Computer Engineering Commons^™

Developments On Abbreviations Towards Machine Reading Comprehension, Sing Choi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Machine reading comprehension is a critical step in development of applications that require the semantic understanding of human speech-to-text driven work. Many devices such as smart home appliances like the Amazon Echo Dot, Google Home, or smart assistants like Apple Siri or Microsoft Cortana are examples of these applications. The comprehension task involves a deeper understanding and recognition of named entities such as person names, locations, medicals codes, quantities, abbreviations, and acronyms in speech or text data. In this dissertation, we explore and extend the different approaches and techniques in modern research that tackles the problem of recognition and definition …

Elevating Education: Leveling Up Individual Learning Plans, Maximum Mgrdich-Ararat Sirabian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This three-article dissertation investigated the effectiveness, implementation quality, and automation of Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) in promoting college and career readiness. Article 1 analyzed High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 data and found that ILPs did not significantly guide course alignment. Article 2 examined ILP implementation across Nevada high schools, revealing inconsistent quality, limited standardization, and few culturally responsive practices. These findings informed the creation of a new high-quality ILP framework. Article 3 employed a convergent parallel mixed methods design to assess an automated ILP prototype based on this framework. Participants in the automated group reported significantly higher scores in …

Ecodrone: Autonomous Environmental Monitoring, Belsen Lee

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This project presents EcoDrone, an autonomous aerial drone designed for continuous and automated environmental monitoring. Current environmental monitoring methods rely on stationary sensors or manual data collection, limiting real-time response capabilities. This reliance leads to delayed, incomplete, and spatially limited data and restricts the ability to capture real-time changes. Another challenge includes the difficulty of environmental monitoring in challenging terrain, whether it be wildfire areas, dense forestry, or mountainous terrain. EcoDrone overcomes these challenges by autonomously navigating difficult terrain to collect real-time data, offering more flexible and timely monitoring than stationary or manual methods. The central research question investigates integrating …

Development Of Interactive Games On An Affordable Braille Display, Daniel Tsivkovski, Dylan Ravel, Maryam Etezad

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Developing an affordable and STEM learning-focused Braille display addresses a significant disparity in the market for Braille displays, where most fail to provide a cost-effective, accessible, and education-oriented solution. This research aims to bridge this gap through innovative hardware and software development, offering a comprehensive learning experience to elementary school children (K-6) who are blind/visually impaired. The hardware features a piezo-electric tactile display that displays up to six Braille characters at once or a shape in an 8x8 pin array configuration. The educational software includes a user-friendly website packed with engaging STEM activities specifically designed for blind/visually impaired children. The …

Soft Modular Robots: From Modular Tensegrity Structures To Bioinspired Sea Robots, Luyang Zhao

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The rapid advancement of robotics necessitates systems capable of adapting to complex, unstructured environments. Soft robots, with their flexibility and compliance, excel in delicate interactions, making them ideal for medical applications and search-and-rescue missions. Modular robots, on the other hand, offer reconfigurability, enabling diverse task-specific adaptations in dynamic settings. Despite their individual advantages, the integration of soft and modular robotics remains underexplored. This proposal aims to develop soft modular robots that combine the adaptability of soft robotics with the versatility of modularity. These systems will be capable of autonomously transitioning between locomotion, manipulation, and infrastructure assembly across land, water, and …

Controlling A Mobile Inverted Pendulum And Optimizing Leaning Angle To Apply Force Using Reinforcement Learning, Aryan Mediratta

2025 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Reinforcement Learning is a Machine Learning paradigm that involves simulating learning through rewards and penalties in intelligent systems. This technique is often employed in robotics when traditional control methods are insufficient or when human intuition does not provide a good solution on how to control robot systems, This project involves training a Segway-style Mobile Inverted Pendulum (MIP) robot to balance and push a box forward. The BeagleBone Blue board is used that includes a built-in Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and encoder ports. These sensors enable the system to measure its current state. The goal is to find the optimal leaning …

