Digital Commons Network^™

Biologically Informed Negative Samplingfor Antibody Chain Pairing Classification, Ishita Singh

Computer Science Senior Theses

Antibody heavy and light chain (H/L) pairing is fundamental to antigen recognition and stability. While single-cell sequencing preserves native pairing information, widely used bulk repertoire and spatial transcriptomics platforms do not, motivating the need for efficient ML methods to infer H/L pairing. Training a binary classifier for this task faces the methodological challenge of a lack of true biological negatives, since natural selection eliminates B cells with incompatible H/L pairs.

In this thesis, I introduce a biologically informed negative sampling strategy for H/L pairing classification, drawing on known V-gene biases in heavy and light chain pairing. Pseudo-negatives are constructed by …

Mimic: A Multimodal Dataset For Affective Incongruity In Video, Ethan M. Baird

Computer Science Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the computational challenges of constructing a database for affective incongruity, exploring the difficulties in automating the collection of contradictory affective states. Capturing these incongruities is essential for advancing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and sentiment analysis, which struggle to interpret signals deviating from basic emotional archetypes. Curating non-congruent affect provides the data necessary for models to navigate complex social contexts, which is critical for applications like automated Audio Description (AD) for the visually impaired and nuanced Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). To capture these signals, two distinct methodologies were employed. The first utilized a tripartite decomposition of video data, isolating textual, …

Stomp (The Student Organization Management Portal), Lindsey Leong, Madeline Follosco, Noelle Evanich, Irene Chang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

At Santa Clara University, the Center for Student Involvement (CSI) leads to support hundreds of student-led organizations with different audiences and ambitions, but all aim to bring students together nonetheless. However, such development regarding student organization management proves to be much harder when administrative processes are decentralized and cumbersome, often involving numerous layers of manual work and departmental bottlenecks. Restructuring and optimizing administrative workflows would entail more energy towards the growth of student life at Santa Clara University.

The Student Organization Management Portal, or StOMP, is a web application that aims to centralize and optimize student organization-related processes, as well …

Holy Hunger: A Study Of How Spiritually Formative Practices Shape A Faith Community At The Cedar Lane Church Of Christ, David W. Mitchell

DMin Project Theses

I have served in leadership as an elder/shepherd at the Cedar Lane Church of Christ in Tullahoma, Tennessee, since 2011. Before serving in this leadership position, I was in full-time ministry with churches of Christ from 1982 to 2005 (as a youth minister, education minister, and preaching minister). Since 2007, I have been a public educator, first as a High School Civics teacher and now as a Middle School Social Studies teacher. My primary work as an elder includes education, spiritual formation, and community engagement. Another role I have is to assess the spiritual health of the believers I am …

Real-Time Corridor Counting, Erick Sun, Jacob Lin, Jayden Malhotra, Joseph Hissen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Identifying traffic trends is a critical step in urban planning and design for the purpose of creating safer and more efficient roads. One such problem in the field of traffic data is corridor counting, which is the process of counting the unique number of vehicles that pass through a set of predefined intersections in a given time. In this paper, we develop an automated solution to perform corridor counting in real-time using camera footage and computer vision. We build upon the architecture of a previous Senior Design project, replacing and refining key components and architectural choices to improve accuracy and …

A Provable Semi-Infinite Programming Approach For Solving Constrained Dynamic Games, Tyler C. Gardner, Matthew W. Harris, Logan Lancaster

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Student Publications and Presentations

Many engineering problems must account for the non-cooperative decisions and actions of multiple players. These problems can be modeled within a game-theoretic framework. The approach herein is to model such problems as mathematical games, convert them to semi-infinite programs, and utilize a semi-infinite program solver whose output is provably an ϵ-optimal Nash equilibrium. The approach is successfully benchmarked on two low-dimensional problems. Two types of higher-dimensional linear quadratic dynamic games are then investigated: ones where each player’s problem is convex and ones where at least one player’s problem is nonconvex. Within each type, variations based on information structure, control …

Bilingual Math For Kindergartners (Biki), Anna Aldrin, Caroline Tapia, Lillian Le

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

For many children from bilingual households, kindergarten represents a critical, learning benchmark where the introduction of fundamental math concepts coincides with their first significant exposure to the English language. Traditional educational methods often fail to support English language learners, leading to a disconnect between their understanding of math in the home and its application in the classroom. This linguistic barrier frequently results in reduced engagement, diminished confidence, and an unstable educational foundation that can discourage students from pursuing STEM careers later in life. While existing platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo address either language acquisition or mathematical proficiency independently, they …

