Computer Engineering Commons^™

Augmenting Machine Learning Technique Through Natural Language, Tasmia Tasrin

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

While artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have proven effective at addressing many of the challenges that we face in our everyday lives, there are many situations in which these methods struggle. Examples include environments where AI or ML systems must perform complex behaviors or those where rewards are difficult to calculate. To address this limitation, interactive machine learning (IML) techniques have been introduced, which incorporate machine-understandable human feedback into traditional ML approaches. This feedback is often given as a discrete, positive or negative numeric value. This feedback is typically provided as often as possible to convey a dense …

Learning From Leads: A 1d Dilated Resnet For Ecg Chagas Disease Screening, Somesh Saini, Matheus Lima Diniz Araujo

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prediction Of Glass Transition Temperature Of Polymers Using Structure-Based Models, Nicholas Wolfe

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The focus for this study is prediction of glass transition temperatures of polymers using machine learning models. The preprocessing of the data included the generation of descriptors, the scaling of the data, the principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction, and the clustering of the data. Three methods of property predictions were utilized including Linear Regression, Random Forest, and a Feedforward Neural Network. The dataset consisted of over 7000 polymers each with their respective glass transition temperatures. This study found that the Random Forest model returned the best results followed by the Feedforward Neural Network then the Linear Regression model. Each …

Personalized Physics Learning Through Ai: Insights From Problem Generation, Chatbot Dialogues, And Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Atharva Dange

Physics Dissertations - Archive

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform science education, yet questions remain on how best to integrate these technologies into teaching and learning. This dissertation investigates the use of AI-driven tools in university physics courses through three complementary studies. In the first study, a generative language model (ChatGPT) was used to create novel physics homework problems aligned with course objectives. Analysis showed that, after expert vetting, AI-generated questions can foster higher-order problem-solving and reduce student reliance on solution memorization, though careful instructor oversight is required to ensure accuracy. The second study embedded an AI chatbot as a learning aid in …

Efficient And Test-Time Adaptive Visual Object Tracking In The Wild, Ram J. Zaveri

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Tracking a single object, given the location at the first frame, has been an ongoing challenge in the vision community for decades. Most recent approaches provide reasonably good performance, especially when benchmarked on in-distribution (ID) datasets, i.e., on the testing portion of the same datasets used for training. However, they incur high computational costs and hardware constraints, making their deployment in the wild for mobile, autonomous, and IoT applications still challenging. Efficient visual trackers address the efficiency aspect of such bottlenecks; however, they tend to overfit to their training distributions and lack generalization abilities, resulting in them performing well on …

Afapbp: Aggregate Function Accelerated Parallel Bit-Pattern Computing, Charles Z. Armstrong

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Classical computing models have proven sufficient for problems of the complexity class ``P", but problems of a higher complexity class like ``NP", ``NP-Hard", etc. have been shown to be more resistant to efficient computation. Quantum Computing is an alternative computing model that specifically targets performing computations within the ``NP" complexity class in close to linear time. However, Quantum Computing has its own set of problems. Methods for dealing with quantum decoherence, error correction, and difficulty in scaling have all inhibited Quantum Computing from becoming a commonly used computational model. This thesis introduces AFAPBP (Aggregate Function Accelerated Parallel Bit Pattern), a …

Image-To-Text Transcription: Analyzing And Describing Visual Content, Zixiao Fan

Master's Projects

Image captioning, which provides a textual understanding of visual content, is the fundamental support for the advancement of Human-A.I. Interaction technology. In the hope of exploring the application of such technology, this project focuses on two specific goals. One is to directly explore the application of the image informationretrieving abilities, and the other is to dive into the specifics of the pipeline and components of image captioning models. As a result, this project presents a working app that exploits the text retrieval functionalities to enable image storage with functions like tagging and transcription. It also supports search functionality with a …

Advanced Knowledge Extraction With Biomedical Data Using Llms, Akshat Krishna

Master's Projects

The rapid growth of biomedical research has led to an overwhelming volume of unstructured textual data in the scientific literature. This has necessitated the development of an automated approach for knowledge extraction and integration. In

this project, we present a comprehensive pipeline for constructing a unified biomed- ical knowledge graph by combining two well-known datasets: CHEMPROT [1],

which captures chemical–protein interactions, and EU-ADR [2], which annotates drug–gene–disease relationships. In order to identify important biomedical entities and interactions from CHEMPROT dataset, we perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) and relation Extraction (RE) using state-of-the-art biomedical models like BioBERT [3], BioGPT [4] and …

Mitigating Cold Start Problem Through Metadata Integration And User Preference Analysis, Prabaljit Walia

Master's Projects

Recommendation systems power the most popular platforms in the world: from content catalogs on Netflix to custom feeds on TikTok – the importance of recommendation systems is significant. Collaborative filtering, the most popular recommendation technique, is essentially based on the idea of leveraging collective user intelligence i.e., creating recommendations by finding similar users. But this technique suffers when there is not enough data in the profiles of users, formally termed as the cold start problem. This research focuses on this problem by introducing an approach that integrates metadata-driven similarity measures with profile expansion techniques. Our approach combines traditional collaborative filtering …

