Digital Commons Network^™

Tread: A Digital Solution For Sustainable Travel, Audrey Claire Talmi, Amy Besford

Graphic Communication

This senior project aims to create an eco-tourism website that promotes sustainable and ethical travel by connecting users with local businesses, communities, and culturally respectful experiences. As mainstream tourism increasingly contributes to environmental degradation and social displacement, this platform will provide responsible alternatives by avoiding over-touristed destinations and favoring underrepresented areas. It will allow users to book flights, lodging, and activities while educating them on the consequences of over-tourism. Through a combination of intuitive user interface, thoughtful user experience, engaging visual design, and curated educational content, the website will serve not only as a booking platform but as a digital …

Seattle's New Edition, Kyle Gray

Graphic Communication

My project is to create and develop the branding of the NBA's newest franchise: The Seattle Grunge. Grunge is a genre of alternative rock that emerged in the mid-1980s particularly in the city of Seattle. With my team, I am looking for seamless cohesion with other logos in the Association while establishing an emotional connection between the fanbase and its city. The project will consist of a complete creation of the team’s logo/branding, court, 3 jersey designs (home/away/city connect), merchandise, season ticket packaging, and a full marketing report (team logo exposure/connection to the city).

A Digital Dive: Redesigning The Cabrillo High School Aquarium Website, Jacob V. Cacho

Graphic Communication

Tucked away on the Central Coast in Lompoc, you’ll find the Cabrillo High School (CHS) Aquarium. Started in 1986, the CHS Aquarium is the only high school aquarium of its kind in the nation run entirely by high school students. This 10,000+ square foot aquarium serves an underserved community at a Title I school, where students manage all aspects of animal care, nutrition, breeding, educational curriculum development, and visitor tours.

This program is truly one-of-a-kind and deserves the spotlight for just how unique it is. As a CHS graduate, I felt the current website lacked in many areas and could …

Style Guides For Individualized Branding And User Experience, Paige N. Stainsby

Graphic Communication

The increase of digital platforms has led to more competition and brand saturation, making it harder for users to distinguish between companies online. This essay explores how the Aesthetic-Usability Effect influences user perception, particularly for lesser-known organizations. From interviews with professionals in UX/UI Design and Content Design, I examined how to create a wholistic style guide that can sustain longevity within a company as well as garner trust and engagement amongst users. The interviews highlighted the importance of consistent, accessible design systems and consistent communication within teams. These insights offer practical implications for designers working to differentiate brands in crowded …

Truehue: Finding The Right Shade For You, Rania Price

Graphic Communication

Six in ten women struggle to find the right foundation or concealer due to the lack of representation and unreliable color-matching tools. This highlights the need for a more inclusive solution in the beauty industry. Introducing TrueHue—an innovative app prototype designed to address the widespread challenge of accurate color matching. TrueHue leverages Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) AI technology to provide precise, personalized makeup shade recommendations. Users begin by selecting their skin type, desired price range, and type of product they’re seeking. The app then captures a full-face image to analyze undertones and overall skin tone. TrueHue recommends the best shade …

Ray Collection: Forging A New Fashion Genre, Olivia R. Cooper

Graphic Communication

This senior project addresses a gap in the fashion industry by creating a new genre through a unique collection and comprehensive branding. The "RAY" collection draws inspiration from the designer's artistic roots and is a deeply personal homage to influential female artists like Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Leonora Carrington, whose works have inspired the designer's creative journey. Each piece in the collection draws direct inspiration from these artists, reflecting the creator's vision and self-expression, a key element of the streetwear genre incorporated into the designs.

The project also heavily emphasizes fashion branding, encompassing a logo, brand identity, social and …

Digitalizing Organization: Creating A Digital And Customizable Bullet Journal, Ashley Ho

Graphic Communication

This project presents a digital, customizable bullet journal designed to improve organization, creativity, and accessibility. Using a user-centered design approach and principles of design thinking, the planner addresses common barriers to traditional journaling, such as time-consuming setup and lack of flexibility. Based on survey feedback, the final product includes a 2026 calendar, habit trackers, budgeting tools, and customizable weekly spreads in a print-friendly PDF format. The project highlights how digital tools can enhance personal productivity and well-being, with broader applications in UX/UI design and digital wellness solutions.

