Computer Engineering Commons^™

Programing Ai With Ethics, Conor Anderson

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As artificial intelligence grows increasingly ubiquitous, it’s pertinent to examine its fundamentals as well as its greater implications. Anderson discusses the ethical implications of AI.

View captioned video at https://youtu.be/LBTVEMm_C70

Development And Evaluation Of Machine Learning Models For Early Pediatric Sepsis Prediction, Ancita M. Andrade

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Sepsis is a leading cause of pediatric mortality, claiming more lives in the United States annually than all childhood cancers combined. Early identification in Emergency Departments (EDs) remains challenging, as the current Phoenix criteria establishes an updated international consensus definition for sepsis, however is not designed for use as a screening tool. This study aimed to develop predictive models identifying pediatric patients at risk of sepsis within 24 hours of admission. Multiple tree-based and deep learning models were trained utilizing clinical and laboratory data from the initial four hours of presentation. Both the LightGBM and LSTM architectures demonstrated superior performance, …

Wearable Sensor Data Analysis For Machine Learning-Based Detection Of Posture And Autonomic Responses, Chaitanya Vardhini Anumula

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This study investigates how Iyengar yoga postures influence autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity by analyzing multimodal physiological signals collected via wearable sensors. The physiological mechanisms underlying Iyengar yoga’s therapeutic effects remain under-explored at the granular, pose-level. Using data collected from 16 participants, this research evaluates whether machine learning models can distinguish between baseline, parasympathetic-dominant, and sympathetic-dominant states based on wrist-worn sensor data. The goals were to explore whether subtle postural variations elicit measurable autonomic responses and to identify which sensor features most effectively capture these changes. Participants performed a sequence of yoga poses while wearing synchronized sensors measuring electrodermal activity …

Impact Of Graph Structures For Rag Outcomes In Llms, Chris Davis Jaldi

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Explainability, interpretability and adaptability (EIA) remain three central motivations for next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially as Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to engage with ever-increasing knowledge bodies. As the landscape pushes toward controllable agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems where AI agents engage in iterative, guided reasoning, a critical question arises as to the extent to which the knowledge design itself shapes these models' reasoning behavior. This work conducts a systematic evaluation of how different conceptualizations and representation of the identical knowledge affect an LLM's path-based reasoning capabilities. Through the introduction of controlled variations along graph structural complexity, linguistic and semantic …

Re-Parameterizing Adversarial Reprogramming In Low-Dimensional Subspace For Efficient Software Vulnerability Detection, Hootan Alavizadeh

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Software vulnerabilities are a major cause of security breaches, making effective detection critical. Traditional learning-based methods require large datasets and significant computational resources, which are often impractical due to high annotation costs and data scarcity. To address this, we propose an innovative system, RearVul, which Re-parameterizes adversarial reprogramming in a low-dimensional subspace for software vulnerability detection. Unlike conventional approaches, RearVul repurposes a pre-trained classification model using adversarial reprogramming, enabling detection with minimal modifications. It learns a universal perturbation applied to program representations, preserving the original model’s feature extraction capabilities while adapting it to a new domain. Furthermore, we introduce a …

Subjective Readiness Forecasting Using Supervised Machine Learning And Wearable Device Data, Nathaniel Michael Weiland

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Recent advances in wearable technology allow continuous monitoring of physiological and behavioral data, opening new opportunities for real-time assessments of readiness and well-being. However, creating predictive models that generalize across diverse users remains challenging, especially in high-stakes settings like the military, where preventable injuries, illnesses, and stress-related performance declines are frequent. This research assesses the feasibility of using supervised machine learning models trained on wearable device data to predict subjective readiness indicators—recovery, stress, injury, and illness. Data from over 10,000 users in the OHWS (Optimizing the Human Weapons System) program combined daily check ins with physiological metrics from Garmin, Polar, …

Dataset Generation For Routing Policy Study In Ad Hoc Wireless Networks, Vishnu Vishnu Priya

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Ad Hoc wireless networks, with their decentralized architecture and dynamic topology, present challenges in reliable and energy-efficient routing. While machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) offer promising solutions, progress is limited by the lack of realistic, high-fidelity datasets. This research introduces a simulation-based framework for generating four diverse datasets representing combinations of node mobility (mobile vs. static) and spatial distribution (random vs. clustered). Each dataset captures critical metrics such as Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR), bottleneck rate, and power consumption across multi-hop paths. A lookahead-based greedy routing algorithm with scenario-aware power control is implemented to emulate practical behavior. Supervised ML models, …