Bridgeide, Maya Srimal, Jeshwin Prince, Arnav Gupta, Will Zumbolo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Anyone who has done a group project knows the pattern: the first meeting burns an hour on logistics—which document to use, who has access, why the formatting broke on one laptop—before real work begins. In computer science courses that gap is worse. Students must install the right compiler, runtime, and libraries on their own machines; a four-person team on four different laptops can lose the first week to setup alone. Instructors who want to review submissions often download every zip from the learning management system and run each one locally. Existing tools solve pieces of this puzzle—real-time document editing, browser-based …

Tailoring Crystallization Kinetics For Scalable And Efficient Large-Area Perovskite Light-Emitting Diodes, Sung Doo Baek, Yuanhao Tang, Hyuntae Choi, Shang Jiang, Qixuan Hu, Yu Ting Yang, Hanjun Yang, Wenzhan Xu, Kyu Yoon, Devansh Drolia, Limei Wang, Syed Joy, Su Hye Jeong, Gangsan Lee, Vivek Narsimhan, Kenneth R. Graham, Jeffrey T. Miller, Jianguo Mei, Yoon Ho Lee, Letian Dou

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Scalable fabrication of uniform perovskite films is a critical bottleneck for large-area perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs), hindered by coffee-ring formation and heterogeneous crystallization upon scaling. Here, we report a multimodal solvent-engineering strategy enabling highly uniform films via ambient blade coating combined with vacuum-assisted solvent evaporation. Incorporating N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) and acetonitrile (ACN) into a dimethylformamide (DMF)-based system synergistically modulates evaporation dynamics: It suppresses macroscopic solute segregation through Marangoni flow-induced redistribution, while tuning precursor coordination to regulate nucleation/phase conversion and promote radiatively efficient film formation. Consequently, the ternary formulation yields films with improved uniformity, reduced trap densities, and enhanced radiative efficiency. Near-infrared …

Wearable Hazard Detection System For The Visually Impaired, Nolan Daly, Sergio Diaz, Brandon Ng

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project presents a wearable assistive system designed to help blind or visually impaired people navigate their surroundings more safely. The system uses a Raspberry Pi 5 connected to Camera Module 3 (NoIR Wide) sensors to capture a wide field of view. Real-time object detection is performed using a lightweight YOLOv8 model, and a redundancy-based merging algorithm combines detections across cameras to improve reliability. By requiring agreement between multiple cameras, the system reduces false positives and increases confidence in identifying obstacles.

The device is designed to operate in real time and provide reliable feedback about nearby hazards, helping users make …

Sealing Ability Of Polydopamine-Coated Gutta-Percha With Bioceramic Sealer:An In Vitro Study, Mariam Fahmy

Dentistry

No abstract provided.

National Agricultural Library (Nal) Search., Leah Everitt, Sonya Lemke

Publications

SEARCH is the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL)'s main discovery platform that provides integrated access to the NAL Digital Collections, Special Collections, PubAg and AGRICOLA. NAL SEARCH is a valuable tool for health science librarians, students, and professionals seeking veterinary science, nutrition, or animal experiment alternatives. This article aims to give users a comprehensive overview of this resource.

Values Driven Priming: Engaging Ai With Reflective, Purposeful Interaction, Carrie Fry, V. Dozier, Amanda Makula

Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship

This librarian-led immersive session seeks to set the human at the center of Generative AI use, beginning by exploring the themes and connections between the foundations of Catholic higher education and the integration of emerging technologies, and then moving to a practical exploration of how the tools can be primed to give outputs that reflect those values.

Librarians are uniquely positioned in AI discussions because of our background in information literacy, and our training in the evaluation of data including provenance of data, reducing misinformation, and bias awareness. Librarians are also interdisciplinary mediators with cross-curricular reach, and connections with student …

Designing Cost-Effective Quadrupedal Service Robots For Disability Aid, Kieran Pazmino, Akira Zone, Ryan Toy, Cyrus Wong

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

With aging populations and the increased rate of disability diagnosis in the United States, the economy has taken on an elevated toll, as fewer are able to work, including caretakers. Give the rise in unpaid time put in by the average caretaker, it is necessary to determine ways of reducing this burden, for the caretaker and also for elderly and disabled people. Individuals who service dogs for their daily lives face substantial financial and personal responsibilities, on top of their own medical and living costs. This project proposed a wheeled quadrupedal robotic service dog, designed primarily for mobility assistance. In …

“I Was Well Informed. It Was A Great Advantage”: Pre-Arrival Information Seeking, Information Intelligence, And Immigrants’ Settlement, Nafiz Z. Shuva, Paulette Rothbauer