Cross-Dataset Fairness Evaluation Of Transformer-Based Sentiment Models, Sara Zuiran

Theses and Dissertations

With the growing exploration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems in decision-making environments, it is essential to evaluate technical and ethical aspects of the dataset and the NLP model to improve fairness. To assess fairness, the thesis examines demographic imbalances in sentiment classification models by evaluating transformer-based models fine-tuned on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank version 2 dataset (SST-2) against the demographically annotated Comprehensive Assessment of Language Model dataset (CALM). This work identifies performance disparities in sentiment prediction across demographic groups by examining sensitive attributes such as gender and race. The study evaluates both the RoBERTa and MentalBERT transformer models using …

Reconfigurable Python Autopilot Software For Rc Aircraft, Kate Doiron

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Computer Vision In Soccer: Yolov11 Analytics Engine For Quantifying Game Strategy, Connor S. Maurer

Data Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Single-shot object detection capabilities significantly reduce computational overhead for real-time computer vision in sports analytics at 60 FPS. YOLO11’s lightweight CNN gives promising accuracy while meeting the low-latency demand of dynamic soccer matches. As data-driven approaches take over the sport of soccer, efficient player tracking systems become critical for informing coach’s strategies. I prototype the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process of data collected from a single- shot detection program and evaluate its viability for estimating player fatigue. YOLO11 detects players, the ball, and other characteristics, with the output transformed by homography to estimate the positions in the real world. These …

Towards Mitigation Of The Light Network Load Performance Penalty Of The Network Link Outlier Factor (Nlof), Jaime Merin Guzman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Detecting and localizing faults in communication networks is critical to maintaining reliable and efficient network operations. The Network Link Outlier Factor with Most Likely Link (NLOF: MLL) algorithm has demonstrated its potential to automate this task but suffers from significant performance degradation under low network load conditions, where limited network flow data reduces its ability to localize faults. This thesis proposes and evaluates the performance of a synthetic traffic generation algorithm to be used with NLOF:MLL. This algorithm strategically injects synthetic flows that supplement the insufficient real network flows, thereby improving NLOF:MLL's performance under low-load conditions. Specifically, we select network …

Improving Home Security Through User Centered Device Positioning, Lalith Nadipalli

Theses and Dissertations

In today’s world, where technology is advancing rapidly and security threats are becoming more complex, the need for effective home safety measures is more critical than ever. Homeowners are increasingly turning to a variety of smart devices, such as smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and security cameras, to protect their living spaces against potential dangers like burglary, fire, and environmental hazards. These devices offer essential protection, acting as both early warning systems and visual surveillance tools. However, their effectiveness largely hinges on how well they are placed within the home. Proper placement of these safety devices ensures that they provide …

Key-Based Authentication Scheme For Evtol Drones Using Chebyshev Chaotic Maps, Eduardo A. Hernandez Escobar

Master's Theses

The development of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) drones signifies a substantial advancement in urban air mobility, ready to transform transportation models in densely populated regions. These advanced drones, distinguished by their capacity to function in limited spaces and their minimized environmental impact, are set to transform individual, shipping, emergency services, and public safety activities. Nonetheless, like any transformational technology, the implementation of eVTOL systems presents many challenges, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Adding many devices and entities to an eVTOL network increases the risk of privacy and security attacks. This paper proposes a key-based authentication scheme that …

Cellular Telemetry For Real-Time River Flow Velocity Data From Fluvial Acoustic Tomography Loggers, Joshua Lee Seymour

Honors Theses

Streamflow is a critical element in understanding watershed processes and the effects of land use on those processes because it is the primary medium through which water, sediment, nutrients, organic material, thermal energy, and aquatic species move. Fluvial Acoustic Tomography (FAT) systems offer accurate direct measurements of river section-averaged flow velocity by measuring reciprocal acoustic travel times between at least two acoustic nodes positioned on opposite riverbanks. However, similar to many in-situ sensors used in estuarine and riverine environments, FAT loggers require manual data retrieval, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and limits real-time access and increases maintenance costs. This project presents …

