Navigating Enhanced Exploration Assistance (Nexa),
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Navigating Enhanced Exploration Assistance (Nexa), Azhari Abbas, Caleb Fakunle, Ryan Powell, Donovan Livingston
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
NEXA is an artificial intelligence software platform developed to enhance residential security and property monitoring through seamless integration with autonomous drone systems. This research application of advanced AI in surveillance aims to create a standalone solution capable of real-time threat detection and intelligent alert management. By processing visual and sensory data, NEXA facilitates autonomous drone operation with minimal human intervention. Secure communication channels ensure that instant alerts are delivered to property owners and, potentially, law enforcement, improving response times in security incidents, search-and-rescue operations, and perimeter surveillance. Additionally, NEXA is capable of interfacing with commercially available drone platforms and presents …
Robotic Arm Development For Cone Penetration Testing On The Lunar Surface,
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Robotic Arm Development For Cone Penetration Testing On The Lunar Surface, Jonah Graff, Derek Zhang
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
Just as on Earth, future lunar operations will require accurate characterization of surface conditions. On Earth, a proven method for this is Cone Penetration Testing (CPT), which evaluates soil bearing capacity and stratification. This information is vital for lunar operations, including habitat construction, resource extraction, and safe pathfinding. However, traditional CPT systems are designed for human operation and lack autonomy. This project addresses that limitation by developing an autonomous, in-situ terrain characterization system for lunar surfaces. The device is driven by ball-screw actuators powered by stepper motors and controlled through an Arduino Mega, using a combination of metal and 3D-printed …
Advanced Manufacturing And Materials Of A Bio-Mimetic Hoof For Space Robotics Applications,
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Advanced Manufacturing And Materials Of A Bio-Mimetic Hoof For Space Robotics Applications, Benjamin Heckel
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
Planetary surfaces often feature steep, uneven, and unpredictable terrain conditions that resemble some of the most challenging natural environments on Earth. In these terrestrial settings, certain animals have evolved to navigate complex landscapes with remarkable agility. One example is the mountain goat, an animal whose hooves have evolved for stable and precise movement across rocky, inclined surfaces. This biological adaptation provides a useful model for improving robotic mobility in planetary exploration. This study draws inspiration from that natural adaptation to develop a bio-mimetic robotic hoof designed to enhance traction, durability, and adaptability for extraterrestrial exploration. By replicating the mechanical properties …
Phaëthon System,
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Phaëthon System, Brady Roudabush, Lauren Gallo, Emelia Thompson, Jacob Woods
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
Phaëthon System is the project name for the Search and Rescue Drone Initiative. This initiative will improve the current search and rescue drone industry by introducing new techniques to get through dense forest canopies and other places where an overhead view is not useful. The Phaëthon System uses a swarm of drones that can penetrate under the tree canopy to map and search with the utmost efficiency and safety for rescuers. A command drone is launched to survey the overall search area, and set up a communications and data link. The next component is then released, which is a swarm …
Interplay Between Physical Design Choices And Emergent Cyber System Consensus: A Case Study With An Underwater Swarm,
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Interplay Between Physical Design Choices And Emergent Cyber System Consensus: A Case Study With An Underwater Swarm, Ava Neubert
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
Understanding how physical constraints influence collective behavior is critical for designing cyber-physical multi-agent systems in communication-limited environments. This project investigates how agent mobility and communication constraints affect opinion dynamics in a three-dimensional underwater swarm. An agent-based model was developed in AnyLogic, where agents follow realistic motion dynamics and exchange information at discrete communication intervals to reflect underwater limitations. Agent opinions are modeled using a BOIDS-inspired consensus mechanism in RGB space, allowing visualization of convergence behavior. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to evaluate the effects of communication range, agent speed, turn rate, and swarm size. Results show that communication range has …
Automation And Robotics In Timber Construction Prefabrication,
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Automation And Robotics In Timber Construction Prefabrication, Jason Grabowski, Anish Mandyam, Samuel Mcaraw, Jacob Jander
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
Robotics and automation have varying degrees of utilization across the construction prefabrication industry. The timber prefabrication industry is uniquely positioned for the implementation of robotics and automation due to the environment being more controlled than most of the construction industry. Current developments are influenced by the evolution of "Construction 4.0/5.0," where the integration of digital technologies and robotics is transforming timber prefabrication from traditional subtractive CNC machining into a highly precise, additive, and collaborative process. The purpose of this project is to conduct a systematic literature review of the state of-the-art and near-future developments of automation and robotics in timber …
The Electric Crackdown: Exploring The Human Factors Impacts Of Controls & Displays In Evs Across The Market,
2026
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
The Electric Crackdown: Exploring The Human Factors Impacts Of Controls & Displays In Evs Across The Market, Rae Okada, Robin Hanen, Liam Brennan
Discovery Day - Daytona Beach
Title: The Electric Crackdown: Exploring the Human Factors Impacts of Controls & Displays in Electric Vehicles Across the Market Despite a global adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) with partial driving automation (i.e., advanced driver assistance systems; ADAS), differences exist at societal (i.e., legislation, regulation), individual (i.e., use of), and system (i.e., vehicle-to-vehicle) levels surrounding these vehicles. While these former societal divergences can be considered based on the: (1) mechanisms promoting or limiting EV adoption, (2) number of EVs on the road, and (3) respective incident reports; system differences require investigation for each vehicle based on its make and model. In …
Balancing Innovation And Integrity: Ethical Implications Of Ai Use In Higher Education,
2026
Women's University in Africa
Balancing Innovation And Integrity: Ethical Implications Of Ai Use In Higher Education, Petronella Muziti, Ntando S. Sibanda
African Conference on Information Systems and Technology
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming higher education, creating opportunities while raising ethical concerns such as bias, privacy violations, academic misconduct and reduced human-centred teaching. This study examined how institutions can balance AI innovation with academic integrity and equity, focusing on lecturers’ ethical dilemmas and institutional readiness. A triangulation design incorporating quantitative and qualitative methods was used. Twelve semi-structured interviews and two focus group discussions involving eighteen participants were conducted across five universities, while 150 questionnaires were distributed, yielding 128 valid responses. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were applied. Findings showed that lecturers reported student misuse and plagiarism (78%), AI …
Ubuntu Signs: A Tool For Real-Time Translation Of South African Sign Language,
2026
Nelson Mandela University
Ubuntu Signs: A Tool For Real-Time Translation Of South African Sign Language, Simone Beets, Hasita Rama
African Conference on Information Systems and Technology
Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) individuals often face communication challenges with people who do not understand sign language. Existing systems lack support for South African Sign Language (SASL) and are limited in accessibility, efficiency and accuracy. This paper introduces Ubuntu Signs, a mobile prototype tool for real-time SASL translation using a camera-based interface and machine learning. The tool uses two models to recognize gestures: a static model for alphabetical and numerical gestures and a dynamic model for continuous gestures representing words and phrases. A preliminary user study evaluated the effectiveness, efficiency, accuracy and satisfaction of Ubuntu Signs. Results indicated high usability …
Robbed With Permission: Toward A Receiver-Consent Architecture For Trust-Preserving Mobile Money Transactions In Africa,
2026
University of Ghana Business School
Robbed With Permission: Toward A Receiver-Consent Architecture For Trust-Preserving Mobile Money Transactions In Africa, Raphael Amponsah
African Conference on Information Systems and Technology
Mobile money transacted more than USD 2 trillion globally in 2025 across 2.3 billion registered accounts, with Sub-Saharan Africa holding over half of all accounts and two-thirds of transaction value. Between 58 and 72 percent of mobile money fraud on the continent exploits trust rather than technology, yet current security architecture authenticates the sender and merely notifies the receiver, leaving the transaction execution moment structurally unguarded. This paper introduces the Receiver-Consent Transaction Protocol (RCTP), a USSD-native protocol requiring the receiver's active PIN consent on their physical SIM before any credit completes, grounded in Design Science Research with Routine Activity Theory …
Genai Goes To Campus: A Narrative Literature Review Of Benefits, Challenges And Policies,
2026
University of Cape Town
Genai Goes To Campus: A Narrative Literature Review Of Benefits, Challenges And Policies, Jayson Warren Peters, Mmasechaba J. Seopa, Justin T. Maistry, Tebogo J. Matome, Christen Du Toit, Maureen C. Tanner
African Conference on Information Systems and Technology
This study examines the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the learning and administrative experiences of students and educators in higher education, through a narrative literature review of thirty-one articles. The literature was thematically reviewed and coded to identify themes and factors contributing to challenges, benefits, and policies and guidelines. These themes were explored in depth with their relation to GenAI for learning outcomes, the role of GenAI in student’s learning experiences and the effectiveness of using GenAI tools to support educators’ administrative processes. In light of the challenges and deterrents identified (e.g. implementation - maintenance, privacy and security, …
Rockin’ Rover On The Rainbow Road,
2026
Palm Beach Atlantic University
Rockin’ Rover On The Rainbow Road, Michael Kolta, Lawrence Burgee, Ying Yuan
Transformations
This paper presents a progressive series of age-appropriate lesson plans for grades K-12 that all use the same interdisciplinary activity to educate students about Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) simultaneously. Technology from Texas Instruments (TI) was employed including a TI Nspire graphing calculator that can run Python programs, a TI Innovator Hub, and a TI Rover. The TI Rover is a small, robotic car that has sensors and is controlled by the calculator via the Hub hardware interface. A Python program was developed that uses the color sensor in the Rover to detect the color on colored paper …
Evaluating Diagnostic Information Preservation In Weakly Supervised Medical Imaging,
2026
Florida Atlantic University
Evaluating Diagnostic Information Preservation In Weakly Supervised Medical Imaging, Vinceline Bertrand
Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present
Weakly supervised medical imaging models trained with coarse image-level labels often report strong performance on metrics such as accuracy and AUC. This thesis argues that these metrics can be misleading: a model may succeed on a coarse diagnostic task while failing to preserve the fine-grained information needed for consequential clinical decisions. It makes this failure measurable through the diagnostic gap, defined as the divergence between coarse and fine-grained diagnostic preservation, across three connected studies. The first shows that near-perfect ovarian ultrasound accuracy reflects visual separability rather than pathological understanding. The second measures the diagnostic gap in a mammographic pipeline, where …
Tackling Oversmoothing, Heterogeneity, And Label Distributions For Robust Graph Learning,
2026
Florida Atlantic University
Tackling Oversmoothing, Heterogeneity, And Label Distributions For Robust Graph Learning, Yufei Jin
Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present
With the tremendous development of graph neural networks, graph learning has become a dominant solution applied to various applications naturally integrated with graph structures, including traffic networks [82], molecule networks [40, 22, 1, 30, 32], social networks [4], etc. While most existing graph learning solutions can handle homogeneous graphs (graphs with a single node type and a single edge type) and homophily graphs (graphs where node labels tend to be the same as their neighbors) for multi-class node classification downstream tasks well, in real world applications, graph structures can be more complex with heterogeneous graphs (graphs with multiple node types …
Hardware-In-The-Loop Evaluation Of Sensor-Source Selection For Prosthetic Locomotion Intent Recognition,
2026
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Hardware-In-The-Loop Evaluation Of Sensor-Source Selection For Prosthetic Locomotion Intent Recognition, Victoria Asencio-Clemens
Master's Theses
Active lower-limb prostheses use intent-recognition systems to identify a user’s locomotion mode and select an appropriate control strategy, but sensor configurations that perform well offline may be unsuitable for resource-constrained embedded hardware. Existing sensor-selection methods generally prioritize classification accuracy without directly accounting for processing latency, memory usage, or other hardware-dependent requirements. To address this limitation, this thesis develops a hardware-in-the-loop source-selection framework for embedded classification of level walking, ramp ascent, ramp descent, stair ascent, and stair descent using multimodal biomechanical data from transtibial amputee participants. Subject-specific linear support vector machine classifiers were evaluated using trial-held-out validation, and candidate configurations from …
A Maintainable Extensible And Performant Compiler Toolchain For The Trustguard Architecture,
2026
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
A Maintainable Extensible And Performant Compiler Toolchain For The Trustguard Architecture, Ethan N. Emery
Master's Theses
TrustGuard is a hardware architecture implementing a CAVO (Containment Architecture with Verified Output) model, which provides security guarantees by bootstrapping trust of a system to a hardware component known as the Sentry. Rather than verifying an entire system, TrustGuard re-executes trusted computation on the Sentry and validates the host system's execution before allowing values to pass to the outside world, thereby containing the effects of erroneous computation. Implementing this architecture in practice without hardware modifications to a host CPU requires a compiler toolchain capable of automatically generating instrumented binaries for both the untrusted host and the trusted Sentry from C …
Development And Testing Of A Computer Vision Pose Estimation System For Planar Mobile Robots,
2026
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Development And Testing Of A Computer Vision Pose Estimation System For Planar Mobile Robots, Andrew Jones
Master's Theses
This thesis details the development and testing of a computer vision-based real-time pose estimation system for differential drive robots. A single camera with a fisheye lens is used to locate ArUco markers placed at fixed locations and attached to robots. Using the OpenCV library, the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem is solved to facilitate the transformation of 2-D robot positions in an image to world-frame coordinates. An analytical solution is presented to estimate robot poses based on a single PnP solution, rather than solving the PnP problem for each pose estimate. Pose information is relayed to individual robots using a multi-microcontroller architecture …
Hyperchaotic Noise Generation For Adversarial Encryption In Privacy-Preserving Image Classification,
2026
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Hyperchaotic Noise Generation For Adversarial Encryption In Privacy-Preserving Image Classification, Neeraja Beesetti
Master's Theses
Artificial intelligence systems make useful predictions by taking in data and returning a classification, recommendation, or decision. Obtaining that prediction, however, requires sharing the data first. This creates a fundamental privacy challenge in machine learning: users must expose their data to receive a valuable prediction. Machine learning systems increasingly rely on cloud-based image classification for this reason, transmitting images from edge devices to remote servers rather than running large models locally. This creates a conflict between the accuracy a classifier requires and the privacy a data owner wants. Traditional encryption destroys the image structure on which a classifier depends, while …
Improving Collective Aggregation Strategies For Hpc And Ai Workloads,
2026
Clemson University
Improving Collective Aggregation Strategies For Hpc And Ai Workloads, Mikaila J. Gossman
All Dissertations
Modern high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads increasingly generate data at rates that outpace the storage systems responsible for persisting it. While computational throughput has scaled dramatically through parallel processors, GPUs, and specialized accelerators, storage systems have improved far more slowly. As such, application performance is increasingly limited by the ability to move data efficiently through deep, heterogeneous storage hierarchies rather than by raw computational capability. This dissertation investigates how aggregation and data movement strategies must be redesigned to close this gap, addressing four central challenges: resource contention between foreground computation and background I/O, the fine-grained and irregular …
Emergency Risk Dispatch For Integrated Electricity-Heat Systems Under Typhoon Disasters,
2026
College of Electrical Engineering, North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power, Zhengzhou 450045, China
Emergency Risk Dispatch For Integrated Electricity-Heat Systems Under Typhoon Disasters, Tongchui Liu, Lian Tan, Dongxuan Bao, Lanting Zeng, Pengfei Hou, Ronghua Ling
Journal of System Simulation
Abstract: The spatiotemporal randomness of typhoon movement paths leads to uncertain operational risks for integrated electricity-heat systems (IEHS), making it difficult to balance system risk controllability and dispatch economy. To tackle this problem, an emergency risk dispatch (ERD) method for IEHS under typhoon disasters is proposed. An ERD model for IEHS under typhoon disasters is established within the model predictive control framework. Based on the uncertainty of typhoon wind speed prediction, a moment-based ambiguity set for uncertain equipment component failures is constructed, and a distributionally robust chance-constrained ERD model is formulated. An approximation method based on worst-case conditional value-at-risk (WC-CVaR) …
