Computer Engineering Commons^™

Whether-Weather, Lucas Voron, Graham Purvis, Malcolm Weaver, Josh Kelleran

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The WhetherWeather project is a comprehensive weather and traffic forecasting system that provides real-time insights and predictions. It utilizes Python programming language and various data sources, including Inrix data for traffic information and weather data from Meteostat. The system employs machine learning techniques, specifically XGBoost, to train models on historical data. Once trained, the models can accurately forecast traffic conditions based on weather data. To visualize the results, a Flask API is available, allowing users to access the system's functionalities through a web interface. For more information and to access the WhetherWeather website, visit WhetherWeather.org.

Singular Value Decomposition And Transformer-Based Image Super Resolution, Andy Qin, Chen Zhang, Timothy Cui

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Image super-resolution (ISR) is a prominent field in computer vision that aims to enhance the quality and resolution of low-resolution images. It finds widespread applications in various domains, including surveillance, satellite imagery, medical imaging, and media. The primary objective of ISR is to improve the visual quality and level of detail in low-resolution images. In this paper, we propose the Singular Value Decomposition and Transformer-based Image Super Resolution (SVDTIR) model, which combines both traditional and deep learning approaches to achieve image super-resolution. The SVDTIR model consists of three stages: image pre-processing, which employs the singular-value decomposition (SVD) algorithm to decompose …

Climate Cloud, Atiyut Khemkhon, Dylan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The increasing frequency and intensity of drastic climate change events have underscored the urgency for a comprehensive understanding of climate dynamics and the development of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. In this context, our thesis addresses the critical issue of drought category prediction in Western America using machine learning techniques. We recognize the interconnectedness of efforts aimed at combating climate change and strive to make a meaningful contribution to the broader understanding of climate change, even if our impact may seem comparatively smaller. By leveraging the power of machine learning algorithms and utilizing a wide range of climatic and environmental …

Ai-Powered Iot Monitoring And Security For Smart Homes, Paul Boldyrev, Timothy Hradil, Matthew Ding

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Smart home devices are becoming increasingly popular across the United States. Unfortunately, in order to keep the cost of these devices down, manufacturers tend to place cybersecurity measures lower on their list of priorities. As a result, these devices have become targets for security breaches like the Mirai Botnet and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The cybersecurity solutions currently available on the market are either expensive, difficult to set up, or follow a static set of rules for attack detection. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to detecting attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) devices through the …

Coastal: Crowdsourcing Reports Of Phenomena On The Santa Cruz Coast, Will Maddrey, Daniel Schott, Michael Zetino

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Every day, beachgoers witness important environmental phenomena that go completely undocumented. Huge amounts of potential data that could be used for research are lost because people don’t have the means to report them, or simply don’t understand their significance. Additionally, many of these phenomena are potentially harmful, and are relatively unknown to the public. In this paper, we develop an iOS and Android mobile app called Coastal, with the goal of crowdsourcing reports of phenomena on the Santa Cruz coast. We hope that in the future, applications like Coastal can be used for both collecting data for environmental research, and …

Dominican Republic Greenhouse Automation, Ryan Le, Erik Mitchell, Mark Castillo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Dominican Republic's Instituto Politécnico Loyola (IPL) needs a wirelessly connected network of sensors for their greenhouses. Our project uses long-range (LoRa) communication to receive data from sensors within the greenhouse on the recorded temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and light values; stores and organizes these measurements in a database and backup text file; and displays appropriate recordings on an interactive application. We collaborated with a team of two General Engineering majors, with our focus on data retrieval and display functionality. Aside from basic data senders used solely for testing purposes, our final design serves as a central hub remotely accessible …

Film Viability Evaluator, Caitlin Lopez, Kulsoom Sabit

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Filmmaking is a financially high-risk field of work. There are multiple variables that contribute to a movie’s success or failure, however the most impactful ones have yet to be identified. In this paper, we used publicly available datasets in combination with several forms of analysis models to determine common factors associated with historically successful movies. Our results narrowed the top categories to include the runtime, the production budget, the release year, the genres, and the primary language. The final round of analysis yielded an 84% accuracy, after the usage of XGBoosting and gradient boosting. Further improvements to this project could …

Monster Maker, Harrison Bui

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

3D modeling and rigging are necessary steps when it comes to 3D animation. However, not everyone has the time and patience to learn and practice these skills. Monster Maker provides an accessible way to create creatures from their imaginations by assembling pre-made 3D body parts. The option to dynamically alter the skeleton and modify body parts opens the door to hundreds of thousands of monsters each with their own unique design. Future developments of Monster Maker could provide users with options to control specific sub-components of the currently established body parts while also providing a more appealing UI.

