Digital Commons Network^™

Effect Of Vine Age And Selected Winemaking Techniques On The Sensory Profile Of Central Coast Red Wines, Isabelle Lomonaco

Master's Theses

Descriptive sensory analysis is essential to understanding how differing varietals, viticultural techniques, enological techniques, vintage, regions, etc. impact the sensory characteristics found in wines. These studies analyzed the sensory impacts of vine age, whole cluster and stem addition influences, the frequency of cap management regimes, and selected fermentation variables, on 2019 Zinfandel, 2020 Syrah, 2020 Tannat, 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon, and 2021 Graciano wines respectively, from the Central Coast of California, USA. The investigation of Old vine Zinfandel indicated that these wines were defined as complex due to the wide variety of descriptors used to characterize them, having high color saturation …

X-Band Rf Transmitter Design For Multi-Purpose Small Satellite Communication Operations, Omer F. Gumus

Master's Theses

This thesis provides a description of the analysis, design, and tests of an X-band RF Transmitter communication system for small satellites. X-band transmitter systems are becoming popular in the upcoming deep space missions. Most of the deep-space ground stations have been using X-band frequencies to receive or transmit signals. The X-band (<10 GHz) can offer lower atmospheric losses and up to a couple of Mbps data rates for multiple satellite operations. Nowadays, many small satellites have been using frequency bands such as VHF, UHF, L, and S-band frequencies for communication. From deep space to the ground station, the low-frequency ranges are inadequate in providing Mbps level data rates and enough bandwidth for deep space missions.

The main focus of this thesis was the development of the subsystems such as gain block amplifier, Mixer, Bandpass Filter, and RF power amplifier. The subsystems were designed separately, then they were connected together to perform an end-to-end system test. One of the thesis aims is to design …

Strainer: State Transcript Rating For Informed News Entity Retrieval, Thomas M. Gerrity

Master's Theses

Over the past two decades there has been a rapid decline in public oversight of state and local governments. From 2003 to 2014, the number of journalists assigned to cover the proceedings in state houses has declined by more than 30\%. During the same time period, non-profit projects such as Digital Democracy sought to collect and store legislative bill and hearing information on behalf of the public. More recently, AI4Reporters, an offshoot of Digital Democracy, seeks to actively summarize interesting legislative data.

This thesis presents STRAINER, a parallel project with AI4Reporters, as an active data retrieval and filtering system for …

Accelerating Graphics Rendering On Risc-V Gpus, Joshua Simpson

Master's Theses

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are commonly used to accelerate massively parallel workloads across a wide range of applications from machine learning to cryptocurrency mining. The original application for GPUs, however, was to accelerate graphics rendering which remains popular today through video gaming and video rendering. While GPUs began as fixed function hardware with minimal programmability, modern GPUs have adopted a design with many programmable cores and supporting fixed function hardware for rasterization, texture sampling, and render output tasks. This balance enables GPUs to be used for general purpose computing and still remain adept at graphics rendering. Previous work at the …

Artist-Configurable Node-Based Approach To Generate Procedural Brush Stroke Textures For Digital Painting, Keavon Chambers

Master's Theses

Digital painting is the field of software designed to provide artists a virtual medium to emulate the experience and results of physical drawing. Several hardware and software components come together to form a whole workflow, ranging from the physical input devices, to the stroking process, to the texture content authorship. This thesis explores an artist-friendly approach to synthesize the textures that give life to digital brush strokes.

Most painting software provides a limited library of predefined brush textures. They aim to offer styles approximating physical media like paintbrushes, pencils, markers, and airbrushes. Often these are static bitmap textures that are …

Evaluating And Improving Domain-Specific Programming Education: A Case Study With Cal Poly Chemistry Courses, Will Fuchs

Master's Theses

Programming is a key skill in many domains outside computer science. When used judiciously, programming can empower people to accomplish what might be impossible or difficult with traditional methods. Unfortunately, students, especially non-CS majors, frequently have trouble while learning to program. This work reports on the challenges and opportunities faced by Physical Chemistry (PChem) students at Cal Poly, SLO as they learn to program in MATLAB. We assessed the PChem students through a multiple-choice concept inventory, as well as through “think-aloud” interviews. Additionally, we examined the students’ perceptions of and attitudes towards programming. We found that PChem students are adept …

Exploring The Impact Of Cognitive Awareness Scaffolding For Debugging In An Introductory Computer Science Class, Jiwon Lee

Master's Theses

Debugging is a significant part of programming. However, a lot of introductory pro- gramming classes tend to focus on writing and reading code than on debugging. They utilize programming assignments that are designed in ways such that students learn debugging by completing these assignments which makes debugging more of an im- plicit goal. In this thesis, we propose a cognitive awareness scaffolding in debugging to help students self-regulate their debugging process. We validate its effectiveness by conducting experiments with students in four sections of a Data Structures course, which is one of the introductory computer science classes at California Polytechnic …