Project Cheetah: Narrative Website Design For The Cheetah, A Record-Breaking Human-Powered Vehicle, Natalie Olivia Garbarino

Graphic Communication

The Cheetah is a 1992 world speed record-breaking bike designed and built by three mechanical engineering graduates from UC Berkeley: Jon Garbarino, James Osborn, and Kevin Frantz. After years on display at the Tech Interactive in San Jose, the bike is returning home to Berkeley’s engineering school for public display. In accompaniment of the exhibit, the Cheetah engineering team requested printed signage with a QR access to a comprehensive website detailing the Cheetah narrative. There is an abundance of media from the engineering process — extensive photographic documentation, substantial archival documents, reputable external media coverage, and an in-progress docuseries — …

Smart Choices, Strong Voices: Empowering The Next Generation, Alexandra J. Bruce-Valverde

Graphic Communication

Smart Choices, Strong Voices (SCSV) is a financial and voter education pamphlet for students that is easy to understand and unbiased and helps to create a more financially and politically literate generation. The expectation for young adults in today's current world is for us to be able to make well-informed decisions about finances and politics. However, when we are constantly bombarded by misinformation and lack easy access to reliable, accessible education in these topics, these expectations become unreasonable. Exposure to this misinformation affects how we show up for ourselves and our democracy. As our world becomes more and more politically …

Analyzing “Sex Ed: The College Edition” - A Comprehensive Workshop Increasing Sexual Literacy On Cal Poly’S Campus, Merav Tzori

Kinesiology and Public Health

"Sex-Education: The College Edition", is a comprehensive and interactive workshop based on Cal Poly student data collected via survey. The workshop aimed to address sexual health knowledge and behavior gaps in the student population and provide sexual education about anatomy, barrier methods, contraception, STIs, and more. The following paper discusses the creation, execution, and efficacy of the workshop that was conducted with seven student groups.

Assessing Students’ Attitudes And Self-Efficacy In Introductory Statistics Courses, Kendall Hipes

Master's Theses

This study investigates the cognitive factors that shape students’ experiences in introductory statistics courses, with particular emphasis on the role of self-efficacy sources on student attitudes (mastery experiences, verbal persuasion, vicarious experiences, and physiological and emotional states) measured across multiple time points. Using linear multilevel models and qualitative interview data, the research examines patterns in students’ perceptions of interest, difficulty, effort, value, cognitive competence, and affect throughout an academic quarter. Findings indicate that higher levels of mastery experiences consistently predict more positive outcomes across all attitude dimensions, underscoring the importance of early and ongoing opportunities for success in fostering engagement …

Fault Tolerant Dynamic Task Allocation For Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems, Jack R. Cline

Master's Theses

This research presents a novel approach to dynamic task allocation in heterogeneous multi-robot systems with integrated fault detection capabilities. As multiple industries are becoming more reliant on multi-robot systems for tasks, maintaining operational efficiency despite robot failures becomes critical. We propose a framework that combines optimization-based task allocation with a Kalman filter that estimates task progress for anomaly detection to identify unreliable agents and dynamically redistribute tasks. Observing values such as the normalized innovation squared (NIS), covariance, and progress rate, the algorithm can designate a robot as faulty. Embedding information about which robots are faulty in the task algorithm allows …

Compact, Low-Power Underwater Acoustic Modem Characterization And Sensing Network Node Implementation, Lucas W. Lucia

Master's Theses

There is a growing market for compact, power-efficient underwater communication technology. Due to the limited propagation of electromagnetic waves through water, modulated acoustic waves have emerged as an effective means of wireless communication underwater. In decades past, many acoustic modems had been developed primarily for defense customers in larger systems functioning at high power. In recent years, smaller, relatively inexpensive acoustic modems have become available on the market—but data on their performance in a real-world environment is scarce. Companies such as OWL Integrations are interested in employing such acoustic modems as part of sensing networks across multiple mediums. For such …

Deeppanorf: Deep Prior For Neural 3d Reconstruction From Sparse Panoramas, Edward Du

Master's Theses

Advances in neural field representations have led to a significant improvement in view synthesis quality. However, many current novel view synthesis methods rely on a dense set of input views, which can be impractical and inefficient in real-world applications. We propose DeepPanoRF, a novel method for 360◦ scene reconstruction from a sparse set of input equirectangular panoramas. Built upon K-Planes, a radiance field representation that encodes explicit features on orthogonal feature planes, our method does not directly learn feature grids. Instead, we parameterize the feature grids to enable sparse view reconstruction without pretraining or additional regularization. We implement a custom …

Spos: An Attestation Solution For The Detection And Mitigation Of Point Of Sale Malware, Damian Singh Dhesi