A Machine Learning Framework For Packet Anomaly Detection In Smartgrid Substation Networks, Sowmya Bandari

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The increasing reliance on Smart Grid Substation Networks for efficient electricity distribution has amplified cybersecurity vulnerabilities, particularly within Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. The IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) protocol, widely adopted for communication between Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs), lacks inherent encryption and authentication mechanisms, rendering it susceptible to sophisticated cyberattacks. Threats such as False Data Injection Attacks (FDIAs), command injection, covert attacks and replay attacks pose significant risks by manipulating grid control signals, potentially leading to undetected operational disruptions, cascading failures, or system-wide instability. Conventional signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) often fail to identify zero-day …

Expressive And Interpretable User Engagement Prediction Using Multivariate Survival Processes, Akshay Aravamudan

Theses and Dissertations

The ability to characterize how information diffuses online is of paramount importance to stakeholders that are interested in tasks such as proposing solutions for mitigating and countering dis/misinformation, predicting user engagement of content in social media, planning marketing campaigns to roll-out products and planning dissemination of political campaign messaging among others. One such facet of learning the dynamics of information diffusion is the ability to predict user engagement or the popularity of a single piece of information as it spreads through an online medium. Existing works in this regard mainly either obfuscate user level information or utilize frameworks that are …

Physics Embedded Neural Network: A Novel Data-Free Numerical Method For Solving Computational Physics Problems, Pawan Gaire

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

A novel approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using neural networks for scientific computing is introduced. The proposed approach, referred to as physics-embedded neural network (PENN), features a unique architecture that incorporates the PDE and boundary conditions information directly within the final fully-connected layer of the feed-forward neural network (NN). The key aspect of PENN is the parallel numerical embedding of a differential equation associated with physical problems within the activation function of the network’s final layer. This integration leads to a new class of computational solvers competitive with classical methods like the Finite Element Method (FEM) and capable …

A System And Method For Measuring Spatially Varying Surface Appearances With A Study Of Feathers, Jessica Baron-Lis

All Dissertations

Real-world materials, particularly biological structures such as feathers exhibit complex appearances that vary spatially across their surfaces. The field of computer graphics provides a means of understanding such surfaces through material modeling which uses both analytical models and data acquired from light-surface interactions. There are many efforts within the past decade in measuring materials for graphics, but common limitations in these works include not accounting for spatially varying properties and reliance on neural networks and synthetic datasets.

Feathers from modern birds present diverse appearances due to how light interacts with their unique hierarchical microstructures. Variations in those structures lead to …

The Role Of Ai In Enhancing Teamwork, Resilience And Decision-Making: Review Of Recent Developments, Satyadhar Joshi

Harrisburg University Other Works

This paper explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on organizational teamwork, decision-making, and resilience. This paper furthur reviews recent literature on the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various organizational functions, focusing on its impact on innovation management, leadership paradigms, and organizational resilience. We provide groundwork required to enhance frameworks that can integrate cognitive scaffolding with antifragile team dynamics, employing behavioral economics and neurocognitive principles. We introduce methodologies for enhancing team resilience through adaptive AI systems, cross-training interventions, and pre-mortem simulation techniques. The framework addresses key challenges in confirmation bias mitigation, cultural dimension alignment, and vigilance decrement prevention. …

Robot-Integrated 4d Building Information Modeling (4d Bim): Framework For Planning Safe Autonomous Construction Operations In Dynamic Environments, Hafiz Oyedimeji Oyediran

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

In the construction industry, the use of autonomous robots is considered a solution to overcome the heavy reliance on human workers to perform repetitive, strenuous, and hazardous tasks. While these robots offer the advantage of autonomous operation, ensuring their safe and efficient integration within construction sites requires precise planning. Such planning must account for the varying project complexities such as scope, site layout, tasks, timelines, existence of human workers, and other spatiotemporal conditions of the construction site. Currently, there are no methods to safely plan autonomous robot operations considering these factors within the overarching construction planning process. Thus, autonomous robots …

