Engineering Commons^™

A New Deep Decoder Type Cascaded Feedforward Neural Network For Critical Heat Flux Prediction In Power Reactors, Rehan Zubair Khalid, Atta Ullah, Asifullah Khan, Mansoor Hameed Inayat, Muthanna H. Al-Dahhan

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Critical Heat Flux (CHF) is a fundamental parameter for ensuring the performance, reliability, safety, and economic viability of water-cooled nuclear reactors. Despite its significance, the absence of a deterministic theory for CHF prediction poses a substantial challenge in thermal engineering. Consequently, various experimental and numerical models have been developed, yet no universally accepted model comprehensively addresses the wide range of flow conditions encountered in practical applications. The accurate prediction of CHF remains a complex and critical task. This work introduces a novel Deep Decoder Type Cascaded feedforward Neural Network (DD-CFNN) to predict CHF across a broad spectrum of operating conditions. …

Drone Medical Package Delivery For Improved Transportation And Better Patient Outcomes Final Implementation Report, Amro El-Adle, Madeline Alden, Yin-Hsuen Chen, Melissa Davidson

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

The Drone Medical Package Delivery for Improved Transportation and Better Patient Outcomes planning and prototyping grant involves five partners, including Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission (A-NPDC), Riverside Health System, Old Dominion University (ODU), Virginia Institute for Spaceflight & Autonomy (VISA), Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), and DroneUp. The partners worked together to address access, safety, reliability and sustainability for medical and emergency response package delivery via drone, specifically, where the use of aerial drones could lead to better patient outcomes and improved safety and emergency response.

The goal of the project was to develop an operational prototype that woul evolve into …

Comparing Funders' Altruism Versus Self-Interest: Leveraging The Context Of Crisis, Dan Liu, Guangzhi Shang, Cynthia Fan Yang

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

While reward-based crowdfunding has widespread popularity, the motivations driving funders, balancing self-interest and altruism, have remained puzzling. Prior research has been constrained by examination methods and produced mixed findings regarding the weight of altruism versus self-interest among funders. Our study takes a fresh perspective, delving into funder behavior amid a major crisis—the tumultuous backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reveal that funders not only display an increased willingness to contribute but also significantly amplify their contributions, particularly to projects in crisis-affected regions, irrespective of external incentives like rewards. This underscores the prevalence of altruistic motives among funders in challenging …

Understanding The Determinants Of Blockchain Adoption: An Empirical Study, Amarpreet Kohli, Nihar Kumthekar, Piyush Shah, Rebecca Jauch

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Blockchain technology (BT) has the potential to enhance security and robustness of transactions through a distributed ledger bookkeeping process. This study employs technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and threat-rigidity theory (TRT) to examine whether perceived disruption caused by COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the adoption of BT, and inclination to adopt BT in the US. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique backdrop, as it affected businesses across all industries, sizes, and geographies. Results show a non-significant effect of perceived pandemic disruption on the current stage of BT adoption and intention to adopt BT. However, disruption readiness positively influences the current stage of BT …

Comparing Vr And Tv In Nigeria And The U.S.: Impacts On Empathy, Engagement, And Enjoyment, Jinhee Yoo, Eugene A. Ohu, Radosław Mącik

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This study (N = 170), involving participants from Nigeria and the U.S., investigated how different technologies (TV and VR) affect users' empathy (α = .93), engagement (α = .93), enjoyment (α = .93), preferences, and likelihood of technology use. Participants watched an animated documentary titled “Is Anna OK?” at two different time points, utilizing VR (Oculus Rift S) and TV, following which they completed measuring empathy, engagement, enjoyment, device preference, and usage likelihood. Analysis via one-way ANOVA and chi-square tests revealed that VR users reported significantly higher empathy and enjoyment compared to TV viewers, particularly on second viewing. Combining both …

The Effect Of Liquid Conductivity On A Helium Plasma Jet And The Hydrogen Peroxide Production, Edwin A. Oshin, M. Ziaur Rahman, Chunqi Jiang