Machine Learning Based Network Traffic Classification With Cosine-Similarity Based Out-Of-Distribution Detection, Prabhat Edupuganti

Master's Projects

The changes occurring in the amount of encrypted network traffic is growing at an alarming rate. This development has created intricate problems in traffic classification which is vital for effective cybersecurity. Moreover, most frameworks seem to ignore OOD detection, model calibration and novel pattern detection as cornerstone problem areas. The due analysis is presented as a machine learning approach aimed at resolving encrypted traffic classification issues and focuses on novel OOD detection and calibration issues. Primary contributions comprise detection of out-of-distribution states using softmax scaled cosine similarity, advanced variance-based feature elimination, and lowering ECE using stringent NNs. This work demonstrates …

Real-Time Adaptive Framework For Topic Modeling In Social Engineering Attacks, Manav Bhasin

Master's Projects

Detecting social engineering attempts is crucial for security, as these threats are becoming more frequent and increasingly exploit human vulnerabilities. This research focuses on topic modeling using conversational data from Kevin Mitnick’s ”The Art of Deception” with dialogues that illustrate various social engineering strategies. The dataset comprises manually extracted and synthetically augmented conversations to ensure natural dialogue flow. Two methodologies are presented for utterance-level and global topic extraction: prompt engineering leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, characterized by few-shot learning and chain-of-thought prompting, and Quantized Low Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) utilizing Mistral’s 7B instruct model for efficient fine-tuning. Through experimentation and evaluation, this study …

Cognitive Map Generation For Vision And Language Navigation, Alexander Sandoval Mesa

Dissertations and Theses

Visual-Language Navigation (VLN) presents significant challenges for autonomous agents, such as robots and virtual assistants, particularly in complex, dynamic environments where the seamless integration of visual perception and natural language understanding is critical. Traditional VLN systems often struggle with effectively aligning language instructions and visual scene understanding, limiting their adaptability and navigation efficiency.

This thesis proposes a novel Cognitive Map-based framework that addresses these challenges by transforming natural language navigation instructions into structured graph representations. The Cognitive Map consists of nodes representing waypoints, landmarks, decision points, and edges encoding spatial relationships and navigational actions. These maps are generated using Large …

Swarming Segregation: Leveraging Swarm Intelligence And Regionalization As Instruments For School District Desegregation, Jeffrey Wooten

Theses and Dissertations

Even after Brown led to the South briefly having the most diverse schools in the nation, schools throughout the Northeast have remained the most segregated in the nation for decades. While federal jurisprudence has made compelling desegregation pursuant to the Equal Protection Clause more challenging, New Jersey has a particularly favorable landscape to address severe segregation. With a highly diverse, densely populated public enrollment, favorable state constitutional precedent, and a history of successfully compelling desegregation, New Jersey is fertile ground exploring regional desegregation. Scholars, judges, and even plaintiffs in ongoing litigation (Latino Action Network v. N.J.) have called for New …

Homomorphically Encrypted Faceted Values, Tanmay Singal

Master's Projects

Faceted values prevent the implicit flow of sensitive information by controlling the visibility of program data. They achieve this by maintaining two facets for each variable: a public facet, which is observable, and a private facet, which remains hidden. Although this method secures the flow of sensitive data, it can be leaked if the server storing the faceted values is compromised. While faceted values may be encrypted on the server, doing so would necessitate that the private facets be briefly decrypted during execution to allow arithmetic operations to be performed on them, creating an attack vector for information to be …

Bot Detection In Social Media Using Graphsage And Bert, Abhishek Deshmukh

Master's Projects

This project details a novel bot detection system developed to battle the ever- changing challenge of disinformation, misinformation, and other bot-generated content.

The methodology employed in this project combines the text-based analytical strength of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) with the strength of GraphSage (Graph Sample and Aggregation) for analyzing network structures. The project concatenates BERT and GraphSage vectors to create an 896-size feature embedding with a rich blend of network and text features. This project employs a Support Vector Machine to process the concatenated embeddings, as SVM works well with high-dimensional data. This project was evaluated on two …

Ai Powered Legal Decision Support System, Alisha Rath

Master's Projects

The large volume of legal cases presented by judicial professionals has made it
challenging to study and predict results. With advances in research methods and
technology, predicting law cases in a more accurate manner has become an important
trend. Prediction tools based on AI may help manage a large number of legislative
texts and documents that cannot possibly be fully read, reduce the number of cases
to be seen, and give accurate outcomes of how cases may turn out. Now, when
we look into the current AI legal prediction tools in this domain, they mostly lack
efficiency and interpretability, the …

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Rag) Chatbots: A Comparative Study Of Claude, Gpt-4o, Deepseek, And Llama, Kalindi Vijesh Parekh

