Computer Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Real-Time 3d Automated Spotlight Tracking System, Francine Garcia, Mary Hemker

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Commercially available automated spotlight systems tend to be expensive and unattainable for smaller school or community theaters. This project provides a cheap alternative to automated spotlight systems on the market and is compatible with most stage lighting architecture by using the Digital Multiplex (DMX) Protocol.

Circuit boards with Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio frequency track an actor’s coordinates in a 3D space defined by four UWB anchors. A Raspberry Pi single-board computer acts as a controller and converts the coordinates into pan and tilt angles and maps these calculations to values that the spotlight can read in order to move. These values …

Ascertion: Middleware For Content Moderation, Mia Lassiter, Vani Aggarwal

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Internet is dominated by a handful of social media platforms that disproportionately control content curation and moderation. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for users to discern verified and credible information from misinformation and disinformation. Middleware is a specialized software with mechanisms to decentralize platform power and reinstate users with autonomy over their online experiences. We propose middleware that gives users the autonomy to create and consume authentic and trusted content. We achieved a proof of concept for a middleware with mechanisms for verifiable content posting and authentication. Our solution is implemented as a Chrome plug-in that provides …

Portuguese For Mozambican Mothers – A Language Empowerment App, Josh Kindarara, Alexandre Lopes, Gwendolyn Patwardhan, Riana Santos, Sara Wheeler

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In Mecúfi, Mozambique, the mothers of children who attend school through the DIFF EDUCATION program have a strong desire to learn Portuguese, the country’s national language, due to colonization. However, they have minimal formal education and little to no experience with technology. They are unable to read or write in any language, including their native language, Makhuwa, making many current educational resources unusable. This leaves these mothers without accessible, culturally relevant tools to help address their linguistic needs.

This project focuses on developing an educational application designed for non-literate mothers in rural Mozambique. The app emphasizes visual and auditory learning …

Boundary Value Problems Associated With Morse-Novikov Cohomology Groups Of Riemannian Manifolds With Boundary, Qusay S. A. Al-Zamil, Mohammed Y. Abass

Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics

In this paper, we provide an affirmative response to the following question: if Morse-Novikov cohomology groups of M with non-empty boundary ∂M do not vanish, then what topological or analytical(geometrical) constraints can be enforced to ensure that the equation 𝖽θω=η is solvable for any non-trivialprescribed [η] in absolute Hθk(M) or relative Hθk(M,∂M) Morse-Novikov cohomology groups?. Where 𝖽θω=𝖽ω+θ∧ω and 0≠[θ]∈HdR1(M) for any ω∈ …

Retracted: A Novel Scheme To Optimize Lsb Steganography Based On A Logistic Chaotic Map And Genetic Algorithm, Dena Abu Laila, Ibrahim Moh'd Obeidt, Mohammad Aljaidi, Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Muneer Albourini, Qais Al-Na'amneh, Ghassan Samara, Rami Shehab, Khaled Momani

Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics

Steganography has gained importance in various fields, including cloud security, internet banking, military applications, and medical imaging. Additionally, it is popular due to its many uses, becoming a hot research topic. The Least Significant Bit (LSB) approach is among the simplest ways to embed secret data in a cover image. We proposed a new scheme using LSB with the genetic algorithm GA to find the optimal solution permutation for embedding the pixel assortment of the image where data is to be concealed, and a chaotic genetic algorithm (CGA) to efficiently find the best crossover and mutation performance in the chromosomes. …

Hybrid Methods Of Two Conjugate Gradient Coefficients With Modified Condition For Solving Unconstrained Optimization, Yasir Salih, Sudradjat

Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics

The conjugate gradient (CG) technique is an efficient method for solving nonlinear optimization problems, especially for large scale problems. This is due to simplicity, low memory requirement, and computational cost, which satisfy the sufficient descent condition. This paper presents a new modification of the PRP method which can be considered as a convex combination of PRP and DPRP methods. The performance of the new method is analyzed to ensure the descent property under exact line search. Numerical experiments indicate that this method has good convergence performance and is promising.