Bioelectrics Publications

Understanding plasma-liquid interactions and the impact of the electrical conductivity (σ) of liquid on plasma is important for plasma applications in water treatment and medicine. Ultrapure water, phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) solution, biological media, and sodium chloride (NaCl) solutions at various concentrations were used in this study to provide a broad range of conductivity values ranging from 0.055 μS cm⁻¹ to 222 mS cm⁻¹. A helium atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ) impinging on liquid was generated in ambient air using a hollow-needle electrode that was powered by 200 ns, 7 kV pulses at a pulse repetition frequency of …

Determining The Transient Electric Field And The Effect Of Pulse Repetition Frequency On The Field In A Repetitive 10-Ns Pulsed Discharge In A Quiescent Ch₄-Air Mixture, Chunqi Jiang

Bioelectrics Publications

The goal of this research is to understand the underlying physics enabled by nanosecond pulsed power in a discharge initiation and the following physicochemical processes that favor lean-fuel plasma ignition for combustion. The hypothesis of this project is that pulsed power waveforms such as the pulse repetition frequency (PRF), voltage amplitude, and dielectric surface alter the reduced electric field during the initiation of the discharge, resulting in different plasma properties, which will vary the physicochemical processes for efficient and selective radical productions. This is especially important for lean-burn combustion and reducing emission.

Traceai: Intelligent Distributed Tracing Using Large Language Models, Mihir Dhirajlal Satra

Master's Projects

Distributed systems are difficult to trace using traditional methods due to the scale of data volume and complexity, and they usually require a lot of manual analysis. TraceAI tries to solve these problems by integrating Large Language Models with the tracing tools to automatically enhance the trace data evaluation. The project aims to provide an AI-driven solution for monitoring and understanding the flow of requests across services, anomaly detection, root cause analysis and performance optimization. It can thus automate finding out systems problems using LLMs thereby carrying out large scale trace data analysis. Anticipated results from the effort will be …

Faux Capabilities: A Novel Approach For Code Analysis, Tanay Godse

Master's Projects

When using third-party packages or libraries, it is crucial to understand their behavior. Typically, this requires developers to either conduct code reviews or set up sandbox environments for testing or write unit tests with mocked values for every function used in their code. However, these approaches are often inefficient and time-consuming. A more effective solution would provide developers with a broad understanding of the functionality required by the code they plan to import. This can be done using object capabilities, where a particular functionality is the capability that an object must possess, in order to be able to perform the …

Proxy Cap - La Lua Protector, Swift Sheng

Master's Projects

Inspired by the object capability model and sandbox, this project, Proxy Cap, introduces a new Lua access control model that improves the language’s security without sacrificing usability. Object capability is an unconventional but powerful security model. The security model closely observes the principle of least authority. Ambient authority, the omnipresent global environment, does not exist in the object capability computation world, and no resource is accessible unless explicitly assigned. Only connectivity begets connectivity. Lua is an extensible and high-performing scripting language based on ANSI C. The language is popular in many fields but faces security challenges. Lua has a non-traditional …

Detecting Ai-Generated News Articles Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms, Lilou Sicard-Noel

Master's Projects

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation and heightened concerns over misinformation and the erosion of journalistic integrity. Detecting AI-generated text is critical to addressing these challenges, yet current detection methods face adaptability, scalability, and accuracy limitations. This research paper uses machine-learning techniques to explore the classification of human and AI-generated articles, including a mix of human and AI-written content. The primary focus is on evaluating the effectiveness of clustering algorithms (K-Means and Agglomerative Clustering), auto-encoders, and Part-Of- Speech Tag Transition Matrix Log-Likelihood for distinguishing between AI-generated and human-written texts. Our findings reveal that while …

Effects Of Data Augmentation On Sponge Identification Using Computer Vision Models, George Ku

Master's Projects

Coral reefs can be primarily found in tropical and sub-tropical regions of our oceans, providing a thriving habitat for millions of species. Marine sponges, which can be frequently found in coral reefs, play a critical role that contributes to the maintenance of these ecosystems, including the recycling of nutrients through water filtration. However, rising ocean temperatures and acidification due to climate change have resulted in the bleaching and death of coral reefs worldwide. In order to preserve these reefs and the sponges that depend on them, scientists have been performing studies on their biodiversity. This includes collecting numerous images of …