Master's Projects

The use of Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in chatbot platforms has transformed academic spaces by significantly improving information accessibility. RAG has become a viable approach to upgrading Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge access in real time. With the growing availability of advanced LLMs such as GPT, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, and Llama, there is a growing need to compare RAG systems based on different LLMs. This study compares the responses of four different RAG chatbots using popular LLMs against a uniquely designed evaluation dataset. Specifically, the study compares the responses and performance of closed-source (GPT-4o and Claude) and open-source models …

Social Engineering Scenario Generation For Awareness-Based Attack Resilience, Jade Webb

Master's Projects

Social engineering is found in a strong majority of cyberattacks today, as it is a powerful manipulation tactic that does not require the technical skills of hacking. Calculated social engineers utilize simple communication to deceive and exploit their victims, all by capitalizing on the vulnerabilities of human nature: trust and fear. When successful, this inconspicuous technique can lead to millions of dollars in losses. Social engineering is not a one-dimensional technique; criminals often leverage a combination of strategies to craft a robust yet subtle attack. In addition, offenders are continually evolving their methods in efforts to surpass preventive measures. A …

Cca Analysis Using Computer Vision Techniques, Rahul Thakur

Master's Projects

Coral reefs are an essential part of the marine ecosystem. They perform a wide variety of tasks, some directly and others indirectly. They can produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, along with supporting ocean habitat. Crustose Coralline Algae (“CCA”) plays an important role in helping provide structural support to Coral Reef ecosystems. However, global warming is causing ocean water to become more acidic resulting in coral bleaching. This is leading to changes in coral environments and causing coral deaths at alarming rates. Object detection using computer vision techniques, specifically deep learning, can help to monitor coral reef health and identify CCA …

Coral Vision – Crustose Coralline Algae Detection With Computer Vision, Ryan Tseng

Master's Projects

Crustose coralline algae (CCA) are a group of red algae that are vital contributors to the health of coral reef ecosystems. Monitoring CCA abundance can serve as an indicator for coral reef health and improve reef conservation efforts. Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) are artificial structures that can be deployed into coral reef ecosystems and retrieved to gather ecological data without harming reef structures. Traditional methods of calculating CCA abundance require manual analysis and are labor-intensive. Recent developments in computer vision and deep learning technology have provided an avenue to fully automate this task. This research aims to train a …

Ai-Enabled Anticipatory Handover Predictions In 5g Networks, Ojas Ankush Naik

Master's Projects

As users move across network cells in 5G, it is critical to maintain seamless connectivity through efficient and fast handovers. However, as 5G networks have a very dense deployment of cells and higher carrier frequencies, handovers are often more frequent and challenging, leading to failures or the ping-pong effect. In this research, we are going to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to enable predicting handover(HO) events proactively as opposed to reactively, aiming to reduce HO failures and unnecessary handovers. We develop Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) models to forecast future signal measurements, predict handover trigger points, and compare …

Landslide Prediction Using Time-Series Decomposition, Reinforcement Learning-Based Feature Selection And Ml Models, Mohith Sai Venkat Ankem

Master's Projects

Landslides pose significant risks to human life, the community, and the environment, yet their prediction remains a complex and unexplored challenge. Existing prediction models often rely on surface measurements and satellite images, neglecting the critical role, in providing deeper insights into landslide analysis. The literature review highlights a lack of research in time series decomposition techniques, despite their potential to improve prediction accuracy. Similarly, feature selection methods that enhance model robustness and precision have not been adequately addressed. This study presents a novel approach to predicting landslide displacement by combining feature selection through reinforcement learning techniques with advanced time-series machine …

Adaptive Cobot Interaction Via Smartwatch Data Fusion For Car Assembly Automation, Riddhik Tilawat

Master's Projects

In modern car manufacturing, collaborative robots (cobots) work with human operators during shared workcell interactions to maximize production speed and flexibility. Collaboration between humans and robots is safe and effective only when operator intent recognition via a single wrist-worn inertial measurement unit (IMU) is accurate and low-latency. This thesis develops an IMU-only intent recognition pipeline, and is evaluated on three datasets: the public OPPORTUNITY dataset, the Sony Smartwatch Gesture dataset and a custom Samsung Galaxy watch 6 dataset. The proposed framework leverages five step sequence-to-label problems which are stepwise posed as data streams transforming raw IMU data into trainable tensors. …

Augmenting Missing Sensor Data For Robust Human Activity Recognition, Suryakangeyan Kandasamy Gowdaman

Master's Projects

Applications of ubiquitous computing, including health monitoring, sports analytics, and ambient-assisted living, rely on Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable sensors. However, model robustness is challenged by missing sensor values, class imbalance, inter-subject variability, and temporal noise. This work proposes a complete HAR pipeline that addresses these challenges through sampling, time-series augmentation, dynamic feature handling, and GAN-PCA-based imputation. Built on the DeepSense architecture, the model integrates convolutional feature extraction with bi-GRUs for temporal modeling. The system is evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation, subject-aware holdout, and LOSEO strategies on the Opportunity dataset. Results demonstrate consistent accuracy across folds and strong generalization to …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …