Digital Commons Network^™

Computer Vision Methods For Detecting Counterfeit Usd Bills, Tyler W. Jones

Master's Theses

This thesis addresses the global challenge of counterfeit paper currency by proposing a classical computer vision framework for distinguishing genuine United States Dollar (USD) bills from counterfeit ones using image data. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on a large number of easily reproducible visual features, this work prioritizes the detection of a single, robust security feature: the ultraviolet (UV) reactive security strip embedded in genuine USD bills of denominations $5 and above. By focusing on a feature that is inherently difficult to replicate, the proposed method reduces the likelihood of counterfeit bills being misclassified as genuine.

The system …

Development Of A Free-Floating Space Robotic Simulator, Truman: Terrestrial Robotic Unit For Multibody Analysis And Navigation, Jackson W. Cordova

Master's Theses

This work describes the development of a 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) robotic manipulator for use on a free-floating planar air-bearing vehicle. The system developed aims to serve as a foundation for future space robotics research at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly)’s Space Robotics Laboratory. Systems doc- umentation describes conceptual operation and architecture of the proposed system: Terrestrial Robotic Unit for Multibody Analysis and Navigation (TRUMAN). The key operation of TRUMAN is to study a self launch maneuver of a free-floating ve- hicle including 4 distinct phases: launch off a fixed rail, coast, reorientation using manipulator motion, and capture of …

Spaceotter: A Floating Spacecraft Simulator Air Bearing Vehicle For Hardware-In-The-Loop Experiments And Research, Alexander Debartolo

Master's Theses

Growing interest in nanosatellites has increased demand for accessible ground-testing methods, which have historically been expensive and restricted. Floating Spacecraft Simulators (FSS), built around Air Bearing Vehicles (ABVs), address this gap by approximating a zero-gravity, friction-minimized environment suitable for testing spacecraft control systems, robotics, and propulsion on the ground.

This thesis presents the design, realization, and initial performance characterization of the Space Optically Tracked Testbed for Experiments and Research (SpaceOTTER) ABV, developed for the Cal Poly Space Robotics Lab. SpaceOTTER is the first step toward emulating the 3 degree of freedom (3-DOF) planar dynamics of a simulated spacecraft and is …

When Agents Spend Watts: Measuring Performance-Energy Trade-Offs In Agentic Ai Systems With Agenticbench, Logan J. Barker

Master's Theses

Agentic AI systems increasingly transform a single user request into a multi-step workflow of reasoning, tool use, retries, and framework coordination. Standard benchmark reporting emphasizes task accuracy, but this can hide the latency and energy-related cost of producing an answer. This thesis presents AgenticBench, a modular harness for evaluating agentic AI systems with task performance and execution-cost signals recorded together. AgenticBench integrates benchmark-owned scoring, framework adapters, deterministic task selection, energy profiling, SQLite persistence, and Pareto-style analysis. The main campaign evaluated an 84-cell matrix across four models, three agent frameworks, and six benchmarks on a Windows workstation with an NVIDIA RTX …

Efficient Mathematical Modeling And Synthesis Of Realistic Musical Instrument Sounds, Andrew Chookaszian

Master's Theses

This thesis develops and evaluates a compact parametric additive synthesis model for isolated musical instrument tones. The method analyzes a single-note recording, estimates its fundamental frequency, extracts harmonic amplitude and frequency behavior, and stores the sound as a reduced set of interpretable parameters. These parameters include the note duration, pitch, per-harmonic amplitude envelopes, phase information, and amplitude- and frequency-modulation vibrato parameters. The stored model is then used to resynthesize the tone without directly using the original audio waveform.