Publications and Research

This study reports on the role of pre-arrival information seeking and informed decision making in the settlement experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants in Canada. Despite the importance of immigrants in shaping Canada’s future in innovation, economy, and population, this research shows a significant mismatch between immigrants’ expectations and their actual settlement experiences, particularly in terms of their employment. This mismatch can lead to depression, frustration, and anxiety, affecting integration into Canadian society. While there has been a recent increase in immigrants’ settlement information behavior research in LIS, most focus on post-arrival information needs and seeking. Research findings of this study contribute …

Llzk-Symex: Building A Circuit Verification Framework For The Llzk Zero-Knowledge Intermediate Language, Nicolás Iair Schaievitch

Computer Science Senior Theses

The rising adoption of ZK (Zero-Knowledge) technology has led to a plethora of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) for facilitating the development of ZK circuits. At the same time, there has also been an increase in the number of compilation targets for these languages, with different cryptographic foundations and performance optimizations. LLZK, by Veridise, aims to unify the ecosystem by providing a single IR (Intermediate Representation) for the different frontend DSLs, that would then also allow choosing between different backends. Given the high stakes (particularly financial) that a lot of ZK circuits are under, together with their high level of complexity, …

Capturing Large Language Model Similarity Through Spectral Analysis, Ishan Verma Prasad

Computer Science Senior Theses

With the rapid development of open-sourced models on Huggingface, there is a strong need for a way to systematically determine the similarity between models. More strongly, for intellectual property and organization, we need a way to determine the "lineage" of models. We borrow principles from Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization and Random Matrix Theory to provide an inference-free method to accomplish this. We cluster a corpus of several model families by their spectral fingerprints and demonstrate that each model family occupies a distinct region in weight space. This confirms prior ideas of training setups leaving artifacts on model weights and allows us to …

Rscore - A Tool For Learning And Quantifying Software Infrastructure Resiliency, Selena Yujia Zhou

Computer Science Senior Theses

As LLMs take over writing code, infrastructure resilience has become the central challenge of software development, especially for gaming applications, where latency, availability, and scale demands are extreme. However, holistic software infrastructure is difficult to understand for casual developers because of the multiple layers of abstraction that make up an application, and the lack of structured information from proprietary companies. This thesis explores the creation of rscore, a tool that quantifies software infrastructure resiliency and subsequently educates developers about the architecture of any existing gaming application. The tool generates two graphical models of a game’s early versus current infrastructure and …

Wrack Lines Spring-Summer 2026 Volume Number 1, Margaret Cozens, Johann Heupel, Owen Placido, Paul Salopek, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

“Building community around the places we love,” is the theme of the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Wrack Lines magazine. Learn about the work of the Six Lakes Park coalition in Hamden, Riverfront Recapture in Hartford, MyCoast in southeastern Connecticut and the statewide land conservation conference. Additional stories tell about the artistry and mission of photographer-videographer Tomas Koeck, and National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek, who is traveling the world on foot.

Iajes Website Redesign, Justin Fan, Nicolas Gibson, Isabelle Hu, Anisha Malani

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The International Association of Jesuit Engineering and Science Schools (IAJES) connects more than sixty Jesuit institutions worldwide to promote collaboration and shared learning in STEM research. Santa Clara University is one of more than sixty member universities whose faculty and staff participate in conferences and task forces to address priority issues identified by the Society of Jesus. IAJES’ existing website, built on a static no-code platform, limited the organization’s ability to manage content, support member interaction, and scale with its growing global network. Users faced unclear navigation options, a basic design, and no effective tools for managing roles, resources, or …

Wheelless Snake-Like Robot For Unknown Environment Exploration, Anastasiia Statcenko, Gwyn Anawalt, Eden Steinbeck

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

This project focuses on creating a locomotive device that is capable of movement without relying on active wheels. This kind of system is essential to exploration in rough terrains where wheel-based motion proves to be ineffective. Drawing inspiration from the natural movement of snakes- the animal most successful in traversing difficult and diverse environments- we will develop a modular snake-like robotic prototype. Our modular design will allow for simplified maintenance, easy component replacement, and opportunity for further development and research.

Our approach will integrate electronic circuits, obstacle awareness via live camera feed, and locomotion control programmed via serial protocols on …

Smart Walker, Viet Ha, Harry Ying, Ayden Dauenhauer

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Traditional walkers provide essential physical support for people recovering from injury, surgery, or reduced mobility, but do not collect objective information about how a person walks. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a SmartWalker system that transforms a standard mobility walker into a portable gait data collection platform. The system integrates Intel RealSense cameras mounted on a walker, NVIDIA Jetson embedded computing units, local storage, and a graphical user interface to record lower-body movement, process video locally, and present clinician-reviewable gait metrics.