Isometric Centroid Encoder (Ice) And Synthetic Data Generation Approaches For Biological Datasets, Prathyusha Kanakamalla

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This thesis addressed two main challenges in biological data analysis: structure-preserving dimensionality reduction and synthetic data generation for small sample datasets. I proposed the Isometric Centroid Encoder (ICE), a supervised dimensionality reduction method that preserves pairwise distances between class centroids during dimension reduction. Unlike existing methods like Centroid Encoder and Super Encoder, ICE explicitly maintains geometric relationships between biological classes, achieving nearly perfect structure preservation at C dimensions (where C equals the number of classes) with strong performance even in 2D and 3D spaces. Additionally, I compared three generative models (VAE, LSH-GAN, and scDiffusion) for synthetic data generation on small …

Leveraging Counterfactuals For Enhanced Natural Language Inference: A Multitask Knowledge Distillation Approach, Brian J. Davis

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Natural-language inference (NLI) asks whether a hypothesis is entailed by, contradicts, or is neutral with respect to a premise. Modern transformers reach high raw accuracy on benchmarks such as SNLI, MNLI, and ANLI, yet they often rely on brittle lexical shortcuts and provide little insight into their decision process. This thesis shows that counterfactual-augmented knowledge distillation can simultaneously boost robustness and supply faithful, token-level explanations—without scaling model size. Four T5-v1_1 students (60M, 220M, 770M, 3B parameters) are trained under four curricula: (1) standard fine-tuning, (2) fine-tuning with free-text rationales, (3) multi-task distillation with naive counterfactuals, and (4) multi-task distillation with …

Optimizing Cloud Computing Resources For Operational Cost And Application Performance Using Machine Learning, Isaac K. Matthew

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As AI-driven workloads accelerate the growth of cloud initiatives and spending, resource waste also increases due to persistent inefficiencies in cloud compute and infrastructure management. Overprovisioned resources and suboptimal configurations often lead to operational inefficiencies and unnecessary financial overhead. These challenges arise from the difficulty of anticipating resource demands in dynamic workloads and selecting suitable virtual machines to ensure optimal performance. Our research proposes a holistic, data-driven framework for managing cloud compute resources that reduces costs without compromising application performance. We integrate a predictive, model-driven, threshold-based autoscaling solution for cloud-native applications with an optimized instance right-sizing approach to select cost-effective …

Reducing Operator Training Time Through Virtual Reality: A Case Study On The Lpkf Protomat E44 Machine, Joshua C. Patel

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This thesis presents the development of an immersive virtual reality (VR) simulation that replicates the operation of the LPKF ProtoMat E44 PCB milling machine. Aimed at reducing operator training time and improving procedural understanding, the simulation offers an interactive and realistic environment where users can safely engage with machine workflows and start-up sequences. The emphasis is on accurate representation, usability, and maintaining immersion to support intuitive learning. Although formal evaluation is outside the scope of this work, the system is designed to serve as a foundation for cost-effective, scalable training in technical and manufacturing contexts, offering a modern alternative to …

Scalable Real-Time Stream Clustering For Unbounded Text Streams, Nathaniel C. Crossman

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Social media, AI systems, IoT sensors, and other platforms generate vast amounts of streaming data. Given this vast volume of information, techniques that can reduce and aggregate data into meaningful topics are essential. One such technique is the two-phase stream clustering approach. In the first, online micro-clustering phase, the system forms micro-clusters from the incoming data stream, incrementally merges new items into related existing micro-clusters, and prunes or fades micro-clusters as they become inactive, producing a constantly updating yet compact set of micro-clusters representing potential topics and subtopics of the stream. In the second, offline macro-clustering phase, these micro-clusters are …

Patient Subset Classification Using Encoded Embeddings And Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Benjamin A. Holmes

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The widespread adoption of electronic medical records has created a vast reservoir of clinical data that can be leveraged to better understand how interventions relate to patient outcomes. Much of this information, however, exists as unstructured free-text, posing significant challenges for traditional statistical and machine-learning methods. Solving these challenges would allow the extraction of specific patient subpopulations (clinically relevant cohorts of individuals who share overlapping symptoms, risk factors, or diagnostic criteria), which could be used in precision medicine. Despite this promise, extracting these subpopulations from unstructured medical notes is an ongoing challenge due to the variability of clinical language and …

Generative Adversarial Networks (Gans) For High-Dimensional Biological Data, Harigovind Harikumar

