Digital Commons Network^™

Point Cloud Initialization Techniques For Gaussian Splatting, Daniel L. Levin

Master's Theses

Over the past year, 3D Gaussian Splatting has become a widespread research topic of interest. It has proven itself against other popular Novel View Synthesis algorithms
like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) by replacing the approximation function with
a modified point cloud. This modified point cloud allows for the rendering of novel
views in real time. While this gives Gaussian Splatting an advantage over algorithms
like NeRF, it shares the same issue of requiring prior camera intrinsics such as a Point
Cloud and Camera Poses. Most Gaussian Splatting pipelines use Colmap Sparse, a
Structure-from-Motion (SfM) technology that efficiently registers the necessary …

Hydrological Analysis Of Post-Fire Responses Within The Little Creek Watershed Of Swanton Pacific Ranch, Alexander Jeffrey Wiens

Master's Theses

Climate change and a growing wildland-urban interface are associated with an increase in the number and severity of wildfires. While severe wildfires do cause a costly and dangerous impact on the environment and the public, their after-effects comprise important subjects of study. In post-fire hydrologic studies, the reduced infiltration and plant cover that results from wildfires can commonly be associated with increased peakflows and erosion. Phenomena such as the flooding and debris flows in Montecito after the Thomas Fire in late 2017 can have important implications on infrastructure and human lives. Quantifying post-fire peak flows and flooding volumes has therefore …

Pain Points: Cluster Analysis In Chronic Pain Networks, Iris W. Ho

Master's Theses

Chronic pain is a pervasive health issue, affecting a significant portion of the population and posing complex challenges due to its diverse etiology and individualized impact. To address this complexity, there is a growing interest in grouping chronic pain patients based on their unique treatment needs. While various methodologies for patient grouping have emerged, leveraging graph-based approaches to produce and evaluate such groupings remains largely unexplored. Recent studies have shown promise in integrating knowledge graphs into exploring patient similarity across different biological domains, indicating potential avenues for research. Additionally, there is a growing interest in investigating patient similarity networks, highlighting …

Sequential Memory Generation For Cognitive Models, Eben Miles Sherwood

Master's Theses

Understanding the process of memory formation in neural systems is of great interest in the field of neuroscience. Valiant’s Neuroidal Model poses a plausible theory for how memories are created within a computational context. Previously, the algorithm JOIN has been used to show how the brain could perform conjunctive and disjunctive coding to store memories. A limitation of JOIN is that it does not consider the coding of temporal information in a meaningful manner. We propose SeqMem, a similar algorithmic primitive that is designed to encode a series of items within a random graph model. We investigate the feasibility of …

An Analysis Of Indoor Air Quality At Cal Poly For Sensor Design, Isabella M. Santi

Master's Theses

Prior research has shown that indoor air quality (IAQ) impacts cognitive performance. At Cal Poly, many older buildings are unable to maintain appropriate IAQ because of their outdated ventilation systems and the increasing number of students in the rooms. This work analyzes the IAQ of different buildings at Cal Poly, with a focus on Building 20. Carbon dioxide, temperature, and relative humidity inside classrooms are collected using an integrated circuit sensor and a microcontroller. A total of 38 hours of data was collected, with 22 of those hours in Building 20 specifically. We find that unlike temperature and relative humidity, …

A Hardware-In-The-Loop Star Tracker Test Bed, Ashley Haraguchi

Master's Theses

As the use of small satellites for advanced space missions continues to grow, the importance of low mass and cost three-axis attitude stabilization systems increases as well, with these systems requiring high accuracy attitude knowledge. Star trackers provide the most accurate attitude knowledge of any type of attitude sensor, but the high cost, size, and weight of commercial star trackers can be prohibitive to small satellite missions. Many simple star trackers have been developed using commercial off-the-shelf camera sensors and processing hardware, but the challenge remains in testing and characterizing these devices. A common solution is night sky tests, in …

Unraveling The History Of Deforestation In The Amazon Rainforest With Statistical Modeling, Ryan Destefano

Master's Theses

The Amazon rainforest, a vital ecosystem of immense biodiversity and global climate significance, faces the ongoing threat of deforestation driven by agricultural expansion. This thesis employs remote sensing techniques, focusing on the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) derived from Landsat satellite imagery, to track land cover dynamics within the Amazon. The study examines historical land cover changes in current plantations in Peru and Brazil, regions where the exact timing of deforestation is uncertain. By analyzing EVI measurements dating back to 1984, inflection points indicative of deforestation events preceding plantation establishment are identified. Statistical modeling techniques, including spline fitting to analyze time …

Jorge Ricardo Masetti: Journalist, Guerrilla, Cold Warrior, Brooks C. Martin Mr.