The model was evaluated using synthetic signals, real instrument samples, objective error metrics, storage comparisons, pitch and duration modification tests, and listening …

Challenges And Opportunities Of Mastery-Based Learning: A Student-Centered Analysis In An Upper Division Programming Languages Course, Parshana Sekhon

Master's Theses

Traditional grading structures in computer science courses reward performance on a few high-stakes assessments that may not accurately reflect a student’s mastery of concepts. Mastery-Based Learning (MBL) offers students multiple opportunities to demonstrate understanding through iterative feedback and reassessment, promoting their persistence and self-regulation. However, MBL can promote student behaviors like procrastination, “minimal effort” attempts, or de-prioritizing the course in favor of other courses with inflexible deadlines, which may undermine its effectiveness. This case study investigates how students navigated MBL in an upper-division computer science course at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. The course explores the fundamentals of programming …

Scorespeak: An Agentic System For Natural Language Control Of Musical Scores, Nathan S. Lim

Master's Theses

With the recent popularization of large language models (LLMs), natural language has become one of the most accessible and powerful ways for people to interact with creative tools. Although they have become common in mainstream domains like image and audio editing, there is currently no robust AI-based system that can reliably turn free-form language into edits for symbolic musical scores. This gap represents a missed opportunity to improve human workflows for creating and editing sheet music, but it is also a fundamental limitation for other agentic music systems; without a robust mechanism for translating free-form language into structured scores, AI …

Design And Implementation Of An Embedded Control System For The Cal Poly Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator, Neil Mahesh Bedagkar

Master's Theses

This thesis presents the development of a cascaded reaction wheel control system for Cal Poly's Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator. This work considers system architecture, empirical modeling, high-fidelity simulation, embedded firmware, hardware integration, and experimental characterization. In discrete-time simulation, it is shown that nonlinear direct model reference adaptive control (NDMRAC) enables a nonlinear, partially known plant with realistic actuator dynamics to track the response of a canonical second-order transfer function, with settling time within 4.67% and percent overshoot within order of magnitude of the second-order response. In hardware, the feasibility of a cascaded reaction wheel control architecture is experimentally demonstrated, achieving …

Empirical Comparsion Of Traveling Salesperson Approximation Algorithms, Shayan Daijavad

Master's Theses

The traveling salesperson problem deals with optimizing the route a traveling sales- person might take to visit a set of places exactly once and return back to their starting point. The problem is NP-hard, and it is hard to approximate in general, but special cases have many approximation algorithms, which come with tradeoffs. In this thesis we compare the runtime, approximation ratio, and overall implementation complexity of two approximation algorithms for the Euclidean version of the problem, a classical 2-approximation algorithm and the multifragment heuristic. We run both algorithms on randomly generated point sets and real world data from TSPLIB. …

Characterization Of The Thermally Driven Red Hue Effect In Coated And Uncoated Concrete Systems: Implications For Post-Fire Assessment In Wildland Urban Interface Communities, Juan C. Palominos Jr

Master's Theses

The increasing frequency and intensity of Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) wildfires, such as the destructive 2025 Pacific Palisades Fire that destroyed over 6,000 structures, have underscored the urgent need for rapid post-fire safety assessment methodologies. This study sought to quantitatively characterize the Thermally Driven Red Hue Effect (TRHE), a unique, irreversible color shift observed in architectural coatings and concrete substrates, to determine its reliability as a permanent visual record of thermal exposure. Concrete substrates were formulated with three distinct coarse aggregates: gold granite (14.7% Fe), red cinder (22.4% Fe), and green rock (33.6% Fe) and coated with a 20 PVC waterborne …

Evaluating The Commercial Aquaculture Potential Of The Native Pacific Littleneck Clam (Leukoma Staminea) As A Climate Resilient Alternative To The Non-Native Manila Littleneck Clam (Ruditapes Philippinarum)., Skylar M. Wuelfing

Master's Theses

The California shellfish industry’s near-exclusive reliance on the non-native Manila littleneck clam (Ruditapes philippinarum) creates an economic vulnerability to climate-driven disturbances, which can cause mortality events that eradicate up to 80% of stocks. This singular reliance on an introduced species highlights a need for the evaluation of native alternatives like the Pacific littleneck clam (Leukoma staminea). Our goal was to assess the feasibility of using the native Pacific littleneck in commercial aquaculture by comparing their performance to the non-native Manila littlenecks across the following conditions: 1) a five-month field outplant trial at high and low intertidal …

Political Inconsistency Detection Across Legislative Speech And Public Communications, Scott M. Pramuk

Master's Theses

Political actors communicate about legislation across multiple contexts, including committee hearings, recorded votes, and public-facing press releases. Differences between these forms of communication can provide useful signals for journalists and researchers seeking to understand how legislators present policy positions to different audiences.