Wesearch - Scu’S Research Hub, Beatrice Hackman, Hilary Le, Meagan Vu, Nicholas Cheung

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Santa Clara University (SCU) hosts a flourishing undergraduate research program, but discovering research opportunities remains inefficient due to inconsistent information channels. Students rely on informal communication and disconnected departmental web pages to find research roles. In response, our senior design team developedWeSearch: a centralized, web-based platform that consolidates research opportunities across all SCU laboratories. It allows students to browse labs, projects, and apply directly to open positions. Faculty members can create lab profiles, post research openings, manage applications, and assign administrative roles to student assistants.

The platform was designed using Figma and implemented with React.js on the front-end. Firebase was …

Visualizing Sustainability Data With Ai, Matthew Van Dyke, Emily Chen, Hayden Le, Dorothy Xu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

EcoVisor is a prototype system for extracting, structuring, and visualizing sustainability related metrics from natural language articles. The project integrates a FastAPI backend with a Next.js frontend to transform raw text or article URLs into structured sustainability data, detect trends over time, and generate visual outputs for users. Key capabilities include automated scraping of web articles for sustainability semantics, sustainability related metric data extraction, post-processing of extracted values into cleaned segments and sentences using HTML parsing, grouping of metrics by category and year, generation of Chart.js visualizations, and production of concise “comic brief” summaries for accessible storytelling. EcoVisor aims to …

Accelerating Llm Inference With Smart Nic Tokenization And Caching, Sudarshan Mehta

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Tokenization is a critical preprocessing step in machine learning pipelines, particularly for generative AI models such as large language models (LLMs). Despite significant advances in training and inference technologies, tokenization continues to be a notable performance bottleneck due to its CPU-bound nature and limited acceleration support. This thesis proposes NetTokenizer, a system designed to offload tokenization from CPUs to network data planes. Utilizing software frameworks such as the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and hardware-based SmartNIC solutions, NetTokenizer substantially improves inference efficiency. Experimental evaluations demonstrate up to a 95.9% reduction in tail latency and a 5.73x throughput increase compared to …

Neural Ranking In Sparse Data Environments, Xuyang Wu

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Neural ranking models have become central to modern information retrieval (IR) systems, powering applications such as web search, product recommendation, and question answering. However, their effectiveness often hinges on access to abundant labeled supervision, a condition that is rarely met in real-world scenarios. In many domains, including e-commerce, healthcare, and legal search, labeled user interactions (e.g., clicks, purchases, or expert annotations) are sparse, especially for long-tail queries and new content. This data sparsity challenges the generalization, adaptability, and fairness of traditional ranking approaches.

This thesis presents a unified investigation of neural ranking under sparse supervision, introducing novel methods and analytical …

Tiny-Tlic: Lightweight Transformer Based Lossy Image Compression, Chen Li

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

This thesis presents a comprehensive study on image compression, beginning with a review of both traditional and learning-based methods. Building upon the conventional Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework, we explore the integration of Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures into the image compression pipeline to leverage their global modeling capabilities. Based on this, we propose Tiny-TLIC (Tiny Transformer-Based Lossy Image Compression), a lightweight yet effective model that introduces two novel components: Integrated Convolution and Self-Attention (ICSA) for enhanced feature representation, and a Multistage Context Model (MCM) for improved entropy estimation. To validate our approach, we train both a baseline Transformer-Based Image Compression (TIC) …

Spy Bot, Nathanael Bruce Farris

Computer Engineering

This project set out to develop a compact, mobile-controlled robotic platform designed for remote video surveillance and control via a smartphone. Using a Raspberry Pi as the core controller, the robot integrates a Flask-based server, HTML/JavaScript-based user interface, and an infrared-capable camera to provide real-time video streaming and directional control through a web browser. Key design challenges included managing power delivery, integrating motor control with live video, and modernizing web technologies to ensure smooth communication between client and server. The final system demonstrates a responsive and portable proof of concept that highlights the potential for future upgrades, such as night …