Unconditional-To-Conditional Transfer And Optimization For Web-Based Skybox Gan, Crystal Kwong

Master's Projects

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are known for their ability to generate high quality
images mimicking real life or even particular art styles. Yet for all their capability, casually
training a GAN on an average machine can be infeasible as GANs require an enormous amount
of time and data to train. Even with a trained GAN, model inference demands heavy
computations, making GANs difficult to deploy on applications. To address these limitations,
techniques such as transfer learning and quantization have been leveraged to speed up training of
GANs and lighten computational cost of GAN inference. This project aims to use such …

Disease Diagnosis Using Rag Llm With Smart Prompt Engineering, Qadeerullah Syed

Master's Projects

Although recent trends indicate that LLMs outperform traditional methods in solving complex problems with enhanced reasoning, there has been barely any progress in replicating the quality of diagnoses like those of actual human doctors. The identification of an accurate diagnosis with thorough reasoning is still a significant challenge, even with advanced AI models. The process of performing accurate diagnosis remains challenging due to a lack of transparency in state-of-the-art models existing today, a lack of explanation in the diagnosis process, an emphasis on results rather than reasoning, and a lack of foundational knowledge in models, along with limited exploration of …

Transformers In Time-Series Forecasting: Enhancing Robustness Via Dynamic Attention Mechanisms, Kush Patel

Master's Projects

Transformer architectures have emerged as powerful tools for time series forecasting, excelling at capturing complex temporal dependencies across multivariate inputs. However, these models are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks such as the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Basic Iterative Method (BIM), which can significantly degrade predictive performance through small, targeted perturbations. This work integrates dynamic attention mechanisms, adaptive masking modules that introduce controlled variability into attention pathways, into a transformer forecasting model to enhance robustness against such attacks. Using two distinct datasets, we compare the performance of a standard transformer and a dynamic attention-enhanced transformer under both clean and …

An Evidence-Based Approach To Predicting Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma, Surya Teja Nalluri

Master's Projects

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a complex disease with hidden clinical indicators, so a reliable diagnosis of PDAC requires high precision and sophisticated analysis. Traditional probabilistic methods often rely on making unwarranted assumptions or undesirable approximations about probabilistic estimates, limiting their ability to provide the precision needed for correct diagnosis and treatment planning. In contrast, Dempster–Shafer Theory offers a formal framework for integrating uncertain and potentially conflicting evidence. This makes it well-suited for analyzing incomplete and ambiguous data typically associated with PDAC. By employing an evidential reasoning (ER) model based on Dempster-Shafer Theory, this approach systematically combines and evaluates imperfect …

Identifying Red Sponges On Arms Plates By Preprocessing Images Using Histogram Equalization, Barry Ng

Master's Projects

Sponges play a vital role in marine ecosystems, being the only organisms capable of converting dissolved organic matter (DOM) into particulate organic matter (POM). They provide nutrients for coral reefs to thrive in oligotrophic waters. Autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS) are used to measure the biodiversity of coral reefs by simulating the complex cavities inside reef structures. Organisms settle on them and scientists can retrieve them after a period of time for analysis. Images are taken of ARMS plates after they are retrieved. Human analysis is unsuitable for the analysis of ARMS plates due to the huge number of images. …

Hierarchical Bloom Filter Tree (Hbft): Scalable Geospatial Metadata Indexing For Bigdata Systems, Mrudula Patteparapu

Master's Projects

Big Data infrastructure growth has produced overwhelming metadata volumes which create extensive problems for spatial indexing and both system scalability and database queries. Traditional solutions consisting of R-trees and conventional Bloom filters manage to provide either range query support or approximate membership testing, yet they face performance issues when used at large-scale metadata management. This research proposes Hierarchical Bloom Filter Tree (HBFT) as an improved framework that integrates hierarchical spatial partitioning with partitioned, scalable, cuckoo, and striped Bloom filter variants based on existing studies in hierarchical and probabilistic indexing. The complete evaluation process shows that HBFT outperforms PostGIS (an industry-standard …

