Computer Engineering Commons^™

Detection Of Fake News In Short Videos: A Multimodal Approach, Mona Kumari

Master’s Dissertations

The rise of generative models and affordable video editing tools has fueled the spread of fake and manipulated videos, undermining information reliabilityespecially on social media. Traditional detection methods, focused on single modalities like visual artifacts or text cues, often struggle with diverse, user-generated content. This dissertation presents a unified framework for fake video detection that integrates multimodal semantics, narrative structure, and propagation behavior. Visual, audio, text, and OCR features are extracted using pretrained models (CLIP, Wav2Vec2), and segment-level graphs are built to model narrative flow using Graph Attention Networks (GATv2Conv). User engagement dynamics are modeled via a bidirectional LSTM. A …

Xmr: Extensible Model Representation, Jason Cisneros, Lucas Van Der Heijden

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In safety critical industries, such as aerospace, verification and validation are crucial steps in system development. Validation begins with decomposing a system into its requirements. These requirements are used to create the high level model of the system. The low level system that is created from this must then be verified. Manually ensuring that the system being verified exactly matches the validated design is tedious, time consuming, and error prone. To solve this, we have created an open source tool that can automatically generate the code from UML models. This enables going from the high level model to the low …

Deepfake Detection, Timothy Tong, Abem Lucas

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

From elections, to wars, to people’s personal lives, deepfakes have become ever more present, blurring the distinction between reality and fiction. Many deep learning-based deepfake detection methods lack generalizability. They often overfit to deepfake generation techniques in their training distribution, and fail to detect deepfake generation techniques outside of their training distribution. One approach to solve the generalization problem has been to use Vision Language Models, such as the pretrained CLIP model, to extract features that generalize across different deepfake generation techniques, including diffusion and GAN images. However, most CLIP approaches only consider image level features for detection, such as …

Exploring Novel Methods For Real-Time Multi-Camera People Tracking In Machine Learning, Johan Kou, Connor Vallero

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Multi-camera people tracking is the process of tracking persons and their paths, continuously across different camera fields of view. It can help track suspects across large areas, and assist individuals in emergency situations. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method involves using geometric-consistent constraints, information on the appearance of subjects, and pose estimation for dealing with occlusion issues. This current SOTA works well, but is still lacking in its ability to handle occlusion and perform well in real-time applications on a network. With occlusion, the IDs assigned to persons can be accidentally swapped in high density areas, or places where there are …

Vintage Game Emulator, Andrew Katchour, Ashwin Raman

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project explores the integration of artificial intelligence into retro-style arcade titles to enhance the gameplay, while still preserving the nostalgic aesthetic and overall mechanics of the titles. By using Pygame to explore clones of the existing video game titles, we modified the existing games to develop AI into the games using various AI algorithms. The system introduces adaptive enemy behavior that responds to the players actions and also introduces an additional player to some games that will play alongside the player as well. This helps to create a more engaging and unpredictable gaming experience. The AI logic is implemented …

An Ai-Driven Microfinance Platform To Enhance The Growth Of Small Businesses, Abdullah Naveed, Yunzhou Wang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Microfinance provides financial services to businesses which do not have access to regular banking institutions. There have been many digital applications developed to support microfinance schemes globally. However, the applications currently on the market do not yet fully leverage technology features, which are already being widely used in traditional banking. In conjunction with the Miller Center of Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University, we have developed an application utilizing the latest technologies to help small businesses and lenders in all stages of a microfinance project.

Variable Natural Language Translator For Video Games, Gabriel Bernini, Cole Propach

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In the field of video games, developers work to immerse players in a variety of ways. In one genre of video games, 2D exploration, or Metroidvania as its colloquially known, developers try to immerse players by letting them explore large worlds with the hope to overcome isolation. Often these worlds are sparse or dead worlds where the player is alone, but by exploring more of the world familiarity with the space is achieved and this isolation can be overcome. We hope to innovate in this genre by utilizing a new way to simulate and overcome this isolation, through language learning. …

