Engineering Commons^™

Neural Network Interpretability For Autonomous Driving Neural Networks, Raghav Kapoor, Casey Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In the field of neural networks, there has been a long-standing problem that needs to be addressed: gaining insight into how neural networks make decisions. Neural Networks are still considered black boxes and are often difficult to understand. This lack of understanding becomes an ethical dilemma especially in the domain of self-driving cars. Given the limited number of works geared towards unravelling neural network logic for autonomous driving vehicles, our team seeks to create a novel neural network interpretability method to influence the neural network during its training process.

Deep Neural Networks have demonstrated impressive performance in complex tasks, such …

Improving Diversity In Journalistic Sources With Computer Vision, Austin Johnson, Carlos Mercado, Sabiq Khan

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

News is a constant part of our lives, and has a significant impact on how we see the world. Simply put, journalistic sources are not diverse enough, and typically are only those in the majority. Newsrooms have made passionate declarations about wanting more diversity in their news sources. Our project aims to help with that. Building on top of the DEI toolkit, we aim to help newsrooms increase the diversity of their sources by analyzing their sources using a google search to pick an image and facial recognition software to determine the gender and race of the image.

Mysyllabi: An Online Syllabus Repository, Aristos Xanthus

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College students need more information when selecting coursework. During the time of course registration, students are limited to the course name, time, description, and professor. To make the best course selection, students need access to the syllabus which provides a comprehensive overview of the course as well as course-specific details such as the structure, workload, and teaching style. However, syllabi are hard to obtain before the first day of class, and they are seldom found online. Therefore, I propose MySyllabi, an online syllabus repository as a quick, accessible, and reliable location to find syllabi for a university’s classes/professors that will …

Expanding Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence For Strategic Learning, Dorian Clay

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Today, artificial intelligence is used to solve problems as varied as driving cars to diagnosing diseases. However, it still has major pitfalls. The most common form of AI today, machine learning, can produce near-certain predictions for some tasks, yet completely fail at a related but different task. Additionally, such algorithms cannot do reasoning for complex problems, are not well explainable, require massive training datasets, and are sensitive to new data.

One solution to these problems is combining today’s cutting-edge neural networks with an older idea in AI: symbolic AI. Such so-called “neuro-symbolic AI” systems can be understood at a high …

Netcon: Dynamic Resource Allocation To Containers Running On Network Switching Appliances, Siena Hanna, Justin Lee, Tania Pham

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

A WiFi Access Point (AP) is an important technology that switches data packets to transmit and receive wireless signals to create WiFi. These Access Points (AP) can have powerful processors, but they are idle most of the time [1]. Instead, these idle processing resources could be redirected to run containers for low-latency applications. However, it is essential to ensure that the AP does not suffer performance issues as a result of running containers. The main function of APs is to switch packets, and this function must be preserved while containers are running. In this thesis, we propose a method, NetCon, …

Smartnic Compatible Blockchain, Gavin Jampani, Eish Kapoor, Vivek Ponnala

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The intent of our Senior Design Thesis was to develop a software infrastructure for Blockchain applications that is compatible with SmartNIC (smart network interface card) hardware to contribute to the future of edge computing and Blockchain. The demand on network infrastructure is exploding, with there estimated to be 41.2 billion active network connections in 2025, 30.8 of those being IOT [13]. Of these active network IOT connections, a growing plurality will contain SmartNICs, which add valuable compute into the crucial intersection between the network and individual server. With it forecasted that three-fourths of all enterprise data will be processed at …

Enhancing The Quality Of Service And Energy Efficiency Of Wifi-Based Iot Networks, Jaykumar Sheth

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The 802.11 standard, known as WiFi, is currently being used for a wide variety of applications including Internet of Things (IoT). However, the contention between the traffic of IoT stations (STAs) as well as the contention between these flows and regular user-generated traffic reduces the energy efficiency and timeliness of IoT communication. To remedy this problem, in this thesis, we take the following approaches for mitigating the challenges faced by WiFi-based IoT networks: First, we highlight the importance of observability with respect to WiFi networks and how it helps the researchers to better examine the dynamics of issues and its …

Sengasafe, Patrick Zhang, Matthew Hall, Matthew Brunkhorst

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

There is a lack of effective education about sexual health for women in rural Uganda. Compared to the rest of the world, Uganda has a very high incidence rate of cervical cancer. This is much higher than it should be because it is well established that the human papillomavirus (HPV) is the primary cause of cervical cancer, and vaccinations for HPV have been available in rural Uganda since 2006. However, most rural Ugandan women are not vaccinated due to poor vaccination delivery, negative attitudes towards vaccination, and other social cultural factors. The existing sexual education system run by the Ugandan …

