Digital Commons Network^™

Pedagogical Perspectives Of Practitioner-Turned-Instructors In Upper-Division Computer Science Courses, Sinchana Shivaprasad

Master's Theses

Computer science and software engineering are disciplines in which a substantial proportion of graduates enter software engineering careers immediately after completing their undergraduate degrees. However, research continues to highlight a persistent gap between the knowledge acquired in university settings and the practical skills necessary to succeed in industry. Faculty who bring prior industry experience may be well-positioned to help bridge this gap by integrating applied perspectives and real-world problem-solving into academic instruction. As professors with practitioner experience are being hired into computer science departments, there remains limited research exploring how their professional backgrounds influence teaching approaches and shape computing education. …

Development Of A Video-Based Tool To Measure Motor Asymmetry In Infants At Risk For Hemiparesis, Roha Ali

Master's Theses

Congenital hemiparesis is a unilateral motor impairment stemming from brain injury in utero or early postnatally. Hemiparesis can be difficult to detect in early infancy with current clinical tools. Yet, early identification of motor asymmetry could play a key role in the design of effective early intervention and rehabilitation strategies. This thesis presents the development and validation of a video-based tool designed to extract infant limb movement data using DeepLabCut’s (DLC) machine learning network. The pipeline was developed using videos of typically developing (TD) infants and infants with Asymmetric Perinatal Brain Injury (APBI), all at or under 3 months corrected …

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 …

A Security Framework For Pacemaker Lead Failure: Anomaly Detection System And Failsafe Policy Considerations, Ethan Wagner

Master's Theses

Embedded system security in implantable medical devices (IMDs) remains an underexplored challenge due to the unique constraints of these systems. Specifically, pacemakers are optimized for ultra-low power consumption to maximize device lifespan, are highly resource constrained, and demand reliable and correct operation to prevent severe health consequences. These systems rely on sensing electrodes, called leads, to detect cardiac activity and stimulate the patient’s heart when appropriate. Therefore, pacemaker lead integrity is a critical issue, as malfunction or compromise can result in device failure jeopardizing patient safety.

The security framework presented in this thesis integrates several works to proactively detect and …

Controllable Tile-Based Level Generation For Vertical Platformers, Aiden P. Smith

Master's Theses

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) has had much research poured into it in recent years, as it is a way to more easily create content and levels for player replayability. Historically, this type of level generation has been done by algorithms with strict rules and black-and-white decision making. However, in recent years Large Language Models (LLMs) have been fine-tuned for this task in research in games such as Super Mario Bros and other 2D platformers. In this thesis, we apply a similar approach to level generation for a vertical platformer called Kid Icarus. We create a tile-based level generation system that …

Large Scale Kmer-Based Proteomic Analysis: An Application Towards Evolutionary Constraint Discovery, Matthew Chak

Master's Theses

Large protein databases now make it possible to study short peptides across natural protein sequence space at unprecedented scale, but exhaustively counting k-mers across billions of protein sequences remains computationally difficult. This thesis develops an exact amino-acid k-mer counting method based on direct addressing, in which fixed-length amino-acid strings are encoded as base-20 integers and updated with a sliding-window recurrence. By avoiding key storage and collision resolution, this approach removes overhead inherent to hash-map-based methods when the k-mer space is sufficiently dense. A memory analysis shows when direct addressing is preferable to open-addressing hash tables, and expected-saturation calculations motivate its …

Perception Is Reality: Evaluating Transportation Satisfaction And Utilization In Continuing Student Housing At Cal Poly, Lucas Owens

Master's Theses

As higher education institutions increasingly mandate on-campus living to foster student success, the built environment becomes a critical determinant of daily mobility. California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) is transitioning to a two-year residency requirement and tightening vehicle restrictions. This thesis evaluates how the spatial and built-environment realities of peripheral housing complexes in Cerro Vista Apartments and Poly Canyon Village shape student transportation satisfaction and utilization, and emergency evacuation preparedness.

