language chit-chat. This makes it harder for the system to correctly interpret user intent and in turn provide useful recommendations to …

Applications For Nutrition Education In Developed And Developing Countries, Emma Allegrucci

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Food is vitally important for human beings. Without food, humanity would perish. Not only does food provide us with energy, but it also provides us with adequate nutrients so the systems throughout our body can function properly. Unfortunately, many people throughout the world, from top rated athletes to people living in impoverished areas, are either uninformed or do not have easy access to nutritional information or advice. There is a huge malnutrition epidemic among elite collegiate athletes and an even bigger malnutrition problem among the rural population of Uganda.

To solve the problem of malnourishment of collegiate athletes, I have …

A Low-Cost, Long-Range, And Solar-Based Iot Soil Quality Monitor, Salvador Garcia, Trina Nguyen, Julian Wong

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The project objective is to create a low-cost, long-range, and solar-based IoT soil quality monitoring system. The system must transmit packages of data gathered from separate nodes, consisting of two dierent types of sensors, to a centralized gateway receiver to be displayed to the user in an elegant and readable manner. The end goal of the project is to supplement produce grown by large agricultural bodies around the United States without the misuse of water resources. This report presents the need for this system, details the components of the system, and the rationale behind design choices. It serves as a …

Autonomous And Interactive Control Of A Mobile Robot, Dylan Hoover, Tanner Kaczmarek, Kevin Molumphy, Stephen Tambussi

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

An autonomous and interactive control of a mobile robot is a desired asset to the Robotics Systems Laboratory (RSL) at Santa Clara University and to the food automation company, L2F. This benefits their future endeavors of having helpful cobots navigate and assist entities in their respective environments. This paper documents the development of software for a cobot that satisfies the basic requirements for easy and safe control of an autonomous robot within a dynamic environment. The completed software includes the ability for the cobot to track a person and then autonomously follow that person around at a safe following distance …