Master's Theses

Securing 95% of card present transactions, accounting for billions of transactions a year, has made EMV the premier protocol for card-based payment. Created by and named after Europay, Mastercard, and Visa, the EMV protocol provides multiple solutions to resolve security concerns with the outdated, swipe-based, magnetic stripe payment. Such solutions are Chip and PIN which provides a more secure transaction at a significant time cost and EMV contactless which provides improved security to Chip and PIN at greater ease of use with its quick, tap-to-pay based payment. However, regardless of how secure the EMV protocol makes the card side of …

Cislunar Orbital Debris Removal Feasibility Analysis Using Nrho To Dro Transfers At Varying Solar Angles, Peter C. Lie

Master's Theses

The resurgence of lunar exploration necessitates the expansion of space situational awareness into cislunar space. The current tracking technologies for cislunar objects are insufficient to determine vacant orbital regimes for human spaceflight. Orbital debris generated in the cislunar environment often evolves along complex and chaotic trajectories due to the influence of multi-body dynamics. Current research into methods of removing orbital debris from space is limited to debris in Earth orbits. For cislunar orbits, debris disposal options are slowly gaining research, mostly centered on hypothetical solutions for active missions. Lunar impact and escape to heliocentric space are low-cost options, but serve …

Investigating Social Presence In Collaborative Keys For Asynchronous Courses, Lily P. Cook

Master's Theses

Asynchronous virtual courses have become increasingly popular in the years following the global Covid-19 pandemic. These courses, with no set meeting schedule, offer flexibility to both students and instructors, but pose challenges for developing a collaborative learning environment. The Community of Inquiry framework (Rourke et al., 1999) identifies three essential components in an online course necessary to foster a collaborative environment- teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence. Social presence is especially impacted in asynchronous learning settings, which presents challenges for the students to display their personalities and connect with the community. This study investigates Collaborative Keys (CKs), structured collaborative …

Minifying Deep Denoising Networks With Knowledge Distillation, Antonio L. Rozzi

Master's Theses

Hearing loss is a prevalent condition, affecting hundreds of millions globally, with a higher incidence among older adults. While hearing aids are the standard treatment, the majority of those who could benefit from hearing aids choose not to wear them, attributing this decision in large part to their inability to perform well in conversations in large groups and in noisy situations. To date, no denoising systems on commercial hearing aids are able to improve speech intelligibility. Recent advances in artificial intelligence research have shown that large deep-learning models can in fact improve speech intelligibility by removing background noise from audio. …

Adversarial Deep Reinforcement Learning For Tank Duel Simulation Using Lidar-Based Observations, Braedan Kennedy

Master's Theses

Previous research has demonstrated that reinforcement learning agents can learn to steer differential-drive robots around obstacles using 2D lidar scans as observations. However, these studies typically treat all range returns as undifferentiated obstacles—objects to avoid—without distinguishing between different object types. This thesis builds upon previous research by introducing an adversarial task in which an agent must interpret raw range readings to both avoid static obstacles and identify, pursue, and engage a hostile target.

To investigate this problem, this thesis introduces TankGame, a novel, lightweight 2D tank duel simulator. Each agent receives a 360° lidar scan, controls its motion via tread …

Flair: A Fog-Native Workload Placement Framework For Qos-Aware Scheduling In Smart Manufacturing, Daiwik N. Swaminathan

Master's Theses

Smart manufacturing environments utilize a variety of heterogeneous IoT sensors that continuously stream large volumes of data. To detect and mitigate critical events such as fires or accidents in real time, this data must be promptly analyzed by machine learning (ML) image classifiers. These classifiers are typically deployed on fog computing nodes located within the manufacturing warehouse facilities to ensure low-latency responses and to protect data privacy. Although fog nodes offer a better alternative to remote cloud data centers for such latency-sensitive tasks, they are often resource-constrained and highly sensitive to the composition of workloads, particularly in heterogeneous environments where …

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. …

Sentry V3: Extending Context Switches On A Trusted Secure Coprocessor, Mark Kong

Master's Theses

Software correctness and integrity is only ensured through trust in the un- derlying hardware. However, modern computer systems are complex to design and secure. Thus, given the choice between performance and security, companies will often prioritize performance, resulting in vulnerable systems. This creates exploitable systems that must be patched retroactively because business value performance over security. One approach to this issue is to separate the root of security from the rest of the system to create a minimal trusted computing base. Trustguard is one instance of this. Trustguard implements a Containment Architecture with Ver- ified Output (CAVO) model which shows …

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 …

Efficient Gan-Based Adversarial Example Generation Against Ml-Based Network Intrusion Detection Systems, Darren D. Hartono