Employing a mixed-methods approach, this research triangulates data from 79 student surveys and 10 semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that supplementing traditional metrics of proximity with localized spatial data presents …

Effect Of The Stacking Sequence And Number Of Ply Orientation In A Quasi-Isotropic Laminated Plate On In-Plane Shear Modulus And Failure Modes, Ann Larson

Master's Theses

Maximizing the shear modulus and strength, as well as predicting failure mode and location, when designing a stacking sequence of quasi-isotropic carbon fiber laminated plates is essential to predict stability, resistance to deformation, and overall stiffness of the structure. This research investigates the effect of the stacking sequence of quasi-isotropic laminated composite plate materials in accordance with ASTM D5379: Standard Test Method for Shear Properties of Composite Materials by the V-Notched Beam Method.

In this research, experimental testing and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) were first used on aluminum to validate the simulation process before applying it to composite materials. The …

Characteristic Stress And Strain Optimization Of Cardiovascular Catheters With Laser-Cut Hypotubes Using Finite Element Analysis, Kyle E. Hirth

Master's Theses

Cardiovascular catheter systems rely on laser-cut hypotubes to balance flexibility and structural integrity required for minimally invasive surgical procedures.  Optimizing these mechanical characteristics remains a significant challenge.  This study aims to investigate the influence of key laser-cut geometric parameters on the mechanical performance of hypotubes through finite element analysis.

Commercially representative laser-cut hypotubes were modeled and a finite element model was developed.   Geometric design parameters were varied across a design space consisting of pitch values ranging from 0.006 in. to 0.018 in. and cuts per revolution (CPR) ranging from 2.5 – 4.5.  For each pitch and CPR combination, loading stiffness …

Analysis And Design Of Auger Cast Piles With Isolation Casing, Zachary Lindsay

Master's Theses

This research addresses the analysis and design of double cased piles. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) runs a large rail system both above and below ground that connects the entire Bay Area. BART requires that all new constructions avoid transmitting axial load to their tunnels from adjacent piles. If piles fall within the zone of influence, builders must install double cased piles. Double casing is where there is an extra casing around the pile, with an air gap between them. The air gap prevents load from transferring to the outer casing. The length of this casing is called the isolation …

Aerodynamic Design And Structural Evaluation Of A Global Minimum Torque Inspired Multirotor Propeller, Zeke Bukovansky

Master's Theses

This thesis develops a repeatable design, CAD, aerodynamic postprocessing, structural screening, and manufacturing feasibility workflow for a 22-inch global minimum torque inspired multirotor propeller. Matched MIL and GMT geometries were compared at a 35 N, 4000 rpm static-hover operating condition using BEMT/XFOIL aerodynamic postprocessing, with diameter, blade count, chord distribution, airfoil schedule, and target thrust held constant. The final modeled comparison predicted a modest 1.5% reduction in torque and shaft power for the GMT case while maintaining the same thrust target. CAD construction, MATLAB reduced-order beam model, Abaqus screening, and manufacturing planning were used to identify geometry level structural and …

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 …

Synthesis And Characterization Of A Graphene Oxide-Zif-8 Composite For Enhanced Post-Combustion Carbon Capture, Sydney Cooper

Master's Theses

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuel combustion are a major contributor to climate change and its associated environmental impacts. The current standard technology for post-combustion carbon capture, aqueous amine scrubbing, is effective but requires significant regeneration energy and has high operational costs. As a result, solid sorbents have been investigated as lower-energy alternatives. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a promising class of porous nanomaterials due to their high surface area, tunable pore structures, and adjustable surface chemistry. Among them, zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) has high thermal and chemical stability, hydrophobicity, and favorable adsorption properties. However, conventional synthesis methods often rely …

Evaluating The Cost-Benefit Tradeoffs Of Simt Control Mechanisms In Resource-Constrained Gpus, Nikolas Tambornini