Digital Thread: Bridging Macro–Micro Services In System-Of-Systems, Joshit Mohanty

Graduate Student Government Association Research Conference

Organizations and industries increasingly rely on distributed services in decentralized environments—ranging from large-scale, system-of-system architectures to fine-grained, agent-based microservices. While this distributed paradigm offers flexibility and innovation, it presents critical challenges such as interoperability gaps, inconsistent data formats, and a lack of holistic oversight. Traditional integration approaches, including ad-hoc middleware or enterprise service buses, tend to solve these issues reactively. As a result, technical debt accumulates, stakeholder misalignments persist, and scaling to new demands becomes complex.

This research proposes digital thread (DT) as the unifying framework to create an authoritative source of truth: a continuous flow of information across the …

Meta-Clustering For Specialized Language Models: Enhancing Contextual Adaptation And Mitigating Hallucinations In Diverse Healthcare Environments, Joshit Mohanty, Vaishali Vaishali, Sandeep Kumar Nayak, Sumit Lahiri

Graduate Student Government Association Research Conference

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced conversational AI by enabling dialogic information-seeking and task execution across diverse domains. However, their extensive parameters and broad domain scope lead to “data hallucinations.” These shortcomings are particularly evident in dynamic and diverse environments like India’s healthcare sector, where myriad languages, regional practices, and cultural nuances demand specialized, localized expertise rather than one-size-fits-all generalist models. This paper introduces a meta-clustering framework that integrates Distilled Language Models (DLMs) and Small/Specialized Language Models (SLMs) with meta-learning principles to address these limitations. By drawing on evidence from works such as MedHalu and Med-HALT, the framework seeks …

Survey On Intelligent Planning Methods From Large Language Models Perspective, Yanzhong Zhou, Junren Luo, Xueqiang Gu, Wanpeng Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Starting from the perspective of large language models, this paper gives an overview of the definition and development of intelligent planning, and briefly introduces the traditional methods of intelligent planning; based on the close relationship between large language model intelligent agents and intelligent planning, introduces the architecture of large language models and typical large model intelligent agents; focusing on the intelligent planning for large language models, combs through the learning of planning languages, chain of thought, feedback optimization, and process automation; combining with the current challenges and difficulties, introduces the outlook of cutting-edge research on intelligent planning with large …

Simulation Environment Construction Of Track Segment Association And Algorithm Performance Evaluation, Dian Ding, Guangfen Wei, Zheng Cao, Shaohui Wen

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to study the applicability of Track Segment Association (TSA) algorithms in actual radar working environment , a TSA simulation environment which can simulate the real movement of the target is constructed. By constructing a rich set of target motion sets, the state switching process of target motion is described based on Markov state transition matrix, and the density is flexibly controlled through track translation. The simulation results show that this environment can evaluate the performance of the current classical TSA algorithms. The evaluation results provide a good reference for the practical engineering application of interrupted track association.

A Method For Road Extraction Using Masked Image Modeling And Contrastive Learning, Jiangjiang Wu, Zhenghong Li, Zhichao Sha, Hao Chen, Shuang Peng, Chun Du, Jun Li

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Aiming at the occlusion problem of road extraction from remote sensing images, a road extraction method combining MIM and CL is proposed, the model training process includes a masked pretraining stage and a contrast training stage. The masked pre-training stage mainly carries out mask image reconstruction, and trains the model to recover the whole image from some areas that are randomly occluded. The comparison training stage is mainly for the prediction error and low confidence regions to learn the comparison, to narrow the distance between the features of the same category and increase the distance between the features of …

A Transfer Learning-Based Hybrid Model For Pm2.5 Concentration Prediction, Xinbiao Lu, Chunlin Ye, Yisen Chen, Wen Wu, Yudan Chen