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This thesis investigates the application of Generative AI models, mainly Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models to high dimensional and low sample size biological datasets like Motion Sickness, Breast Cancer, Crohn, and Melanoma. We utilized and compared three generative AI frameworks: Vanilla GAN, Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), Locality-Sensitive Hashing GAN (LSH-GAN) and Omics GAN. To address the challenges associated with high-dimensionality and low sample size, which was leading to very poor outputs of biological synthetic samples, we came up with an approach to stop the model when it reaches its saturation level. That is, we printed the loss plots to see where …

Pixmix Attack: Implementation And Evaluation Of A Novel Pixel Injection On Digital Video Port (Dvp) Interface In Embedded Camera Systems With Pcb Hardware Trojan, Sayed Md Tashfi Nowroz

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Image sensors are at the heart of machine vision systems in robotics, industrial automation, and surveillance systems which ideally operate with minimal human supervision and only occasional maintenance. The image sensors convert visible light into electrical signals which are locally decoded to image on the printed circuit board (PCB) by an ordinary embedded processor System on Chip (SoC). This thesis investigates a critical vulnerability in such systems, targeting the communication protocol at the signal level during runtime. Specifically, it focuses on a novel attack in the Digital Video Port (DVP) protocol, possible to exploit with PCB-based hardware Trojans, to craft …

A Secure Ml-Assisted Framework For Resilient And Efficient Prediction Of Physiotherapy Sequence In Bilateral Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Pratik Pandurang Kharat

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Bilateral idiopathic carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by compression of the median nerve at both wrists, leading to symptoms such as pain, numbness, tingling, and muscle weakness. Unlike unilateral cases, bilateral idiopathic CTS presents distinct therapeutic challenges due to the simultaneous involvement of both hands and the lack of an identifiable underlying cause. This study explores the application of machine learning techniques to predict the optimal sequence of physiotherapeutic interventions Stretching followed by Myofascial Mobilization (S/M) or the reverse (M/S) in female patients with bilateral idiopathic CTS and right hand dominance. Data were drawn from a …

Learning Under Data Scarcity: Reasoning And Negative Distillation For Texts And Graphs, Calvin T. Greenewald

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Modern machine learning (ML) models rely on large amounts of high-quality labeled data to achieve optimal performance. However, in many real-world domains, such as cyber security, acquiring sufficient labeled data is often infeasible due to cost, privacy concerns, and the rapid evolution of underlying phenomena. This challenge underscores the importance of learning under data scarcity. This thesis addresses this challenge by proposing distinct, modality-specific techniques for text and graph domains, which allow models to generalize effectively with minimal data. For text classification task, we incorporate distilled rationales from large language models and adversarial perturbations into the input space to improve …

Understanding Patient Profiles In Sickle Cell Disease Using Unsupervised Machine Learning, Raj Kamal Somavarapu

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Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is one of the most prevalent genetic blood disorders affecting millions of people worldwide. It is often accompanied by acute and/or chronic pain leading to increased healthcare costs and adverse outcomes. Effective management of SCD requires an understanding of the diverse physiological profiles. This study employs unsupervised machine learning, specifically K-means clustering to categorize the patients suffering with SCD into different clusters based on their vital signs. The main aim is to identify the groups that reflect similarities in physiological and pain profiles, allowing an in-depth analysis to reveal distinctive features distinguishing patient clusters. The project …

Enhancing Robustness Of Graph Neural Network Against Adversarial Attacks By Balancing Local And Global Perspectives, Bibek Raj Joshi

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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have increasingly gained popularity as tools for analyzing graph data in areas like biology, knowledge-graphs, social networks, biology, and recommendation systems. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks - small, targeted manipulations of graph structures or node features - raises serious concerns about their reliability in real-world applications. Existing defense strategies, such as adversarial training, edge filtering, low-rank approximations, and randomization-based methods, often suffer from high computational costs, scalability issues, or reduced clean-data performance. Unlike these methods, the proposed approach integrates multi-hop relationships, applies adaptive regularization, and maintains a balance between feature-based and structural embeddings, ensuring improved …

Meta-Learning-Based Model Stacking Framework For Hardware Trojan Detection In Fpga Systems, Mani Rupak Gurram

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In today's technological landscape, hardware devices are integral to critical applications such as industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, and medical equipment, relying on advanced platforms like FPGAs for core functionalities. However, the multi-stage manufacturing process, often distributed across various foundries, introduces substantial security risks, notably the potential for hardware Trojan insertion. These malicious modifications compromise the reliability and safety of hardware systems. This research addresses the detection of hardware Trojans through side-channel analysis, utilizing power and electromagnetic signal data, combined with meta-learning techniques, specifically model stacking. By employing diverse base models and a meta-model to consolidate predictions, this non-invasive approach effectively …