This thesis extends the Digital Democracy Project, a legislative transparency initiative that provides access to California state legislative hearing transcripts, voting records, and related legislative data. Specifically, this work incorporates publicly accessible, legislator-authored news releases into the Digital Democracy Database and develops a pipeline for analyzing legislative communication across multiple sources. The system collects news releases from California …

Structured Dynamic Factor Analysis Of Environmental Time Series With Application To Morro Bay Estuary, Jose Garcia

Master's Theses

This thesis develops a structured dynamic factor analysis (sDFA) framework for decomposing multivariate environmental time series into latent biological and physical components. The methodology is applied to five years of high-resolution passive monitoring data collected from two sites in Morro Bay, California from 2020 through 2024. Relative contribution indices are developed based on the structured DFA that measure how much each latent process contributes to each observed variable at any given time. Structured DFA models fit to the application data suggest site-specific patterns in how biological and physical processes affect water quality variables. At the bay mouth location, physical processes …

A2s Uplink Latency Minimization For Wildfire Monitoring Systems Using Mbse And Stochastic Modeling, Luis Giovanni Wang

Master's Theses

Wildfire response depends on how quickly a detection reaches the people who act on it, and the slowest remaining step is often the link that carries an alert from a remote sensing platform to a satellite. This thesis models the latency of that link, the Air-to-Space uplink, for a wildfire-monitoring UAV that carries a Starlink terminal and sends an ALERT packet to a serving Low Earth Orbit satellite. The uplink is difficult to predict because both the UAV and the satellite move, and because the wildfire environment degrades the channel at the moment the data matters most.

The thesis uses …

Multimodal Machine Learning For Soil Burn Severity Mapping Across California Wildfires, Sanjana Checker

Master's Theses

Accurate mapping of soil burn severity (SBS) is critical for post-fire watershed management, erosion risk assessment, and ecological recovery planning, yet traditional field-based approaches remain costly, time-intensive, and spatially limited. This thesis presents a machine learning pipeline for wall-to-wall SBS classification across California wildfires using multi-sensor satellite imagery, terrain derivatives, and bioclimatic covariates. Field-collected SBS observations (n = 2,180) from 52 wildfires occur- ring between 2013 and 2025, sourced from the U.S. Forest Service and CAL FIRE, were used to train and evaluate multiple classification architectures within a Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud-based prediction framework. After upsampling the unburned …

Thermally Induced Color Changes In Iron Oxide Pigments Used In Architectural Coatings, Han Diep

Master's Theses

The 2025 Palisades Fire was one of the most destructive wildfires in the history of Los Angeles, destroying thousands of structures and severely impacting the communities after. This widespread destruction demonstrated an urgent need for more effective wildfire prevention strategies. Architectural coatings do not only provide aesthetics and protection against environmental conditions but can also function as a thermal indicator when a fire breaks out. This study examines the thermally induced color transformation of iron oxide pigments, commonly used in earthtone paint, to provide information relevant to CAL FIRE for improved analysis of wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire behavior and mitigation …

The Sleep Effects Of Construction Management Students At Cal Poly Slo, Riley James Coalwell

Construction Management

Sleep deprivation and poor sleep quality have become increasingly common among college students, particularly in demanding studies such as construction management. This study examined sleep patterns, sleep duration, and perceptions related to sleep deprivation among construction management students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The study replicated prior research conducted at Mississippi State University while focusing exclusively on one academic program and institution. A quantitative research method was used through an anonymous Microsoft Forms survey distributed to construction management students over a ten-week period. The survey collected demographic information, sleep behaviors, academic workload, and perceptions regarding sleep within …

Academic Senate - Minutes, 05/26/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Minutes

No abstract provided.