Master's Theses

The following thesis describes the life and activities of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentinian journalist who was assigned to interview Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Masetti was responsible for broadcasting interviews with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara to the rest of Latin America for the first time, allowing people to understand what was happening in Cuba through the words of the Revolution’s leaders. Masetti returned to Cuba to found the first international Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina, which still exists today. However, ideological factionalism within Prensa Latina drove Masetti to resign in …

Scalable Hybrid Neuromorphic Accelerator & Hybrid Neural Networks, Joshua Nardone

Master's Theses

With machine learning workloads currently at very large scales, models are distributed across large compute systems. On distributed systems, the performance of these models are limited by the bandwidth limitations of chip-to-chip communication. To relieve this bottleneck, spiking neural networks (SNNs) can be utilized to reduce inter-chip communication traffic utilizing inherit network sparsity. However, in comparison to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), SNNs can have significant degradation in performance with increased network scale and complexity.

This research proposes a hybrid neural network accelerator that uses the best of both spiking and non-spiking layers by allocating a majority of resources to …

Power Flow Modeling And Analysis Of A Green Seaport Power System, Alejandra Zapata

Master's Theses

Indonesia has committed to achieving Net-Zero emissions by 2060, signaling a significant shift towards sustainability, which includes impactful initiatives such as the implementation of Green Seaports. This thesis focuses on designing and developing a model for a proposed Green Seaport power system and the subsequent performance of power flow analysis under various operating conditions. The model, constructed using MATLAB Simulink, underwent extensive testing and analysis, with a specific emphasis on the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) operating modes, including individual charging, discharging, and simultaneous charging and discharging. This comprehensive investigation and analysis, involving 62 separate simulations, evaluated the impact of …

Exploring Gender Disparities In Collaboration Networks: An Analysis Of H-Indices And Collaborator Proximity, Andrew R. Estrada

Master's Theses

Research is crucial for expanding the boundaries of what is known, driving innovation, and solving problems faced by communities. It is carried out across all sectors of society by all matter of institutions. Academic research is one such sector that contributes to a plethora of disciplines. Research often compels collaboration among researchers, and as with any team, the dynamics and outcomes are affected by the individuals who contribute to the research. For instance, researchers can be from different institutions; therefore research teams can differ in collaboration distance -- the geographic distance between the organizations of authors. In a similar vein, …

Using Plankton Edna To Estimate Whale Abundances Off The California Coast: Data Integration And Statistical Modeling, Katherine Chan

Master's Theses

Understanding marine mammal populations and how they are affected by human activity and ocean conditions is vital, especially in tracking population declines and monitoring endangered species. However, tracking marine mammal populations and their distribution is challenging due to difficulties in observation and costs. Using surrounding plankton environmental DNA (eDNA) has the potential to provide an indirect measure of monitoring cetacean abundances based on ecological associations. This project aims to apply statistical methods to assess the relationship of visual abundances of common species of baleen whales with amplicon sequence variants (ASV) of plankton eDNA samples from the NOAA-CalCOFI Ocean Genomics (NCOG) …

Identification Of Downy Mildew Resistance In Wild Arugula And Evaluation Of Downy Mildew Causing Pathogens And Management Practices, Reilly B. Blair

Master's Theses

Downy mildew has been a potentially devastating constraint to crop production within the Brassicaceae family worldwide (CABI, 2022) and on the Central Coast of California (Smukler, et al, 2008; Koike, et al. 2007). Downy mildew is a foliar disease, caused by the pathogens in the Hyaloperonospora genus on plants within the Brassicaceae family (Goker, et al, 2009). Downy mildew is a disease that is common in region of the world with Coastal climates that provide humidity and moderate temperatures (Sarahan, et al, 2017). Crops within the Brassicaceae family maintain a predominant role in agricultural systems worldwide (Cartea, et al, 2011) …

Hyperbolic Groups And The Word Problem, David Wu

Master's Theses

Mikhail Gromov’s work on hyperbolic groups in the late 1980s contributed to the formation of geometric group theory as a distinct branch of mathematics. The creation of hyperbolic metric spaces showed it was possible to define a large class of hyperbolic groups entirely geometrically yet still be able to derive significant algebraic properties. The objectives of this thesis are to provide an introduction to geometric group theory through the lens of quasi-isometry and show how hyperbolic groups have solvable word problem. Also included is the Stability Theorem as an intermediary result for quasi-isometry invariance of hyperbolicity.