Medilightrag: A System For Medical Query Response Using Fine-Tuned Llms And Graph Based Retrieval, Rajiv Karthik Reddy Kodimala

Master's Projects

The exponential increase in medical data has created a greater demand for precise and efficient information retrieval systems. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) face domain-specific difficulties such as sophisticated medical jargon, situational comprehension, and the continual advancement of healthcare knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we present MediLightRAG, an innovative two-stage system which integrates parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language models with LightRAG’s graph-based retrieval. The first stage focuses on enabling accurate resource-efficient model adaptation for the medical domain through QLoRA fine-tuning. In the second stage, LightRAG’s two-tiered retrieval architecture that combines graph-based indexing with dynamic knowledge retrieval is employed to enhance …

Mycelia: Cross-Chain Data Oracle Using Frost Signatures, Bala Komatireddy

Master's Projects

The interoperability of heterogeneous blockchain networks is the basis for the widespread application of blockchains in various fields. Cross-chain data oracles play a significant role in enabling distributed applications to exchange data and assets across different blockchains, thereby greatly enriching and expanding the application scenarios and use of blockchains. With the continuous advancement of blockchain technology, more and more researchers and industry participants have begun to focus on developing cross-chain data oracles. Current cross-chain data oracles face issues with trust, as they rely on centralized intermediaries or limited validator networks, increasing the risk of manipulation or single points of failure. …

Moving Target Defense With Quantized Morphence: Defense Quantification Against Common Adversaries In Image And Time Series Problems, Rithika Dhamala

Master's Projects

In recent years, the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial attacks has emerged as a serious threat, particularly in domains where reliability and robustness are critical. This project builds upon the Morphence framework, a Moving Target Defense (MTD) strategy designed to counter adversarial threats by maintaining a dynamic pool of models and introducing randomness at inference time. While Morphence was originally developed for image classification tasks, this work not only reproduces the original architecture using MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets but also extends the core principles to an entirely new domain: time series forecasting. The project proposes a unified defense …

Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Survival Analysis In Cancers: Methods And Evaluation On The Surveillance, Epidemiology, And End Results Database, Jyothi Vaidyanathan

Master's Projects

Healthcare is one of the most important fields that benefits from advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). From classic models like linear regression to cuttingedge transformers, AI is applied across various healthcare subdomains, such as drug discovery, predictive analytics, and personalized medicine, to name a few. These techniques enable medical practitioners to make more informed decisions, significantly improving both the speed and accuracy of diagnoses and treatments. Machine learning has played a transformative role in oncology, especially in areas like early detection, diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient monitoring, by analyzing medical images, clinical information, genomic data, sensor information. Our research aims …

Ai-Based Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Model For Wireless Network Management, Sai Sashank Peddibhotla

Master's Projects

The growth of wireless communication has introduced challenges in the dynamic and resource contrived space which is the efficient utilization of bandwidth and spectrum. This research presents a model for dynamic spectrum allocation with the help of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for feature extraction and the Deep Q-Network (DQN) model’s reinforcement learning architecture. The CNN captures both spatial and temporal features of the network states and gives them to the DQN for optimal allocation decision making. This CNN-DQN architecture effectively implements spectrum resource allocation in wireless networks and adapts to resource allocation changes within performance bounds. The system’s performance is …

Energy Considerations For Large Pre-Trained Neural Networks, Leo Mei

Master's Projects

In recent years, neural network models have achieved phenomenal performance due to the increasing parameters and complexity of model architectures. However, these advancements come with high environmental costs as they require massive computational resources and consume substantial amounts of electricity, leading to high carbon emissions. Previous studies have demonstrated that substantial redundancies exist in large pre-trained models, and reducing these redundancies through compression would not compromise model performance. While these studies focused on retaining comparable model performance, the direct impact of compression on energy consumption when training models appears to have received little attention. By quantifying the energy usage associated …