Master's Theses

This thesis conducts a hardware-level analysis of the cost–benefit tradeoffs associated with increasingly complex SIMT control mechanisms in a resource-constrained GPU core. Four design implementations are evaluated: a Base Tiny GPU without warp scheduling capability; a Warp Scheduler using round-robin warp selection; a Branch Divergence implementation incorporating a dedicated divergence stack and post-dominator reconvergence mechanism; and a Dynamic Warp Allocation implementation that replaces the static warp structure with a runtime warp manager, regrouping threads by current program counter to recover SIMD lane utilization during active divergence. Each design is evaluated using two complementary measurements: functional simulation implemented using the CocoTB …

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 …

A Proof-Of-Concept Design Of A High-Gain Deployable Reflectarray Antenna For A 3u Cubesat, Armin Behbahani

Master's Theses

CubeSats are a class of nanosatellites that have democratized space exploration by greatly reducing cost and complexity. Their small size and limited power generation directly limit the performance of a high-data-rate communication system due to low transmit power and limited gain from small antenna sizes. Transmission losses increase with higher operating frequencies, spurring the need for innovative high-gain antenna solutions. This thesis investigates the design of a deployable 10 GHz reflectorarray, a planar high-gain aperture antenna, for a 3U CubeSat. A simple variable-size square-patch resonant unit cell was designed for implementation on commonly available PCB layer stack-ups. Preliminary reflectarray system …

Trim-Transfer: A Transfer Learning Approach For Cross-Trim Level Can Intrusion Detection, Baylor J. Whitehead

Master's Theses

Modern vehicles contain many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that communicate through CAN. While CAN enables efficient data communication, it lacks built in authentication and encryption, allowing adversarial actors to inject malicious CAN messages. This limitation has motivated the development of CAN intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, deploying IDS across a vehicle lineup requires collecting large labeled datasets and retraining models, increasing development cost and limiting scalability.

This thesis investigates the use of transfer learning with LSTM-based deep neural networks to reduce retraining cost while maintaining model detection performance. A baseline LSTM model is trained using CAN data from a base …

A Comparative Study Of Model Predictive Control And The Stanley Method For Vehicle Path Tracking Applications, Noah S. Fitzgerald

Master's Theses

This thesis compares a model predictive controller (MPC) and a lateral Stanley controller for vehicle path-tracking applications under simulation-based and perception-driven operating conditions. Both controllers were evaluated in simulation using a nonlinear dynamic bicycle model executing single and double lane change maneuvers. Following simulation-based evaluation, both controllers were implemented on hardware within a perception-driven steering-control pipeline. This pipeline utilized recorded sensor data from the MXcarkit 1/8^th-scale autonomous vehicle platform, incorporating lane instance segmentation and homography-based roadway estimation.

Under idealized simulation conditions, the MPC demonstrated improved trajectory-tracking performance during aggressive maneuvers while requiring greater steering activity and computational effort …

Constructing Orthonormal Bases With The Residuals Of Successive Approximations, An Introduction To Multiresolution Analysis, Elijah J. Guptill

Master's Theses

Wavelets and wavelet analysis are used in the study of signal processing, quantum field theory, functional analysis, multifractal analysis, and various other areas of mathematics. Multiresolution analysis provides a framework for building a wavelet basis of $\mathcal{L}^{2}(\mathbb{R})$ from a scaling function $\phi$, whose dyadic dilations and translations, $\{2^{j /2}\phi(2^{j}x-k):j,k\in \mathbb{Z}\}$, approximate $\mathcal{L}^{2}(\mathbb{R})$. One of the key properties of  $\phi$ is that it must satisfy $\phi(x)=\sum_{k\in \mathbb{Z}}{p_{k}2^{j /2}\phi(2^{j}x-k)}$ with respect to the norm on $\mathcal{L}^{2}(\mathbb{R})$. This equation is called a two-scale difference equation. Such equations enforce a regularity on the ordinary generating function $2^{-1 /2}\sum_{k\in \mathbb{Z}}{p_{k}z^{k}}$, known as the quadrature condition. …