Reliability Study Of Electrical Distribution System With Local And Interregional Bidirectional Centralized Electric Vehicle Charging Stations, Janine Gian Christii C. Darato

Master's Theses

In this thesis, a method was developed to evaluate the impact of bidirectional electric vehicle (EV) charging on power system reliability using Synergi Electric software. Load profiles, EV availability, EV state-of-charge (SOC) were important factors considered in this study. The analysis in this study is based on local and interregional vehicle-to-grid (V2G) implementation at different load points in the system. In general, local V2G implementation is observed to be more effective in improving system reliability over interregional V2G power flow. System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) improvements were observed to increase with increasing …

Music Visualization Using Source Separated Stereophonic Music, Hannah Eileen Chookaszian

Master's Theses

This thesis introduces a music visualization system for stereophonic source separated music. Music visualization systems are a popular way to represent information from audio signals through computer graphics. Visualization can help people better understand music and its complex and interacting elements. This music visualization system extracts pitch, panning, and loudness features from source separated audio files to create the visual. Most state-of-the art visualization systems develop their visual representation of the music from either the fully mixed final song recording, where all of the instruments and vocals are combined into one file, or from the digital audio workstation (DAW) data …

Method And Simulation Of On-Orbit Sub-Microthrust Evaluation, Jonathan Hood

Master's Theses

With the advent of smaller satellites, along with the need for less than 0.1 μN precision attitude control for interferometry and imaging missions, finer micro- to sub-micro- thrusters have become an area of high interest. As thrusters are developed and ground-tested, it is necessary to evaluate their thrust performance on-orbit. On-orbit measurements offer actual thrust performance in mission conditions, free from ground facility vibrations and miniaturization restraints, and allow a thruster system to achieve a NASA Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 7-8. A review is conducted of existing and proposed ground and on-orbit thrust measurement techniques. Experimental gaps and complementary …

Wildfire Risk Assessment Using Convolutional Neural Networks And Modis Climate Data, Sean F. Nesbit

Master's Theses

Wildfires burn millions of acres of land each year leading to the destruction of homes and wildland ecosystems while costing governments billions in funding. As climate change intensifies drought volatility across the Western United States, wildfires are likely to become increasingly severe. Wildfire risk assessment and hazard maps are currently employed by fire services, but can often be outdated. This paper introduces an image-based dataset using climate and wildfire data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The dataset consists of 32 climate and topographical layers captured across 0.1 deg by 0.1 deg tiled regions in California and Nevada between …

Distribution And Ecological Function Of Pacific Lamprey In The San Luis Obispo Creek Watershed, Parker Kalan

Master's Theses

Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus) is an endemic species to coastal watersheds along the Pacific Rim in North America and Asia. The species' geographic distribution is retracting and has not been mapped precisely, and the ability for the species to provide ecosystem services, such as water filtration, for supporting watershed management has not been tested. The San Luis Obispo Creek watershed, California, USA is at the southern end of Pacific lamprey’s retracting distribution, and the San Luis Obispo watershed is impacted by degraded water quality, making investigation of Pacific lamprey in the San Luis Obispo Creek watershed of direct …

Evaluation Of Automatic Text Summarization Using Synthetic Facts, Jaewook Ahn

Master's Theses

Automatic text summarization has achieved remarkable success with the development of deep neural networks and the availability of standardized benchmark datasets. It can generate fluent, human-like summaries. However, the unreliability of the existing evaluation metrics hinders its practical usage and slows down its progress. To address this issue, we propose an automatic reference-less text summarization evaluation system with dynamically generated synthetic facts. We hypothesize that if a system guarantees a summary that has all the facts that are 100% known in the synthetic document, it can provide natural interpretability and high feasibility in measuring factual consistency and comprehensiveness. To our …

A Study Of Grammar-Based Fuzzing Approaches, Ziwei Wu

Master's Theses

Fuzzing is the process of finding security vulnerabilities in code by creating inputs that will activate the exploits. Grammar-based fuzzing uses a grammar, which represents the syntax of all inputs a target program will accept, allowing the fuzzer to create well-formed complex inputs. This thesis conducts an in-depth study on two blackbox grammar-based fuzzing methods, GLADE and Learn&Fuzz, on their performance and usability to the average user. The blackbox fuzzer Radamsa was also used to compare fuzzing effectiveness. From our results in fuzzing PDF objects, GLADE beats both Radamsa and Learn&Fuzz in terms of coverage and pass rate. XML inputs …

Specialized Named Entity Recognition For Breast Cancer Subtyping, Griffith Scheyer Hawblitzel