Master's Theses

In the realm of network security, Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are essential for identifying and mitigating malicious activities targeting networked devices. Traditionally, these systems have relied on signature-based and anomaly-based detection techniques. However, the increasing complexity and adapt- ability of cyber threats have driven the adoption of Machine Learning (ML) ap- proaches in modern NIDS, significantly improving their ability to detect a wider range of attack vectors. Despite these advancements, ML-based NIDS remain vulnerable to adversarial examples—deliberately crafted inputs designed to mislead models and trigger incorrect classifications. Originally identified in the field of computer vision, adversarial examples now pose …

Hardware-In-The-Loop Testing For The Polysim Adcs Lab, Shealyn P. Miller

Master's Theses

Hardware-in-the-loop, HIL, testing is an important tool for the validation and verification of systems in the aerospace industry. A common subsystem to be tested using HIL testing is the attitude, dynamics, and controls subsystem, ADCS. This is due to HIL tests using realistic simulations of the space environment to control physical hardware. To create a HIL test, a simulation and HIL interface are needed to test and communicate with hardware. Using a Speedgoat Performance Real-Time Target Machine to communicate with a Raspberry Pi and a Simulink model, three tests were conducted to ensure communication was functioning properly. A simulation, in …

Vertical And Latitudinal Variability Of Marine Heatwaves In The California Current, Gavin M. Plume

Master's Theses

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are increasing in frequency and intensity globally, with grave effects on marine ecosystems and their dependent industries. There are significant gaps in knowledge of the subsurface behavior and geographic distribution of MHWs, especially in eastern boundary upwelling systems like the California Current. Here, two decades of full water-column temperature observations from a shallow autonomous profiler in San Luis Obispo Bay (~10m) revealed that while MHWs have similar average durations and intensities across all depths, one-third of bottom MHWs occur without a concurrent surface signal. MHWs across the water column initiated during anomalously weak upwelling or downwelling conditions …

Clusters, Trends, And Choices: Feature Selection In Interactive Statistical Graphics, Dylan Le

Master's Theses

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is a method for uncovering the structure and key characteristics of data, often through the use of statistical graphics. These visual tools can reveal patterns and trends, and their effectiveness can be enhanced through interactivity. By enabling users to filter data, zoom, and toggle visual features, interactive plots can accelerate and enrich the EDA process. This study extends a previous graphical study by incorporating an interactive framework. Using a statistical lineup protocol with two target patterns (a linear trend and a clustering trend) participants interacted with plots by toggling various aesthetic features, including cluster coloring, ellipses …

Student-Centric Scheduling: Integrating Student Preferences Into University Course Planning, Jamie Luna

Master's Theses

University course scheduling has direct impacts on student success. In the Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), students face registration challenges like limited course availability and waitlists, which may delay academic progress. This thesis provides a qualitative and quantitative investigation into the course registration experiences of CSSE students. From a survey of 100 CSSE students and follow-up interviews, this study identifies the key factors influencing registration outcomes. This research also evaluates the predictive model currently used by the CSSE department to anticipate course demand, revealing mismatches between predicted and …

Ev Microgrid Inspired Open-Source Power Inverter, Bryan A. Carrillo Martinez

Master's Theses

The development of open-source power electronics platforms plays an instrumental role in accelerating microgrid deployment, electric vehicle (EV) integration, and educational access to embedded power electronic converters. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and validation of the Atinverter V2, an open-source DC to AC inverter intended for low power EV microgrid applications and educational settings. The Atinverter V2 integrates various hardware and software subsystems centered around the ATMEGA328P microcontroller, enabling PWM-based sinusoidal power inversion, DC/AC voltage and current sensing, and embedded control features. Software development leverages a C++ object-oriented library and multiple Arduino-based modules to facilitate modular and scalable operation. …

Assessment Of The Imx7ulp Heterogeneous Soc For Use In A Next Generation Student Cubesat Obc, Lorenzo A. Pedroza

Master's Theses

CubeSats represent a rapidly evolving platform for space research, industry, and education, demanding increasingly sophisticated onboard computing solutions that balance performance, fault tolerance, size, weight, and power constraints. Although the design of the Cal Poly's CubeSat Lab's (PolySat) current On-Board Computer (OBC) keeps up with many of these factors, the demands of modern workloads like fine attitude determination will start to outpace available compute. While the selection of a more capable processor to address this would have traditionally resulted in increased energy usage, modern system-on-chip (SoC) architectures offer novel ways to trade available compute for power savings on-the-fly. With this …