Discrete S-Band Low-Noise Amplifier Designs For High Data-Rate Cubesat Uplink, Alejandro Martin Cosper, Alejandro Cosper

Master's Theses

In the world of small satellites, there is growing interest in higher-data-rate systems and the technologies that enable them. Due to limitations in the extremely reliable and proven Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) systems, the current CubeSats developed by the Cal Poly CubeSat Laboratory operate at 9600 Baud. However, the low Baud rate is rooted in decades of proven flights and is very resistant to many forms of signal degradation. While a slow but simple system was critical to past successes, future satellite payloads may require higher data rates to drastically reduce the number of passes needed to transfer large amounts of …

How Human Vs. Ai Chatbots Support Psychological Needs Of Students, Tymon T. Vu

Master's Theses

AI auto graders and virtual assistants are increasingly prevalent in educational set- tings. Although current literature demonstrates that AI chatbots can positively im- pact student motivation, there is little definitive evidence exploring whether these systems can replicate the effective motivational methods used by human teachers. Thus, in this experiment, we investigate how the perception of the identity of a tutor (AI versus human) impacts the psychological needs of students. 27 undergraduates taking introductory computer science courses were asked to explain code in plain English (EiPE). Participants received feedback from two tutors in within-subjects fashion: one human and one labeled as …

A Study On Quantization And Hardware Cost Tradeoffs In A 5g Nr Ldpc Decoder On Fpga, Giancarlo Acosta

Master's Theses

The fixed-point implementation of a 5G New Radio LDPC decoder forces a tradeoff between precision and hardware cost, governed by the variable node word length W_L, the check node message width W_R, and the normalized min-sum correction factor α. This thesis characterizes how these three parameters affect both error correction performance and FPGA resource utilization for an LDPC decoder on an established LDPC decoder architecture. A bit-accurate MATLAB core model records bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) while a verified HDL Coder model generates synthesizable VHDL for Vivado synthesis, and both are swept …

Deep Learning For Affect Recognition: A Comparative Study Of Physiological Sensor-Based And Facial Image-Based Approaches, Ravi Panchal, Ravi Panchal

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates deep learning approaches for affect recognition using wearable physiological signals and facial image data. The sensor-based component evaluates stress and affect recognition on the WESAD dataset using wrist-based physiological windows and examines multiple temporal modeling strategies, including convolutional, recurrent, hybrid CNN-LSTM, attention-based, ensemble, and time-frequency approaches.

The image-based component evaluates hard-label facial expression recognition on AffectNet+ using pre-trained ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B3, and ConvNeXt-Tiny architectures across Easy, Challenging, and Difficult subsets representing different levels of expression ambiguity.

Experimental results show that the proposed Multi-Branch Attention CNN-BiLSTM (MBA-CNN-BiLSTM) model achieves the strongest wearable stress- and affect-recognition performance among the evaluated …

Integrating Sustainability Into Engineering Education, Riley R. Moller

Master's Theses

Engineering decisions shape lasting technology that affects environmental integrity, public safety, economic stability, and social equity. As global challenges such as climate change, infrastructure vulnerability, and rapid technological advancement intensify, the responsibilities placed on engineers continue to expand. Sustainability provides a framework for addressing these interconnected pressures through systems-based design and long-term thinking. Yet, sustainability education within engineering programs remains unevenly integrated, often positioned as elective or peripheral rather than as a foundational component of professional preparation.