Master's Theses

The amount of data and analysis being published and archived in the biomedical research community is more than can feasibly be sifted through manually, which limits the information an individual or small group can synthesize and integrate into their own research. This presents an opportunity for using automated methods, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), to extract important information from text on various topics. Named Entity Recognition (NER), is one way to automate knowledge extraction of raw text. NER is defined as the task of identifying named entities from text using labels such as people, dates, locations, diseases, and proteins. There …

Development Of A Dual-Band Radio Repeater To Be Carried By A Fixed-Wing Small Unmanned Aerial System, Carl Recine

Master's Theses

With the continued rise in wildfires in California, and around the world, technological advancements are needed to improve the safety and effectiveness of wildland firefighters. One area that provides an opportunity for such development is the deployment of temporary communications networks. Currently, radio repeaters are set up on mountain tops in the response area; such repeaters do not provide flexibility once installed, still have blind spots, and require the time of valuable assets like helicopters to install.

This thesis will establish the feasibility of airborne radio repeaters for wildland firefighting. In order to successfully demonstrate the feasibility of such an …

A Course On Advanced Real-Time Embedded Systems, Krista Round

Master's Theses

This thesis discusses the development of an advanced real-time embedded systems course offered at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, which aims to prepare students to design modern complex real-time embedded systems. It describes the goals of the real-time embedded systems curriculum, which includes an introductory and advanced course. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges of creating a successful advanced real-time embedded systems course and proposes changes to the current advanced real-time embedded systems course in response to those challenges.

In-Situ Defect Detection Using Acoustic Vibration Monitoring For Additive Manufacturing Processes, Ali Harake

Master's Theses

The world of additive manufacturing revolves around speed and repeatability. Inherently, the process of 3D printing is plagued with variability that fluctuates with every material and parameter modification. Without proper qualification standards, processes can never become stable enough to produce parts that may be used in aerospace, medical, and construction industries. These industries rely on high quality metrics in order to protect the lives of those who may benefit from them. To establish trust in a process, all points of variation must be controlled and accounted for every part produced. In instances where even the best process controls are enacted, …

Design Of An Automotive Iot Device To Improve Driver Fault Detection Through Road Class Estimation, Matt Murray

Master's Theses

Unsafe driver habits pose a serious threat to all vehicles on the road. This thesis outlines the development of an automotive IoT device capable of monitoring and reporting adverse driver habits to mitigate the occurrence of unsafe practices. The driver habits targeted are harsh braking, harsh acceleration, harsh cornering, speeding and over revving the vehicle. With the intention of evaluating and expanding upon the industry method of fault detection, a working prototype is designed to handle initialization, data collection, vehicle state tracking, fault detection and communication. A method of decoding the broadcasted messages on the vehicle bus is presented and …

An Introduction To Fröberg's Conjecture, Caroline Semmens

Master's Theses

The goal of this thesis is to make Fröberg's conjecture more accessible to the average math graduate student by building up the necessary background material to understand specific examples where Fröberg's conjecture is true.

Out-Of-Core Gpu Path Tracing On Large Instanced Scenes Via Geometry Streaming, Jeremy Berchtold

Master's Theses

We present a technique for out-of-core GPU path tracing of arbitrarily large scenes that is compatible with hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Our technique improves upon previous works by subdividing the scene spatially into streamable chunks that are loaded using a priority system that maximizes ray throughput and minimizes GPU memory usage. This allows for arbitrarily large scaling of scene complexity. Our system required under 19 minutes to render a solid color version of Disney's Moana Island scene (39.3 million instances, 261.1 million unique quads, and 82.4 billion instanced quads at a resolution of 1024x429 and 1024spp on an RTX 5000 (24GB memory …

Bearing Fault Detection And Classification Using Artificial Neural Networks, Harnak Singh

Master's Theses

Bearings are the essential components of modern rotating machines. Bearing faults can cause severe machine damages or even breakdowns.

In recent years, artificial intelligence and deep learning have been successfully applied to fault detection. In this thesis, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are employed for bearing fault detection and classification. Computer simulations results demonstrate that the CNN based approach is advantageous over the conventional regression model, with an overall accuracy of 99.5%.