Nutrition Visualization For Mindfulness, Jake Tsuchiyama, Jarin Simon, Landis Fusato, Ryan Wong

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In today’s world, users face multiple obstacles obtaining relevant nutrition information for the foods they consume. While nutrition information is provided on some foods like a standard candy bar, this label is typically hard to read and inconveniently located. For other foods such as an apple, this nutrition label is not provided at all and the burden is placed on the user to go out and find this information themselves. We hope to address this inaccessibility of nutrition information to help users ultimately make more informed decisions about their eating habits.

Immersive Scu Campus Tour With Augmented Reality, Tristan Limawan, Axel Perales, Alfredo Perry

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Santa Clara University has hosted numerous guided campus tours as a way for students to understand better and immerse themselves in the university's culture and environment. However, group sizes for these tours are limited and may fill up quickly, leaving students to compete for these tour slots. As such, accompanied by the continual growth in admissions reaching new highs each year, the situation presents a great need to help first-year and prospective students navigate the campus grounds and understand and learn about the campus history and culture.

To resolve this problem, we have developed an augmented reality web application allowing …

A Submodular Optimization Framework For Imbalanced Text Classification With Data Augmentation, Eyor Alemayehu

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

In the domain of text classification, imbalanced datasets are a common occurrence. The skewed distribution of the labels of these datasets poses a great challenge to the performance of text classifiers. One popular way to mitigate this challenge is to augment underwhelmingly represented labels with synthesized items. The synthesized items are generated by data augmentation methods that can typically generate an unbounded number of items. To select the synthesized items that maximize the performance of text classifiers, we introduce a novel method that selects items that jointly maximize the likelihood of the items belonging to their respective labels and the …

Enhancing Residential Energy Sustainability With Occupancy Detection And Ai-Based Trading, Jun Jiang

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

With the rapid development and deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs), Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and innovative energy trading markets, residential buildings as the primary energy consumers show enormous potential in promoting energy sustainability. However, achieving residential energy sustainability faces various challenges. (1) Promoting consistent energy-efficient behaviors among all residents can be challenging due to variations in their awareness and commitment to energy-saving practices. (2) While training can cultivate energy-saving habits among residents, educating residents without energy-related knowledge to effectively coordinate and operate various electrical appliances and DERs remains challenging, especially with the widespread adoption of such equipment. (3) …

Embride: A Madhubani Art Creator, Jui Banik

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Creative machines are playing an increasingly important role in the art world and society at large. This gives rise to the need to consider the ethical dimensions of artistic machine agents. Whose art are we amplifying, or more importantly, who is being left behind? Computational Creativity offers the opportunity to bring awareness and visibility to art forms that have been systemically suppressed due to a range of longstanding societal biases. In this paper, we introduce EMBRIDE, a system that creates Madhubani art, practiced by women in the villages of India and Nepal. We hope that this work will encourage further …

Acat 2.0: An Ai Transformer-Based Approach To Predictive Speech Generation, Kairan Quazi

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

While constituting a rare family of diseases that afflicts 268,000 people worldwide, motor neuron diseases carry a high fatality rate with one-third of people dying within a year of diagnosis and 50% of people dying within two years (MND Association, 2022). MNDs rapidly and progressively impair muscle movement, making everyday activities like walking, chewing, and speaking almost impossible. In collaboration with famed physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking, Intel Labs developed an assistive communications platform known as ACAT to simulate speech and facilitate electronic tasks. However, the original ACAT can be slow to use, leading to awkward pauses in conversations. This paper …

Reactive Particle Swarm Control Architecture And Application For Scalar Field Adaptive Navigation, Shae Taylor Hart