Donation Pick-Up And Tracking App For Columbian Food Bank, Alex Fang, Arren Leung, Adrian Ramirez Lopez, Rodrigo Mejia

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Banco de Alimentos Cali is responsible for picking up food donations from local businesses, organizing by perishable dates, and distributing them to the communities in need. When donations are picked up from the donor, the bank is responsible for sending their donors a certificate with the donation's information, including the dollar equivalent of their donation. This certificate is sent out only if the donor requests it for tax deduction purposes. While this plan may seem simple in theory, the food bank often struggles to get the necessary information from their drivers in regards to the donation, which ultimately delays the …

Halide Perovskites Enable Polaritonic Xy Spin Hamiltonian At Room Temperature, Renjie Tao, Kai Peng, Louis Haeberlé, Quanwei Li, Dafei Jin, Graham R. Fleming, Stéphane Kéna-Cohen, Xiang Zhang, Wei Bao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Exciton polaritons, the part-light and part-matter quasiparticles in semiconductor optical cavities, are promising for exploring Bose–Einstein condensation, non-equilibrium many-body physics and analogue simulation at elevated temperatures. However, a room-temperature polaritonic platform on par with the GaAs quantum wells grown by molecular beam epitaxy at low temperatures remains elusive. The operation of such a platform calls for long-lifetime, strongly interacting excitons in a stringent material system with large yet nanoscale-thin geometry and homogeneous properties. Here, we address this challenge by adopting a method based on the solution synthesis of excitonic halide perovskites grown under nanoconfinement. Such nanoconfinement growth facilitates the synthesis …

Generating Reality-Analogous Datasets For Autonomous Uav Navigation Using Digital Twin Areas, Thomas Lee, Susan Mckeever, Jane Courtney

Conference papers

In order for autonomously navigating Unmanned Air Vehicles(UAVs) to be implemented in day-to-day life, proof of safe operation will be necessary for all realistic navigation scenarios. For Deep Learning powered navigation protocols, this requirement is challenging to fulfil as the performance of a network is impacted by how much the test case deviates from data that the network was trained on. Though networks can generalise to manage multiple scenarios in the same task, they require additional data representing those cases which can be costly to gather. In this work, a solution to this data acquisition problem is suggested by way …

Easycompost: Using Augmented Reality To Improve Reality, Jonathan Nguyen, Andrew Bredar

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In the United States, a significant portion of landfill is undiverted compost and recyclable material. Instead of being sent to landfills, compostable material can be used as nutrient rich fertilizer and soil in local communities. Likewise, recyclable material can be processed at appropriate facilities to reuse materials and reduce the demand for unsustainable resources, like plastics. We seek to reduce the portion of undiverted recyclable and compostable waste by aiding in the proper sorting of waste at common sites of disposal, particularly trash cans in cafeterias and restaurants. We have designed a mobile, augmented reality, 3D object detection model that …

Wage Wizard, Jack Davey, Kyle Felip Mondina, Brett Rimmer

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Wage theft is a severe problem in Santa Clara County, with the Santa Clara Wage Theft Coalition identifying more than 25,000 local wage theft cases as of 20211. In this study we will be addressing the issue of wage theft particularly in the Santa Clara County caregiving industry. Wage theft is prevalent in the caregiving industry for several reasons. First, the industry employs many migrant Filipino workers who are unaware of their legal rights and protections or even the fact if they are experiencing wage theft or not. Second, the sizable undocumented portion of these workers are coerced to lower …

Orient: Teaching Object Oriented Programming With Augmented Reality, Shivangi Kar, Stephanie Lu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In our technologically advanced society, computational thinking is a critical skill for students to develop. Our project, ORIENT, is a mobile application that uses augmented reality to teach object-oriented programming(OOP), a fundamental concept in computer science. ORIENT is designed for novice programmers from the middle school level up, and it consists of a three-part tutorial series that teaches class creation, inheritance, and polymorphism-three of the most important tenets of object-oriented programming. ORIENT, which was built in Unity and made specifically for the iPad, includes a series of interactive tutorials with immediate feedback; it encourages students to explore OOP in a …

Brass: Bandwidth Reservation On Arista Switching Systems, Angelus Mcnally, Conrad Park, Tyler Tivadar

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

As networking technologies in the fields of Cloud, Fog, and Edge computing continue to gain popularity and widespread adoption, their contributions to network traffic load and congestion in their respective data processing layers are expected to increase. The implication of this inevitable change is that overall traffic congestion is expected to increase as more devices are connected. As a consequence of this congestion, network performance is expected to decrease, and the best effort nature of network traffic means that there is no guarantee that applications will continue to communicate at rates required for operation. This could prevent certain networking applications …

Method And System For Region Proposal Based Object Recognition For Estimating Planogram Compliance, Avishek Kumar Shaw, Rajashree Ramakrishnan, Shilpa Yadukumar Rao, Pranoy Hari, Dipti Prasad Mukherjee, Bikash Santra

Patents

No abstract provided.