Photoproof: A Mobile Application For Verifying The Authenticity Of Images, Pruthviraj Urankar

Master's Projects

The easy access to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as deepfakes and generative adversarial networks (GANs), has facilitated the creation of highly realistic artificial images, thereby undermining the authenticity of photos in today’s digital age. Misinformation and manipulation are key dangers to digital content due to this advancement. Therefore, the need for reliable methods of photo verification and authentication has become increasingly important. This report presents a decentralized iOS app that uses blockchain to ensure photo authenticity. The app leverages Ethereum smart contracts and cryptographic hashing to securely log image metadata. When a user takes a photo, the app hashes …

Semanticgraphrec: Lightweight Hybrid Recommendations Powered By Semantic Item Representations And Graph Collaborative Filtering, Devi Surya Kumari Akula

Master's Projects

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for collaborative filtering. However, they often fall short in fully leveraging side textual content, resulting in suboptimal recommendations. To address this limitation, we explore the synergy between GNNs and deep contextual embeddings of item descriptions, aiming to enhance recommendation quality on the Amazon-Books dataset. We propose SemanticGraphRec, which combines GNNs with Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage both collaborative filtering and textual item content. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating semantic item embeddings produced by fine-tuning LLMs consistently improves performance. Our approach enhances recommendation relevance in sparse data scenarios by leveraging …

Optimization Of Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Using An Island Genetic Algorithm For Makespan Minimization, Sahil Salim

Master's Projects

The Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that involves the sequencing of n jobs across m machines in the same order to minimize the total makespan value. This project proposes a Heterogeneous Island Genetic Algorithm framework (HIGA). Each island represents a group of solutions that evolve in parallel using different initialization heuristics, crossover and mutation operators, and adaptive parameters. A dynamic, stagnation-based migration strategy is proposed to maintain targeted communication between the islands. The proposed HIGA approach was compared against the basic Standard Genetic Algorithm (SGA) and a more advanced Niche-based Genetic Algorithm (NEH-NGA) on …

Enhancing Recommender Systems Using Graph Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory And Textual Embeddings, Tianxiang Chen

Master's Projects

Recommender systems surround us. They shape what we watch, how we buy, and even what our future might look like next. The Amazon Review Dataset and Movielens, those two datasets will help this project explore how to improve recommender systems through the user’s preferences. Two methods were combined: sequence-based models and graph-based models. Sequence models, such as LSTMs and Transformers, look at the order of user actions to find patterns by their sequence. On the other hand, Graphbased models focus on relationships between users, items, and their attributes. Textual embeddings added depth and context. Both methods offer something special, according …

Traffic Forecasting With Vset-Nets: A Vgae Spatial Embedding For Temporal Networks Approach, Mrunmayee Dhapre

Master's Projects

Traffic forecasting is important for improving transportation systems by enabling better traffic management, congestion reduction, and urban planning. However, predicting traffic accurately is challenging due to the strong spatial dependencies between different road segments and the temporal changes in traffic patterns over time. Traditional time-series and graph models often struggle to capture both of these aspects effectively. In response, recent research has focused on temporal graph representation learning methods that jointly consider spatial relationships and temporal features in networks. This project proposes a hybrid model called VSET-Nets (VGAE Spatial Embedding for Temporal Networks) that employs Variational Graph Autoencoders (VGAEs) for …

Domain-Specific Graph Rag Pipelines: Optimized Approaches For Building Efficient Personal Knowledge Repositories, Omkar Yadav

Master's Projects

Managing personal data, including notes, calendar events, to-do lists, and other personal information, has become increasingly complex and challenging. In response to this issue, I propose a framework using RAG that enables a large language model (LLM) to efficiently query this data without requiring training on the personal data itself. Conventional retrieval systems, including those leveraging vector-based retrievalaugmented generation (RAG), are effective at handling basic queries but struggle to deliver coherent global abstractions, integrate diverse knowledge sources, and account for temporal nuances. This research explores domain-specific Graph based RAG frameworks that incorporate a knowledge graph to better model relationships, thereby …