Reclaiming Data To Transform Anti-Trafficking Systems, Laura Hackney

SMU Human Trafficking Data Conference

AnnieCannons believes that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. Yet in the anti-trafficking movement, data about survivors is often collected without survivors. Co-founder and CEO Laura Hackney will discuss how reclaiming data can transform systems of care accountability, and prevention. She will share lessons learned from the development of ResourceFull, a digital platform led and co- designed with trafficking survivors to safely connect individuals to trustworthy services and track outcomes across fragmented care systems. There are ethical, technical, and human-centered challenges of collecting and of using data in a space where safety and trust are …

Documentation-Aware Code Generation Via Retrieval Augmented Generation, Daniel Amirtharaj, Rahmin Norwood

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Modern large language models (LLMs) increase the speed of software development but frequently hallucinate code, forcing developers to debug and rewrite generated code manually. This project introduces Documentation-Aware Code Generation, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that injects authoritative documentation into the LLM prompt to reduce hallucinations in generated code. We build an ingestion pipeline that scrapes, cleans, chunks, and embeds official API documentation into a Pinecone vector database, then design a retrieval and re-ranking pipeline that retrieves the most relevant snippets for each user query. Results show that augmenting prompts with documentation lowers code hallucination by up to 60%. The …

Sideque$T, Akshay Nichani, Anusha Kankipati, Afra Mahammad, Lucas Jablon

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In recent years, the gap between traditional education and the current labor market has widened dramatically: in 2024, 11. 5 % of California’s 16-24 year olds were neither in school nor employed, alongside a net decline of roughly 3 million students nationwide in the last decade and more than 4 million members of Generation Z left the job despite having conventional degrees. These trends underscore a growing disconnect between academic credentials and market-ready skills and a pressing need for alternative pathways to gainful work. We introduce SIDEQUE$T, a secure, user-friendly online marketplace engineered to bridge this divide. By allowing job …

Lock And Roll, Varun Mangla, Zachary Common, Gaby Gamarro-Gomez

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

As electronic bikes continue to increase in popularity, cycling has become a means of daily travel for more and more people. However, as the price and quantity of these consumer bicycles increase in public areas, so does the probability of their theft. Newer bikes, especially those with onboard electronics, are a priority target for thieves.

Lock and Roll, therefore, is an advanced smart bike wheel lock that aims to address the growing demands for increased bike security. By providing a variety of security features, such as GPS positioning, a gyroscopic alarm system, and remote monitoring, Lock and Roll represents a …

Stomp: The Student Organization Management Portal, Madison Nguyen, Walker Selby, Cameron Greene, Leila Erhili

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

At Santa Clara University (SCU), student organizations play a vital role in student expression and development. The Center for Student Involvement (CSI) supports these organizations. However, both student organization leaders and CSI are hindered by administrative inefficiencies. The core issue lies in inconsistent and ad hoc processes of submitting, tracking, and approving various requests, such as booking event spaces and processing reimbursements. To address these shortcomings, our team has created a web application in collaboration with student organization leaders and CSI professional staff. The platform serves as a one-stop shop for all essential functions, including event bookings, reimbursements, and policy …

Netgen: Network Traffic Generator, Arya Pefourque, Cole Fettkether, Johnathon Maschler

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project will investigate the development of a transformer-based machine learning model (NetGen), with the purpose of generating realistic and usable synthetic network traffic from natural language inputs. Network research and testing in the cybersecurity field depend on publicly available packet data (PCAP). Many of these datasets are either outdated or fail to represent more modern traffic patterns. We attempt to address this issue by preprocessing available network data into structured and tokenized sequences, suitable for training a transformer model. The transformer architecture allows us to translate user-provided descriptions—“simulate a TCP handshake from IP A to IP B”—into structurally accurate …

Medpez Dispenser, Hannah Hoeptner, Brian Lee, Liam Reese

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

MedPez is a compact, portable device designed to improve medication adherence for individuals who struggle with remembering to take their pills. The device features a modular design, including a universal housing that is paired to a compatible cartridge. The housing is the top half of the device where users insert and store their medication. The main hardware components, such as the microcontroller are housed here. The cartridge is the bottom half of the device that contains the internal mechanisms to dispense the user’s pills and stores the main pilltracking components. A built-in alert system notifies users when it’s time to …