Deep Learning Pseudocode Generation: A Qualitative Analysis, Colin Rioux

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Pseudocode is a traditional teaching tactic in computer science, yet it is not standardized and programming language dependent. Thus, it can be quite time consuming to write it. With the advancement of AI methodologies in NLP, AI could help address this problem. This work investigates the quality of AI generated pseudocode from source code. Five studies are conducted in this work to measure pseudocode quality, where each study modifies model input to observe accuracy and generalizability. The results show that there is an association between pseudocode quality and training and test set similarity. Furthermore, a sizable and diverse training set …

The Future Of Camera Technology With Atul Ingle, Atul Ingle

PDXPLORES Podcast

Single-photon camera sensors have the potential to revolutionize digital camera technology. These sensors can capture individual photons at high speeds, circumventing some of the limitations of current digital camera technologies. One challenge, however, is the sheer amount of data generated by the sensor, which is a hindrance to their widespread adoption. With the support of the National Science Foundation, Assistant Professor Atul Ingle is developing algorithms to solve this problem--algorithms that could enable the adoption of single-photon sensors in applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to medical imaging and the cameras in cellphones.

Knowledge-Driven Drug-Use Namedentity Recognition With Distant Supervision, Goonmeet Bajaj, Ugur Kursuncu, Manas Gaur, Usha Lokala, Ayaz Hyder, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Amit Sheth

Publications

As Named Entity Recognition (NER) has been essential in identifying critical elements of unstructured content, generic NER tools remain limited in recognizing entities specific to a domain, such as drug use and public health. For such high-impact areas, accurately capturing relevant entities at a more granular level is critical, as this information influences real-world processes. On the other hand, training NER models for a specific domain without handcrafted features requires an extensive amount of labeled data, which is expensive in human effort and time. In this study, we employ distant supervision utilizing a domain-specific ontology to reduce the need for …

Emt: Software-Based Energy Management Tool For Wifi Iot Devices, Aastha Chawla, Sreya Goyalia, Nidusha Kannan

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Many WiFi-based IoT (Internet of Things) devices rely on limited energy resources such as batteries or energy harvesting. Although monitoring and studying the energy consumption of these devices is essential, the use of external, hardware-based energy measurement tools is costly, non-scalable, and introduces many challenges regarding the connectivity of such tools with devices. In this thesis, we propose EMT, a novel tool to collect, analyze, and monitor the power cycles of IoT devices without the need for any external tools. The basic idea is to modify the WiFi Access Point's software to keep track of the power status of devices …

Unstumm | Augmented Voyage: A Platform For Telematic Live Performances In Augmented Reality, Unstumm Unstumm, Nicola Hein, Claudia Schmitz, Sven Hahne Hahne

Journal of Network Music and Arts

UnStumm | Augmented Voyage is curated and developed by time-based media artist Claudia Schmitz and sound artist and guitarist Nicola L. Hein. It was programmed and developed by software engineer Sven Hahne. UnStumm | Augmented Voyage is also a mobile app and server infrastructure that serves as the artistic vehicle to realize telematic live performances with artists from around the globe. It consists of video art, music, and dance in augmented reality.
Through the use of our software, the audience is able to view the video streams by video artists as 3D video sculptures and listen to the audio streams …

“Dancedemic” In A Pandemic: A New Networked Reality, Ellen Pearlman

Journal of Network Music and Arts

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 forced large parts of the globe and entire industries to shut down. Network connectivity became a necessary lifeline deploying a host of technologies that, while once considered experimental, were to be adopted as a vital part of just-in-time solutions-based practices. This report examines the implementation of one of these topologies in the form of an artist-built, artist-owned global network in the hopes that other small-sized organizations can benefit from these ad hoc, but successful solutions.

A Spectrum Of Online Rehearsal Applications: A Potential Means For Cultural Connection, Dana Kemack Goot, W. Scott Deal

Journal of Network Music and Arts

The current array of telematic music applications offers exceptional opportunities to transcend distance and enable networking between various cultures and communities. As a means to achieve this, network music applications require assessment through their previous implementations, installation requirements, cost, hardware requirements, and usability in order to assess their potential and to decipher improvements needed as a means of cultural connectivity. An early precursor of telematic music was an innovative concert by Paul Robeson in 1957, which circumvented political restrictions and enabled activism as it occurred, despite the U.S. State Department’s revocation of Robeson’s passport due to his left-wing tendencies and …

Telematic Immersion: Performance, Technology, And Audiovisual Work In Virtual Studies (2020) By Paulo C. Chagas, Cássia Carrascoza Bomfim

Journal of Network Music and Arts

This article discusses the concept of telematic immersion developed in partnership with composer Paulo C. Chagas. Focusing on Chagas’s work Virtual Studies (2020) for flute, live electronics, and 3D video, we reflect on different aspects of artistic creativity in the telematic environment including the use of audio and video technology and the multiple connections between musicians and apparatuses. The article discusses how the parameters of chamber music in the physical environment, such as the uniqueness of the live performance, the corporality of sound, and the visual and choreographic dimension of the performance are being transformed through the virtual setting of …

Sonic Proximities: Locating Oneself And The Others Within A “Migratory Journey”, Ximena Alarcon Diaz

Journal of Network Music and Arts

The INTIMAL App© is a mobile application that synchronously senses people’s walking rhythms in distant locations and then rhythmically sonifies these with the user’s chosen audio frequencies. Taken altogether, the perception of breathing and walking rhythms across space and time creates an embodied telepresence. At the level of content, the app has provided first-hand narrative accounts about the migration experiences of Colombian women living in Europe. These stories are meant to elicit a response from the listener, allowing for a path to be built out of new relationships that emerge between voices and sound frequencies. In the context of the …

Editorial, Sarah Weaver

Journal of Network Music and Arts

No abstract provided.

Spotlight Report #6: Proffering Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Research Agreements: Pilot Project Findings For Ieee P7012 Wg, Noreen Y. Whysel, Lisa Levasseur

Publications and Research

What if people had the ability to assert their own legally binding permissions for data collection, use, sharing, and retention by the technologies they use? The IEEE P7012 has been working on an interoperability specification for machine-readable personal privacy terms to support this ability since 2018. The premise behind the work of IEEE P7012 is that people need technology that works on their behalf—i.e. software agents that assert the individual’s permissions and preferences in a machine-readable format.

Thanks to a grant from the IEEE Technical Activities Board Committee on Standards (TAB CoS), we were able to explore the attitudes of …

Methodologies For Quantum Circuit And Algorithm Design At Low And High Levels, Edison Tsai

Dissertations and Theses

Although the concept of quantum computing has existed for decades, the technology needed to successfully implement a quantum computing system has not yet reached the level of sophistication, reliability, and scalability necessary for commercial viability until very recently. Significant progress on this front was made in the past few years, with IBM planning to create a 1000-qubit chip by the end of 2023, and Google already claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy. Other major industry players such as Intel and Microsoft have also invested significant amounts of resources into quantum computing research.

Any viable computing system requires both hardware and …

Collage Art Therapy Bot, Roland Afaga, Dyllon Au, Jeremy Victor Reyes, Alayna Wong

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Our Collage Art Therapy Bot is an application that utilizes collage therapy to help users navigate their feelings and give them a better understanding of themselves. Unlike other forms of art therapy, collage therapy is much more inclusive and does not require any artistics skill that may intimidate users from participating. The user interface is split into three sections: the photo library, the chat bot, and the photo collage. The user can scroll through the library and pick the photos that they feel connected to. Then, the chatbot prompts the user to tell it what made them choose the photo. …

Large Scale Database Audio Collection Of Tuberculosis Patients: : The Ekifuba Test, Jt Vinolus, Daniela De La Torre, Aimee Kerr, Jordan Randleman

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

One of the top 10 causes of death, 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis (TB) every year. And yet, in 2018, 1.7 billion people were infected with the disease (“Global Health - Newsroom - Tuberculosis.”). This 99.99% recovery rate demonstrates that, when treated with antibiotics, TB is an extremely curable condition, but an early diagnosis is critical to surviving the illness. Developing countries face the largest hurdles to accessing TB screening technologies, and they make up a disproportionately high fraction of worldwide TB deaths. A possible solution to this problem would be to use machine learning (ML) to detect TB …