Prior research shows that sustainability is most frequently addressed through stand-alone courses rather than embedded across required curricula, reflecting disciplinary structures that prioritize …

Movement And Space Use Of Weaned Northern Elephant Seal (Mirounga Angustirostris) Pups During Their First At-Sea Foraging Migration, Katie Saenger

Master's Theses

The northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) is a marine mammal known for engaging in long foraging migrations at sea. Adult male northern elephant seals follow pathways along the western coast of North America towards Alaska and adult female northern elephant seals follow pathways to open ocean in the North Pacific. However, there is little information on weaned northern elephant seal pup foraging behavior during their first foraging migration. This lack of knowledge is significant because northern elephant seals have a mortality rate of >50% in the first year. This project aimed to better understand the at-sea migratory movement …

Reproducing And Evaluating Charger Surfing: Robustness Of Smartphone Charging-Line Side-Channels, Colby M. Watts

Master's Theses

Smartphones are frequently connected to external, untrusted charging hardware, creating opportunities for side-channel attacks that do not require malware or direct access to device data. Charger Surfing, a recently proposed charging-line power analysis side-channel attack, reported high accuracy in inferring touchscreen input from voltage measurements collected from a smartphone’s charging cable; however, the reproducibility and robustness of these results under different conditions remain unclear. This thesis presents an independent replication and evaluation of Charger Surfing, including the development of an end-to-end data collection pipeline consisting of a modified charging cable, oscilloscope-based recordings, custom Android app, automated trace processing, and convolutional …

Improving The Reliability And Performance Of A Supersonic Indraft Tube Wind Tunnel, Christian J. Kaml

Master's Theses

Access to supersonic testing is increasing in demand, and wind tunnels remain one of the safest and most cost-effective methods for gathering high-speed flow data. Despite being more economical than alternative options, supersonic wind tunnel facilities often require substantial investment to construct, operate, and maintain.

The novel indraft tube tunnel architecture was conceived as a high-speed flow testbed that incorporates features of both Ludwieg tubes and indraft wind tunnels to maintain costs low enough to be accessible even to small universities. This design was first developed and tested in 2018 at California Polytechnic State University, featuring a cost per test …

Preserving Structural Alias Information Across The Mlir-To-Llvm Lowering Boundary, Shravan Sheth

Master's Theses

Machine learning training and inference workloads run at massive scale, where the efficiency of generated machine code directly affects throughput and energy consumption. The compilers that lower model specifications to hardware instructions rely on optimization passes that can only exploit information visible in the representations they operate on. MLIR, the intermediate representation framework underlying production machine learning compilers such as IREE and Triton, is designed so that each abstraction level can encode semantics that lower levels cannot represent. One example is memref.subview, which partitions a buffer into typed regions with explicit offsets and sizes, making structural non-overlap provable from the …

Design And Analysis Of A Customizable 6-Dof Force/Torque Sensor, Pyeongkang Kim

Master's Theses

This thesis presents the design, development, calibration, and testing of a novel customizable six-degree-of-freedom force/torque sensor, called the Kustom Force/Torque Sensor (KFTS), for use in the Cal Poly Low Speed Wind Tunnel (LSWT). The KFTS was developed as an alternative to commercial multi-axis force/torque sensors that feature fixed specifications. The swappable components and configurable structure of the KFTS enables changes to the sensor sensitivity, sensing range, and frequency response. Experimental testing verified that the sensor behaved as a linear time-invariant system, enabling calibration through the method of least squares and allowing the applied forces and moments to be reconstructed as …

Praxsmith: An Actor-Centric Domain Specific Language For Emergent Narratives In Video Games, Jacob C. Kelleran

Master's Theses

The video game industry is rapidly growing, and interest in game development is growing alongside it. Among this growing interest is a desire to include branching and emergent narratives in games. This subject is understood to be difficult, as every possible trajectory within the story creates exponential complexity. Large studios are sometimes able to create convincing implementations, but that is often with hundreds of developers and writers. Over the years, various solutions have been proposed to create frameworks and languages that aim to tackle this problem, with varying degrees of success. Some frameworks attempt this by placing the focus on …