The thesis describes the motivation for the monitoring of gait based on walking, the user …

The Whiteness Of Wealth & Black Student Loan Debt, Renee Nicole Allen

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Blendmo: A Blender Mocap Toolkit, Kelly Lee, Angela Zhou, Dana Steinke

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Motion capture technology is vital for achieving realistic movement in 3D animation, but industry-standard tracking suits and studios remain expensive and inaccessible for students, independent artists, and amateur filmmakers. Consequently, many creators rely on accessible, marker-less motion capture methods, which frequently yield noisy data, scale mismatches between the actor and the rigged model, and unnatural behaviors like foot sliding. To address these technical barriers, this project introduces a free and accessible extension for Blender designed to streamline the cleanup and integration of marker-less motion capture data. It consists of various solutions for methods of combats to motion-captured complications: the keyframe …

Formation Control Of A Multi-Agent System, Benjamin Banh, Paul Lancaster, Daniel Sims

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The primary objective of this project is to design and implement a ROS2-based multi-agent robotic prototype capable of demonstrating aggregation and formation-control behavior in a controlled indoor environment. The project explores how multiple mobile robots can coordinate through decentralized interaction rules, peer state information, and namespaced ROS2 communication rather than relying on a single centralized controller.

The project began with theoretical study and MATLAB/Simulink simulation of artificial potential fields, singleintegrator dynamics, aggregation, desired-distance formation control, and obstacle-repulsion concepts. These simulations provided an idealized environment for evaluating the general behavior of the control strategy before physical hardware limitations were introduced.

The …

Disaster Justice: Queer And Disabled Mobilities And Infrastructures Of Care In The Pacific Northwest, Rachel Springer

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines the social, political, and environmental pressures that drive LGBTQ+ migration to the Pacific Northwest and the social infrastructures people find on arrival. Drawing on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ adults who relocated between 2022 and 2025, it argues that these movements are best understood as responses to slow-onset disasters produced by the compounding interaction of legislative targeting and infrastructural violence.

State-level legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people—particularly transgender individuals—has fractured the geography of safety in the U.S., producing a landscape where civil rights, healthcare access, and everyday security vary dramatically across space. For those navigating these conditions at the …

Holistic Strategies For Optimizing Municipal It Operations And Cost Efficiency, Joseph Yazdanpanahi

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Municipalities work to deliver secure and impactful IT (information technology) services while often working within tight budget constraints. To address this problem, this article offers an experience-based and comprehensive framework to optimize municipal IT operations. It emphasizes leveraging automation, streamlining hardware and software management, and forging strategic partnerships to drive cost savings and efficiency gains. Designed to equip municipal IT leaders with practical tools and insights, this article aims to help modernize IT processes.

A Wideband Omnidirectional Dual E-Shaped Microstrip Patch Antenna Based On Partial Ground Plane, Fengyu Du, Boning Ren

Warith Scientific Journal of Engineering and Technology

To address the problems of narrow impedance bandwidth in conventional microstrip patch antennas at the 2.4 GHz Bluetooth band and the strong dependence of port matching and radiation efficiency on structural dimensions, this paper investigates the structural design, equivalent-circuit modeling, and test-result analysis of a wideband omnidirectional dual E-shaped microstrip patch antenna based on a partial ground plane. The antenna is fabricated on an F4B dielectric substrate with a relative permittivity of 2.2, a loss tangent of 0.0009, and overall dimensions of 30 mm × 22.5 mm × 1.575 mm. The radiating patch adopts a dual E-shaped slotted configuration, and …

News From The States, Blake Denton

The Southeastern Librarian

Library news reports from SELA member states

From Performance To Practice: Knowledge-Distilled Segmentator For On-Premises Clinical Workflows, Qizhen Lan, Aaron Choi, Jun Ma, Bo Wang, Zhongming Zhao, Xiaoqian Jiang, Yu-Chun Hsu

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Deploying medical image segmentation models in routine clinical workflows is often constrained by on-premises infrastructure, where computational resources are fixed and cloud-based inference may be restricted by governance and security policies. While high-capacity models achieve strong segmentation accuracy, their computational demands hinder practical deployment and long-term maintainability in hospital environments. We present a deployment-oriented framework that leverages knowledge distillation to translate a high-performing segmentation model into a scalable family of compact student models without modifying the inference pipeline. The framework is primarily evaluated on nnU-Net, with additional validation across transformer and heterogeneous teacher–student architectures. The proposed approach preserves architectural compatibility …