Academic Senate - Agenda, 05/26/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Agendas

No abstract provided.

As-1013-26 Resolution On Revised Academic Assessment Council Membership, Academic Assessment Council

Academic Senate Resolutions

Resolves that the Academic Senate of Cal Poly endorses the attached proposal to adjust the membership of the Academic Assessment Council; and further resolves that this revised AAC membership be put into effect beginning with the 2026-27 academic year.

Spatial Extent And Vertical Structure Of Marine Heatwaves In Chesapeake Bay, Nathan P. Shunk, Piero L. F. Mazzini, Ryan K. Walter, Kyle E. Hinson, Pierre St-Laurent, Marjorie A. M. Friedrichs

Physics

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) adversely impact marine ecosystems globally, yet data scarcity limits our understanding of their subsurface extent, particularly in estuaries. Using a high-resolution regional ocean model, we characterized the horizontal extent and subsurface structure of MHWs across the Chesapeake Bay (CB). Additionally, we developed a supplementary definition for local climatology-identified MHWs, “Vertical MHWs,” which quantifies their water column presence, and developed a new MHW vertical classification scheme. Surface MHWs were generally shorter, more frequent and intense, and impacted ∼5% of the CB surface area, while the deepest MHWs were generally longer, less frequent and intense, and regularly occupied >50% …

Executive Committee - Agenda, 05/19/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Agendas

No abstract provided.

Academic Senate - Minutes, 05/12/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Minutes

No abstract provided.

Academic Senate - Agenda, 05/12/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Agendas

No abstract provided.

Executive Committee - Minutes, 05/05/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Minutes

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Role Of Video Games In Civil Engineering Education And K-12 Stem Engagement, Jillian S. Codron

Architectural Engineering

Civil engineering education has traditionally emphasized a linear progression from theory to application, with foundational concepts introduced in lecture before being reinforced through laboratory or design experiences. While effective for advanced learners, this approach can limit early engagement for K–12 students who may struggle to connect abstract principles to realworld engineering practice. This project examines the use of video games as interactive, feedback-driven environments for introducing civil engineering concepts and practices to younger learners in more exploratory and accessible ways.

The study pursues four primary objectives: evaluating the educational affordances of selected video games; examining how gaming experiences have influenced …

Design And Reliability Analysis Of A Radiation-Tolerant On-Board Computer System For Martian Surface Missions, Jack Ryan

Master's Theses

Space environments present complex challenges for electronic devices, perhaps most notably in the form of radiation effects; the natural protections provided by Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere are largely absent in deep space and extraterrestrial environments, making single-event effects (SEE) a critical concern. Although radiation-hardened components offer near-immunity to SEE, they possess tremendous drawbacks in both cost and performance. To circumvent such issues, this thesis investigates the feasibility of leveraging a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) device, the AMD KRIA K24 system-on-module (SOM), for use in Martian surface missions.

Detailed models were used to predict SEE rates in the system, and system-level fault tree …

As-1009-26 Resolution On New Bachelor Of Science Degree Program In Data Science, Data Science Curriculum Committee

Academic Senate Resolutions

Resolves that the Academic Senate of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, approve the establishment of a Bachelor of Science in Data Science; and be it further resolved that the program be implemented contingent upon final approval by the Chancellor’s Office and availability of appropriate resources.

As-1008-26 Resolution On Proposed New Degree Program: Bachelor Of Arts In Women’S, Gender, And Queer Studies (Wgqs), Women's, Gender And Queer Studies Department

Academic Senate Resolutions

Resolves that the Academic Senate of Cal Poly approves the new degree program for the Bachelor of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Queer Studies (WGQS) for final review by the Chancellor’s Office.

Academic Senate - Agenda, 04/28/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Agendas

No abstract provided.