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to solve the problems of increased computational cost due to irrelevant features and decreased prediction accuracy due to the difference in probability distribution caused by the change of data distribution over time in PM2.5 concentration prediction, this paper constructs a hybrid deep learning model TraTCN-LSTM-BiGRU based on migration learning. The meteorological factors related to PM2.5 concentration are selected as the model input using the mean-value heat map algorithm features; the source domain data and target domain data are divided by KL scatter and an adaptive layer is introduced into the model to achieve inter-domain distribution adaptation; the …

An Event Ontology And Dataset Construction Method For Strategic Operations Analysis, Quanlin Chen, Jun Jia

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Aiming at the lack of professional datasets for information extraction technology research in the field of strategic operations research analysis, this paper proposes an event ontology and dataset construction method for strategic operations research analysis. The method proposes an event ontology model for strategic operations research analysis according to the needs of situation judgment in strategic operations research analysis, and uses the method of "a small amount of manual annotation + fine-tuned large language model annotation" to construct the event dataset EfSOA for strategic operations research analysis. The dataset construction method proposed in this paper and the constructed dataset …

Trajectory Planning Of Quadruped Robot Over Obstacle With Single Leg Based On Deep Reinforcement Learning, Min Li, Sen Zhang, Xiangguang Zeng, Gang Wang, Tongwei Zhang, Dijie Xie, Wenzhe Ren, Tao Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Aiming at the problems of joint vibration and high energy consumption of quadruped robot in the process of walking over obstacles, a foot trajectory planning method of quadruped robot based on deep reinforcement learning SAC algorithm is proposed. Based on robot kinematics and Monte Carlo method, the motion space of the single-legged foot of quadruped robot is analyzed. A compound seventhdegree polynomial trajectory of the quadruped robot is planned. The SAC algorithm is used to train and obtain the low energy consumption obstacle crossing strategy of four-legged robot under different obstacle environment. The simulation results show that the compound …

Research On The Resilience Of Integrated Urban Passenger Transport Network In Urban Agglomerations Considering The Intra-Urban Service Network, Shida Nie, Chengbing Li, Bowei He, Xintao Li

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to solve the problem of insufficient comprehensiveness and refinement of the urban agglomeration passenger transport network model, Space L modelling method in complex network theory is adopted to construct a comprehensive urban passenger transport network model considering the urban internal service network. A comprehensive urban passenger transport network composed of intercity networks and intra-city service networks is built, and time-dependent edge weights in the network is considered. A time-weighted network efficiency model is proposed to evaluate the network resilience. The results show that under a random attack strategy, the relative time efficiency of the network fluctuates less, …

A Multi-Robot Collaborative Path Planning Algorithm With Chain Working Mode, Zhigang He, Dayan Li, Niya Wang, Jianlin Mao, Ning Wang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to solve the problem that the traditional MAPF algorithms can lead to a large number of repeated paths and thus non-essential energy loss in application scenarios where multiple robots have a common goal point, a multi-robot chain work mode with a tractor is proposed, which divides the robots with common target points into subgroups for multi robot collaborative path planning, and a collaborative dynamic priority SIPP with tractor (Co-DPtSIPP) algorithm is given. The polygonal Fermat point principle and other methods are used to obtain the serial connection areas of each collaborative group robot; considering the sequence of …

Traffic Signal Detection Based On Improved Yolov7, Lanyue Zheng, Yujie Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: An improved YOLOv7 is proposed to address the problem of low recognition accuracy in general object detection algorithms for traffic signal detection. The algorithm removes the 20×20 detection scale and adds a 160×160 detection scale to increase shallow features while making the model lightweight. It combines the bi-level routing attention (BRA) proposed in BiFormer with axial attention, and innovatively proposes axially-guided BRA (ABRA). This module is specifically designed for the characteristics of traffic signal positions. To address the issue of object size sensitivity to the IoU metric, the normalized wasserstein distance (NWD) measurement is introduced to improve object location …