Computer Engineering Commons^™

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.

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 …

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 …

Secure And Efficient Bft Consensus For Blockchains, Mohammad Mussadiq Jalalzai

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Blockchains are simple data structures, containing transactions organized into blocks, in which each block points to a previous block using its hash. Thus, by following the chain, we can follow the history of transactions. Blocks are added to the chain through a consensus mechanism. Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols that were designed before blockchains were introduced are usually considered appropriate for use in small scale networks of size 10-20 replicas. Blockchains have changed this trend as the blockchain networks usually require a larger number of replicas and classic BFT protocols cannot provide acceptable performance in large networks. One of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Scheduling And Prefetching In Hadoop With Block Access Pattern Awareness And Global Memory Sharing With Load Balancing Scheme, Sai Suman

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Although several scheduling and prefetching algorithms have been proposed to improve data locality in Hadoop, there has not been much research to increase cluster performance by targeting the issue of data locality while considering the 1) cluster memory, 2) data access patterns and 3) real-time scheduling issues together.

Firstly, considering the data access patterns is crucial because the computation might access some portion of the data in the cluster only once while the rest could be accessed multiple times. Blindly retaining data in memory might eventually lead to inefficient memory utilization.

Secondly, several studies found that the cluster memory goes …

The Trust-Based Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, Richard S. Seymour

Theses and Dissertations

Cooperative agent and robot systems are designed so that each is working toward the same common good. The problem is that the software systems are extremely complex and can be subverted by an adversary to either break the system or potentially worse, create sneaky agents who are willing to cooperate when the stakes are low and take selfish, greedy actions when the rewards rise. This research focuses on the ability of a group of agents to reason about the trustworthiness of each other and make decisions about whether to cooperate. A trust-based interactive partially observable Markov decision process (TI-POMDP) is …

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.

The Perils And Promises Of Artificial General Intelligence, Brian S. Haney

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

Computer Vision Machine Learning And Future-Oriented Ethics, Abagayle Lee Blank

Honors Projects

Computer Vision Machine Learning (CVML) in the application of facial recognition is currently being researched, developed, and deployed across the world. It is of interest to governments, technology companies, and consumers. However, fundamental issues remain related to human rights, error rates, and bias. These issues have the potential to create societal backlash towards the technology which could limit its benefits as well as harm people in the process. To develop facial recognition technology that will be beneficial to society in and beyond the next decade, society must put ethics at the forefront. Drawing on AI4People’s adaption of bioethics for AI, …

Creating A 3d Printed Bipedal Robot’S Ankle And Foot With Human-Like Motion, Tylise E. Fitzgerald

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Humanoid robots are being created to replace humans in dangerous situations, assist overworked humans, and improve our quality of life by completing chores. However, current bipedal robots haven’t matched the performance of humans and are still impractical for commercial use.

One of the Agile and Adaptive Robotics Lab’s goals is to create a humanoid robot whose anatomy is similar to the human body. If this can be accomplished, we can have a functioning model of the human body that we can adjust to improve both humanoid robots’ functions and the functionality of our own human bodies. This specific project looks …