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Adaptive navigation is a subcategory of navigation techniques that attempts to identify goal locations that satisfy specific criteria in an unknown area. In 2D scalar field adaptive navigation (SFAN), primitives navigate to or along features of interest in an unknown, possibly time-varying, planar scalar field. Features include extrema, contours, and fronts. This work solves the 2D SFAN problem using swarm robotic techniques. Robotic swarms are a subset of multi-robot systems that use decentralized control of simple interchangeable robots to perform collective actions. A subgroup of swarms is the Reactive Particle Swarm (RPS), characterized based on its simplicity, reactivity to its …

Comparison Of P4 Programmable Software Switches As Wifi Access Points, Kaustubh Pimparkar

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

WiFi wireless access points must adapt to complex network operations as connected devices and their bandwidth requirements continue to rise. The use of software switches supporting Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) in wireless access points has drawn significant attention due to their versatility, flexibility, and potential to overcome the limitations of conventional network designs. T4P4S and BmV2 are the two most widely used P4 programmable software switches, and comparing the performance of these switches allows network operators to select the most suitable switch for specific use cases, such as minimizing latency or maximizing throughput while reducing resource consumption of the …

Nautilus Rov Robot Manipulator, Dana Stefanides, Jenny Huynh, Andrew Stewart, Steven Reimer, Andrew Nguyen, Rebecca Walters, Matt Hayes

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Global warming and climate change are prevalent issues in today’s society. As a result, research in the ocean, our world’s biggest ecosystem, is imperative in efforts to protect the environment. Santa Clara University’s Robotic Systems Lab contributes to this field through work and developments on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). An existing ROV system called Nautilus consists of a robot arm, end effector, and storage system in order to collect various types of sediments at a depth of 300 feet. However, the previous system does not meet that requirement. In direct collaboration with researchers within the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, …

Metascriptura: A General Data Provenance Framework, Maria Joseph Israel

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Digital technology makes it easy to generate and distribute large volumes of data. However, it has also complicated the process of verifying and validating sources of data and their derivatives risking obfuscation of truth amidst the deluge of data. To address this issue, I trace and develop an approach based on data provenance tracking. Specifically, I make it possible to deep trace the origins and lineages of data, by applying state-of-the-art data provenance technologies, which I extend beyond traditional data provenance applications. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that with the right data infrastructure it is feasible to grant greater agency …

Container Migration In Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks, Gagan Gupta, Kyle Fenole, Siddharth Venkatesh

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project aims to implement container migration on an ad hoc mesh network, which would allow for a mobile fog computing mesh network in areas with no connectivity. This kind of system would allow for a rapidly deployable and mobile compute cluster that could be used in rural scenarios or situations where existing connectivity infrastructures are out of commission i.e. disaster recovery. We use technologies like Docker, CRIU, and batman-adv to create a mesh compute network that is decentralized, flexible, and consistent. Docker with CRIU facilitates container live migration by checkpointing a container in one network node and restoring that …

Velachain: A Decentralized Exchange Built For Cross-Chain Communication, Connor Callahan, Bradley Lostak

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The blockchain industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world right now. Billions of dollars of venture capital money is being put to work to innovate in this new space. One of the problems that has plagued the blockchain space since its inception is the lack of interoperability between blockchains. A single blockchain is great at dictating its own state but they rarely contain functionality to communicate with other blockchains. Furthermore, users on these blockchains have limited ways to swap cryptocurrencies from one blockchain to another. For this project, we built a cryptocurrency decentralized exchange built on …

Brilliance Bias In Gpt-3, Ashley Troske, Edith Gonzalez, Nicole Lawson

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Language has a profound impact on how we perceive the world. With GPT- 3’s rise in popularity, present in 300 applications averaging 4.5 billion words per day, it is critical for us as programmers to identify and correct biases in its generations. A variety of biases have been identified in generative language models, spanning biases based on gender, race, and religion. Our project pioneers the study of the Brilliance Bias for generative models. This implicit, yet powerful bias imposes the idea of “brilliance” being a male trait and in turn, sets back women’s achievements starting as young as 5-7 years. …

Database Of Non-Government Organizations On The Global Scale, Jeremy Mekker

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Currently in the world, there are about 10 million non-profit/non-governmental organizations. In order to find these organizations, one must diligently scour the Internet for hours on end. Most research into helping refugees or those in need results in only finding larger organizations that cover many different tasks in the targeted area. This is an active problem. While larger organizations tend to help a wider audience of people, often the help that one would like to give does not get delivered as urgently as the donor would hope. In order to combat this, the primary objective would be to optimize the …

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 …