From Vigilance To Veracity: Hallucination Detection, Mitigation, And Safety Enhancement In Large Language Models, Sharanya Dasgupta

Master’s Dissertations

Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their adeptness at generating innovative responses to the given prompts across a multitude of domains, yet they exhibit a critical limitation: the propensity to produce factually incorrect and potentially harmful content while preserving syntactic coherence and logical structure. In this work, we hypothesize that these deficiencies in LLMs originate from their internal representational dynamics. Our observations indicate that, during passage generation, …

A Turtlebot3 Hardware Testbed For Distributed Kalman Filter Localization, Dmitri Dobrynin, Indigo T. Garcia

Electrical Engineering

This report presents the preliminary design for a distributed localization framework for a multi-robot system. Many robotics research papers provide simulations of proposed algorithms in regards to formation control and task allocation. However, it is often that these proposals are without hardware experiments, being limited only to simulation. The objective of this framework is to provide a hardware implementation of a distributed Kalman filtering algorithm for multi-agent localization, as well as provide grounds for future multi-agent experiments. The framework is implemented on a swarm of three Turtlebot3 mobile robots. The robots can accurately localize themselves with respect to other agents …

Custom Data Acquisition System For The Cal Poly Racing Baja Team, Joe Keenan

Computer Engineering

The Cal Poly Racing Baja team relies on data to analyze and improve upon various vehicle systems in an off-road style vehicle. In order to accomplish this, some data logging or data acquisition (DAQ) is required to collect the data. This project explores the use of a controller area network with flexible data rate (CAN FD) bus along with a custom file format to store data on an SD card that can be made easily acceptable to engineers on the team.

Open-Source Cubesat Flight Software And Simulation, James Gruber

Computer Engineering

An open-source FreeRTOS-based flight software framework for CubeSats, with an example flight software package and simulation demonstrating real-time attitude control.

How Long Can I Transmit? A Mobility Aware Mmwave-Based Uav Communication Framework, Shawon Mitra

Master’s Dissertations

One primary focus of next generation wireless communication networks is the millimeterwave (mmWave) spectrum, typically considered in the 30 GHz to 300 GHz frequency range. Despite their promise of high data rates, mmWaves su↵ers from severe attenuation while passing through obstacles. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been proposed to o↵set this limitation on account of their additional degrees of freedom, which can be leveraged to provide line of sight (LoS) transmission paths. While some prior works have proposed analytical frameworks to compute the LoS probability for static ground users and a UAV, the same is lacking for mobile users on …

Distributed Formation Control Of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots: Safety-Critical Leader-Follower Approach With Obstacle Avoidance And Dynamic Reconfiguration, Kelvin C. Villago

Master's Theses

Networked control systems for multi-agent robotics have emerged as a critical paradigm for executing complex coordinated tasks in diverse environments. While formation control serves as the backbone of such systems, real-world deployment introduces significant challenges including communication constraints, environmental obstacles, and the need for adaptive reconfiguration. This research addresses these challenges by developing a novel unified framework that seamlessly integrates obstacle avoidance algorithms with dynamic formation reconfiguration capabilities, specifically designed for communication-limited networked control architectures. The proposed framework represents a significant advancement over existing approaches by simultaneously handling both static and dynamic obstacles while maintaining system cohesion under communication constraints. …

Optimizing Web Servers With Io_Uring, Mihika Nigam

Master's Theses

Modern web servers face unprecedented demands for high throughput and low latency [10] [11]. Yet, even the state-of-the-art optimizations often fail under heavy workloads on existing infrastructure. Despite advancements in hardware, communication between applications and the kernel remains a critical bottleneck.

Industry surveys reveal that over 50% of production servers still rely on traditional epoll-based architectures [5]. This research aims to investigate and characterize Linux’s new io_uring subsystem, which has the potential to overcome these challenges. Through controlled load testing of various existing architectures like event-driven, multi-process, and multi-threaded architectures (including other commercial servers), we demonstrate how io_uring can help …