Litter-Acy, Justin Chung, Aster Li, Andrew Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project for Santa Clara University School of Engineering’s annual Senior Design, Litter-acy, addresses the critical societal issue of improper waste management and the lack of public knowledge regarding proper sorting techniques. These contribute significantly to environmental pollution and deterioration. Through recognizing how traditional educational methods often fail to engage younger audiences and combat the ”adolescent dip” in sustainability interest, Litter-acy proposes an innovative solution: an iOS mobile application that gamifies waste management education.

The app features multiple interactive mini-games focused on sustainable waste sorting, including Connections, Catcher, and Trivia, designed to make learning engaging and accessible. It incorporates key …

Autonomous Vehicle Software Update With Blockchain: A Simulation Platform, Hudson Strauss

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The rapid growth of connected and autonomous vehicles demands robust and scalable security solutions. This project introduces AVSWU-Pack, a modular simulation framework designed to evaluate and simulate blockchain-based communication in autonomous vehicular networks adapted directly from Dr. Gabriel Solomon’s work(2). Built on top of Veins, SUMO, INET, and OMNeT++, the platform enables vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communication with secure data exchange via gRPC-based integration with a Polkadot blockchain node. The simulation framework utilizes a Veins-like project built with Polkadot-Substrate to simulate a VANET that communicates vehicle information to the blockchain. Deployable in a basic VirtualBox environment, the system enables controlled experimentation, …

Beyond Campus, Sophia Miranda, Jenna Chinn, Dev Gupta

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College is often regarded as a formative period for building lasting friendships, but many students - particularly new, transfer, or socially reserved individuals - struggle to form connections. Beyond Campus is a social networking platform designed specifically for college students to foster meaningful friendships through interest-based matchmaking. The platform leverages a custom algorithm to suggest compatible peers, supports the formation and discovery of community groups, and o↵ers secure, user-friendly messaging. Unlike existing social apps like Bumble BFF, ZeeMee, and GroupMe, which lack a dedicated focus on the college experience, Beyond Campus targets university communities directly. By providing a modern, inclusive, …

Revit Walasee: An Auto-Generated In-Wall Revit Model, Ally Delgado, Andrew Kimball, Calianna Collins, Yi Qian Goh

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Revit WalaSee is a software-hardware integration tool designed to make building renovations smarter and more sustainable. In the construction industry, rework and demolition make up a large part of global construction waste and carbon emissions, largely due to the lack of internal wall documentation in older buildings. Our project addresses this issue by developing the pipeline between the Walabot wall scanner, a handheld device that detects hidden elements behind drywall, and Autodesk Revit, a widely used platform for Building Information Modeling (BIM).With the Revit WalaSee, someone without extensive technical training could scan any wall and produce accurate 3D modelling …

Secure Your Hardware With Randomization And Redundancy, Dennis Cao, Joseph Khamisy, Sumeet Upadhya

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is a potent hardware attack that threatens cryptographic security by injecting faults into a cipher implementation to reveal secret keys. This project aims to mitigate DFA attacks on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by implementing targeted countermeasures in an embedded AES-128 encryption core. Two key techniques are explored: Randomization and Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR). The randomization approach introduces unpredictability into the encryption process, which involves inserting dummy rounds, artificial noise, and random delays, to disrupt an attacker’s timing and analysis, while TMR provides redundancy by replicating critical rounds of computation and using majority voting to correct …

Leetquest, Sanvir Bal, Vladimir Ceban, Matty Herzig, Daryl Ho

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The technical interview process for software engineering position has drastically changed in recent times to focus on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA). Although, data structures and algorithms are a foundational aspect of several programming languages, the questions asked in the technical interview process do not accurately reflect, in terms of style and difficulty, the experience students and professionals have with DSA from school and work respectively. As a result, many have looked to online resources in order sharpen their DSA problem solving skills. However, the existing solutions are riddled with flaws. In particular, the learning resources they provide are locked …