Preliminary Analysis Of A 12u Astronomy Cubesat, Charles Van Steenwyk

Master's Theses

The explosion of exoplanet astronomy has led to thousands of new discoveries and opportunities to be explored. The ability to capture images and perform meaningful science has resulted in an abundance of follow-on missions, surveys, and fostered a community of amateur astronomers in the last ten years. This success mirrors the development of CubeSats, which have proved an immensely popular way for students of all levels to access space and collect data. Multiple CubeSats have been developed to observe and characterize single exoplanet tran- sits, showing that this class of mission is possible. However, there is currently no mission designed …

Development Of A Deep Learning Algorithm Using Electromyography (Emg) And Acceleration To Monitor Upper Extremity Behavior With Application To Individuals Post-Stroke, Nathan Dodd

Master's Theses

Stroke is a chronic illness which often impairs survivors for extended periods of time,

leaving the individual limited in motor function. The ability to perform daily activities

(ADL) is closely linked to motor recovery following a stroke. The objective of

this work is to employ surface electromyography (sEMG) gathered through a novel,

wearable armband sensor to monitor and quantify ADL performance. The first contribution

of this work seeks to develop a relationship between sEMG and and grip

aperture, a metric tied to the success of post-stroke individuals’ functional independence.

The second contribution of this work aims to develop a deep …

A Hybrid Computer To Solve The Selective Harmonic Minimization Problem In Single-Phase Inverters, Dillon Nguyen

Master's Theses

Power electronics possess forms of non-ideality due to the nonlinearity present in physical switches. These switches are driven with pulse width modulation (PWM), which properly down-converts or up-converts based on converter topology. When these switches turn on or off, they introduce the main proponent of efficiency loss: harmonics. This becomes a nonlinear optimization problem with many converters. The solution proposed in this thesis is an analog/digital hybrid computer that utilizes the speed of analog computation and the accuracy of digital computing together. A Plexim RT Box provides the programmability needed for algorithms, while the analog circuit provides low-power, high-speed computation …

A Study On Privacy Over Security And Privacy Enhancing Networks, Everett Lee Conway

Master's Theses

With rapid developments in communication technologies and awareness of security and privacy risks online, Security and Privacy Enhancing Networks (SPENs) have become increasingly popular. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, workplaces encouraged employees to take additional security measures, such as VPNs. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study on website fingerprinting attacks. A comprehensive system model and threat model based on two types of SPENs (Virtual Private Networks and Tor Networks) are presented. Moreover, we demonstrate a website fingerprinting attack by ethically collecting website fetch data and analyzing the collected data using five different machine learning classification models including k …

Optimal False Data Injection (Fdi) In Simulated Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (Cacc) Systems, Lovro Dukic

Master's Theses

In the rapidly advancing field of autonomous vehicles, ensuring the security and reliability of self-driving systems is crucial. Autonomous vehicle systems, such as cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), must undergo significant research and testing before their integration into commercial intelligent transportation systems. CACC considers multiple vehicles in close proximity as a single entity, or platoon, with each vehicle equipped with a controller that uses sensor-based measurements and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to control inter-vehicle spacing. While this system offers numerous potential benefits for traffic safety and efficiency, it is also susceptible to False Data Injection (FDI) attacks, which can cause the …

Kgscore-Open: Leveraging Knowledge Graph Semantics For Open-Qa Evaluation, Nicholas Hausman

Master's Theses

Evaluating active Question Answering (QA) systems, as users ask questions outside of the original testing data, has proven to be difficult, due to the difficulty of gauging answer quality without ground truth responses. We propose KGScore-Open, a configurable system capable of scoring questions and answers in Open Domain Question Answering (Open-QA) without ground truth answers present by leveraging DBPedia, a Knowledge Graph (KG) derived from Wikipedia, to score question-answer pairs. The system maps entities from questions and answers to DBPedia nodes, constructs a Knowledge Graph based on these entities, and calculates a relatedness score. Our system is validated on multiple …

Design Of A Dynamic, Reconfigurable, Self-Balancing Battery Pack, Alexander Hallett Neiman

Master's Theses

This thesis details the design and testing of a reconfigurable battery array. Reconfigurable battery arrays, specifically for mobile applications, have the potential to reduce or eliminate use of auxiliary charging, balancing, and inverter systems. Design work included a bidirectional solid state switch and a cell-to-cell bidirectional current-limiting power converter. While the overall efficiency, size, and cost of the battery pack was not competitive with existing options, it demonstrated cell-to-cell balancing and native four-level square wave AC inverter output with an array of only two cells. This demonstrates viability of the concept as well as reveals important requirements and safety features …

Closing, Sarai Devi Dasi, Vivian Jameson

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Contributors, Brandon Schwartz

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Donut Still Life' & 'Hello?!', Jolina Chen, Emily La Puma

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Lucky Fix' & 'Jogging Thru The Yard', Dan Lee, Jordan Mendelevitch

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Babydoll' & 'For The Love Of Type', Kennedy Ray, Brandon Schwartz

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Supernova' & 'Poison Girl Friend', Zach Kanter, Celeste Ibarra

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Untitled' & 'Me And My Girls @ The Beach', Vivian Jameson, Zoë Harris

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'The Ducktectives' & 'Blossoming', Trey Bernard, Alara Wiefling

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Sea On A Plate' & 'Beach Music', Shrishti Dutta, Natalia Celebrini

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.