Microgrid Laboratory Wind Energy Integration, Vincent Liang

Master's Theses

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Electrical Engineering Department and the Power Energy Institute have developed a microgrid laboratory with various generators, loads, and protection systems over the past several years. To improve and make the Cal Poly microgrid laboratory more realistic, this thesis outlines the process of improving the EE microgrid setup by adding a wind energy generation system via an induction generator, excitation capacitors, and a protection relay. By adding an induction generator, the microgrid system becomes more resilient to sudden power fluctuations by maintaining a stable voltage and frequency when the microgrid is islanded. To test this, a …

Effects Of Experimental Scale On The Adsorption Of Two Pharmaceutical Drugs Detected In Municipal Wastewater Effluent, Michael Moore

Master's Theses

Pharmaceutical drugs are being produced and consumed in increasing quantities every year and are poorly treated by conventional wastewater treatment processes, leading to increasing detection of such compounds in surface water, groundwater, and municipal drinking water. Soil aquifer treatment (SAT) is a promising method for treating these emerging compounds through combined adsorption and degradation of target compounds in soil. This thesis examines the consistency of results from typical studies like adsorption isotherms and soil columns utilized in analysis of SAT performance, across varying experimental scales. The adsorption behavior of two pharmaceuticals was investigated as a function of experimental scale and …

Improving Relation Extraction From Unstructured Genealogical Texts Using Fine-Tuned Transformers, Carloangello Parrolivelli

Master's Theses

Though exploring one’s family lineage through genealogical family trees can be insightful to developing one’s identity, this knowledge is typically held behind closed doors by private companies or require expensive technologies, such as DNA testing, to uncover. With the ever-booming explosion of data on the world wide web, many unstructured text documents, both old and new, are being discovered, written, and processed which contain rich genealogical information. With access to this immense amount of data, however, entails a costly process whereby people, typically volunteers, have to read large amounts of text to find relationships between people. This delays having genealogical …

Viability And Implementation Of A Vector Cryptography Extension For Risc-V, Jonathan W. Skelly

Master's Theses

RISC-V is an open-source instruction-set architecture (ISA) forming the basis of thousands of commercial and experimental microprocessors. The Scalar Cryptography extension ratified in December 2021 added scalar instructions that target common hashing and encryption algorithms, including SHA2 and AES. The next step forward for the RISC-V ISA in the field of cryptography and digital security is the development of vector cryptography instructions.

This thesis examines if it is viable to add vector implementations of existing RISC-V scalar cryptography instructions to the existing vector instruction format, and what improvements they can make to the execution of SHA2 and AES algorithms. Vector …

Simulating Electric Vehicle Short-Notice Wildfire Evacuation In California Rural Communities, Gudrun Derickson

Master's Theses

The transportation sector in California has begun a shift toward adopting Electric Vehicles (EVs) as a primary source of individual and corporate mobility. The US Government and the State of California are initiating public-sector financed charging station infrastructure to help in this change-over to EVs. Automobile companies and private enterprises are also heavily investing in Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) infrastructure going forward. The state of California is subject to natural disasters such as Fire, Earthquakes, and periodic flooding. Increasing numbers of BEVs may add new challenges to mass evacuations that are often associated with natural disasters. This work focuses on …

Development Of A Body Weight Reduction Algorithm In Micro-Gravity Treadmills™, Alexander Hibbert

Master's Theses

Boost Treadmills™, a company specializing in the use of differential air-pressure (DAP) technology in the realm of exercise and rehabilitation, is developing their second-generation micro-gravity treadmill™ named the Boost 2. This machine will allow individuals in all types of fitness environments to move and exercise at a fraction of their normal body weight, reducing the impact forces on lower body extremities and allowing for accelerated returns to activity.

The purpose of this thesis was to create an algorithm to be implemented on the Boost 2 that related the percentage of body weight reduction of a user to a required pressure …

Understanding Rare Species In California: An Assessment Of Camatta Canyon Amole (Hooveria Purpurea Var. Reducta) And A Meta-Analysis Of California Rare Plants In Literature, Kieran N. Althaus

Master's Theses

California is currently in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. There are approximately 5,000 native species of plants in California, a quarter of which are considered rare. Determining threats to these rare plants is often times difficult. Despite California's botanical resources, we still know very little about much of California’s rare plants. San Luis Obispo County is home to 2,000 of California’s native plant taxa, one- third of which are rare or endemic to the county. These species are of great local and environmental concern.

In Chapter 1, we attempted to assess the impact of non native species on a …

The Shallow Benthic Invertebrate Recovery From The End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction Across The Gulf Coastal Plain, Ronan B. Beltracchi

Master's Theses

The Gulf Coastal Plain, in the southeastern United States, contains several sites with well-preserved fossil assemblages from the Cretaceous- Paleogene boundary (K/Pg). Changes in benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages after mass extinction events commonly include reduction in body size of surviving organisms and preferential survival based on ecospace occupation. This study examines patterns of functional ecology and body size change in mollusk fossils from bulk samples collected throughout the post-extinction recovery interval at a well-studied boundary site from Darting Minnow Creek in Brazos, Texas USA and a recently described K/Pg boundary section on the Ouachita River in Malvern, Arkansas USA. The proportional …