Computer Engineering Commons^™

A High-Speed Portable Ground Heat Exchanger Model For Use In Various Energy Simulation Software, Ryan Davies, Matt Mitchell, Edwin Lee

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

A portable component model (PCM) of a ground source heat pump system was developed and used as a test case in the creating of a PCM development framework. By developing this framework, new building energy simulation models will be able to be easily integrated into existing simulation software such as EnergyPlus and the Modelica Buildings Library. Our model uses a time responsive g-function and numerical methods to simulate ground source heat pumps for single time steps as well as long time scales. We validated our model against GHESim and GLHEPro and found that our model agrees with these two standards …

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 …

Enhancing Residential Energy Sustainability With Occupancy Detection And Ai-Based Trading, Jun Jiang

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

With the rapid development and deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs), Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and innovative energy trading markets, residential buildings as the primary energy consumers show enormous potential in promoting energy sustainability. However, achieving residential energy sustainability faces various challenges. (1) Promoting consistent energy-efficient behaviors among all residents can be challenging due to variations in their awareness and commitment to energy-saving practices. (2) While training can cultivate energy-saving habits among residents, educating residents without energy-related knowledge to effectively coordinate and operate various electrical appliances and DERs remains challenging, especially with the widespread adoption of such equipment. (3) …

When Is An Owl More Than An Owl? An Interaction Analysis Of A Computer Science Co-Design Conversation On Cultural Relevance, Stephanie M. Robillard, Victor R. Lee, Jody Clarke-Midura, Jessica F. Shumway

Publications

The learning sciences community is currently exploring new ways to enact productive and equitable co-design research-practice partnerships that are sensitive to all the concerns and needs of stakeholders. The paper contributes to that still-growing literature through an interaction analysis of a co-design discussion involving school district partners that unfolded about cultural relevance and sensitivity in relation to the use of a specific image in an elementary school coding lesson. The episode involved looking moment-by-moment at how district educators recognized and acknowledged that a specific design decision could be harmful for a minoritized population of students enrolled in the district. However, …

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 …

Ocean Sight One: Mixed Reality Experience, Lucas Michael Reyna

Computer Engineering

Ocean Sight One is an interdisciplinary project group consisting of Cal Poly staff and students from several different departments. It exists to educate the public on the marine ecosystems near the Santa Barbara coastline that is the home of twenty-three abandoned oil rigs. Despite one’s initial reaction to these massive abandoned structures, they actually provide an incredibly diverse dwelling for numerous forms of sea life. The site is a shining beacon for marine ecology researchers trying to formulate how to preserve wildlife in an era of worsening global environmental disruptions. The future of these oil rigs are not certain, as …

Neural Compression Inference Accelerator: A Cost And Energy-Effective Alternative To Conventional Machine Learning Inference Methods, Matthew Wallace

Master's Theses

Recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence have sparked an influx of workloads that require specialized computer hardware for cloud services. The hardware running machine learning models predominantly consists of graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs). However, these com- ponents are expensive for cloud services to purchase, costly for customers to rent, prone to price spikes, and energy-intensive. In this research we show that both cloud services and customers would benefit from utilizing field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to alleviate the aforementioned challenges. An FPGA can be configured as a machine learning accelerator, operating similarly to …

Polyflowbuilder: An Intuitive Tool For Academic Planning At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Duncan Thomas Applegarth

Computer Engineering

PolyFlowBuilder is a web application that lets users create visually intuitive flowcharts to aid in academic planning at Cal Poly. These flowcharts can be customized in a variety of ways to accurately represent complex academic plans, such as double majors, minors, taking courses out- of-order, etc. The original version of PolyFlowBuilder, released Summer 2020, was not written for continued expansion and growth. Therefore, a complete rewrite was determined to be necessary to enable the project to grow in the future. This report details the process to completely rewrite the existing version of PolyFlowBuilder over the course of six months, using …

Vr Force Feedback Gloves, Mark Wu, Claire Chen

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to produce a manufacturing plan for a consumer VR glove. The total addressable market of VR is over 170 million global users as of 2022 (Kolmar , 2022) with a serviceable available market of 300,000 users on Meta’s own social platform (Heath, 2022). The targeted Quest 2 platform utilizes handheld controllers, which causes a lack of immersivity in social settings and gaming scenarios. One common use of the platform involves social platforms such as “Horizons” where users meet in a virtual world to interact; handheld controllers don’t allow users to shake hands, make finger …

An Interactive Ecosystem Simulator, Tong Zhou

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project is about an ecosystem simulator game that allows players to manipulate the population size of the selected species and observe these species interact with each other. It focuses on reflecting the consequences of human intervention in the ecosystem and the difficulty of maintaining a balanced ecosystem. I’ve been astonished by how human intervention could easily crash the ecosystem and how difficult it could be to make up for our faults. And many people still hold the thought that we control the world and could determine the death or live of all other creatures as we like. However, the …

In-Situ Mechanical Tester, Andrrew Murach, Gustavo Marquez, Kosimo Tonn, Jake Vormbaum

Mechanical Engineering

Over the course of the 2022-23 Cal Poly SLO school year, a small tensile tester device was developed specifically for Dr. Long Wang to test thin film materials under a microscope and generate accurate force versus displacement graphs. A tensile tester was manufactured using purchased and machined components, electronics were consolidated in a separate box and connected, and a program and user interface were written to control the motion, provide custom inputs, and organize useful data for the researcher. Tests were conducted to compare the performance of the device to universal tensile testers available in the Composites lab. The device …

Wonder World, Liam M. Shaw, Briana Kuo

Computer Engineering

The main motivation for this project stems from a mutual lifelong love for video games, specifically sandbox games. These types of games, such as Mojang's Minecraft, ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley, and many more, have consistently provided us comfort in stressful times throughout our lives. Now, at the culmination of our undergraduate experience, the curriculum we have experienced throughout these past four years has provided us with the knowledge and resources that allows us to provide this same sense of comfort for others. Our game aims to encourage collaboration between two players through solving puzzles and minigames. In addition, our game seeks …

Contextually Dynamic Quest Generation Using In-Session Player Information In Mmorpg, Shangwei Lin

Master's Theses

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are one of the most

popular genres in video games that combine massively multiplayer online genres with

role-playing gameplay. MMORPGs’ featured social interaction and forms of level pro-

gression through quest completion are the core for gaining players’ attention. Varied

and challenging quests play an essential part in retaining that attention. However,

well-crafted content takes much longer to develop with human efforts than it does to

consume, and the dominant procedural content generation models for quests suffer

from the drawback of being incompatible with dynamic world changes and the feeling

of repetition over time. …

Assessing The Resilience Of Mycorrhizal Networks Following Central Tree Removal, Deon Lillo

Master's Theses

Mycorrhizal networks (MNs), or the networks of fungal mycelia that connect plants to each other, are vital in contributing to the well-being of ecosystems. They not only assist in the transport of nutrients across an ecosystem, but also help protect an ecosystem from disease and adverse conditions. However, more research into these networks is needed and modelling these networks as graphs can help us achieve this. By applying centrality analysis and performing k-core partitioning on these networks, we are able to identify the trees that are most important and central to a MN and observe the effects of removing these …