An Efficient And Trusted Deep Learning Framework For Real-Time Ppe Detection In Secure Iomt Environment, Anusha Verma

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Occupationally-acquired infections impact thousands of healthcare workers (HCWs) in the U.S., with many cases preventable through proper use of personal protective equipment (PPE). This study seeks to develop a robust system to enhance PPE compliance and reduce infection risks among HCWs. The objectives of this thesis are twofold: (1) to create a hybrid machine learning model that combines object detection and keypoint detection to ensure correct donning and doffing of PPE, and (2) to design a real-time feedback system using LED indicators and a display interface to offer actionable guidance to HCWs during PPE usage. The goal is to optimize …

An Enhanced Real-Time Object Detection Of Helmets And License Plates Using A Lightweight Yolov8 Deep Learning Model, Mounika Thatikonda

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Traffic surveillance and enforcement heavily depend on the real-time detection of helmets and license plates, particularly in high-density urban environments. This study presents a dynamic and optimized lightweight model, the proposed G-YOLOv8n, designed for resource constrained edge devices like the Raspberry Pi. By integrating the GhostNet module into the YOLOv8n architecture, this research achieves a nearly 50% reduction in model size and computational load, while maintaining comparable detection accuracy to the original YOLOv8n. These enhancements enable real-time processing capabilities crucial for traffic monitoring operations. The growing demand for real-time, low-power solutions in intelligent transportation systems necessitates lightweight, efficient detection models. …

Integrating Knowledge Graphs With Large Language Models For Natural Language Querying, Rakesh Kandula

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This research explores the integration of knowledge graphs with large language models that have already been trained on a vast pool of unstructured text data. Large language models trained on this type of data have a tendency to hallucinate and produce factually inaccurate results. This behavior is primarily due to the data being trained is unstructured and huge text corpus, and large language model uses predictive text analysis methods to obtain a response. These issues can be addressed by applying Retrieval Augmented Generation and Fine-tuning to large language models, employing an underlying domainspecific knowledge graph. Integrating knowledge graph and large …

Prediction Interpretations Of Ensemble Models In Chronic Kidney Disease Using Explainable Ai, K M Tawsik Jawad

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Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) poses significant health and financial threat to millions of patients all around the world. The irreversible nature of this disease not just leads to comorbid diseases like Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension, Anemia, Bone Disease, Neurological Implants etc. It can permanently damage the kidney by progressing to Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) or End Stage Renal Diseases (ESRD). The risk factors of CKD become more dangerous as patients suffering from it have little to no idea about the presence of CKD in their body until it takes the shape of AKI or ESRD. There are severe economic burdens for …

An Ml-Assisted Golden-Free Hardware Trojan Localization And Detection Approach For Trusted Microelectronics, Ashutosh Ghimire

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Hardware Trojans are malicious circuits, hidden in integrated circuits (ICs) which pose a significant threat to security. Detection of hardware Trojans is important to build trust, verify, and make the semiconductor ICs process secure. The existing hardware Trojan detection methods are generally destructive, require intricate comparisons, or require a long time for reverse engineering. In the initial phase of this study, the substitution of supervised hardware Trojan detection methods in ASICs chips is explored with unsupervised approaches, thereby eliminating the dependence on golden references. The Trojan detection uses a ring oscillator (RO) based on NAND as the power monitor. Frequency …

Understanding Impact Of Graph Structure On Knowledge Graph Embedding, Brandon Dave

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The effectiveness of a deployed knowledge graph is commonly evaluated with defined use-cases from domain experts. This poses challenges during the development cycle in determining how to represent data. Developers of a knowledge graph can optionally include semantics into a knowledge graph by abstracting the data representation in such a way that mirrors information as it exists in the real world. Consequently, the abstraction is represented by additional layers, resulting in performant differences in knowledge graph embedding; such as, the embedded model's ability to infer facts between entities through link predictions. This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of the performance …

Ai-Enabled Hardware Security Approach For Aging Classification And Manufacturer Identification Of Sram Pufs, Harshdeep Singh

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Semiconductor microelectronics integrated circuits (ICs) are increasingly integrated into modern life-critical applications, from intelligent infrastructure and consumer electronics to the Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced military and medical systems. Unfortunately, these applications are vulnerable to new hardware security attacks, including microelectronics counterfeits and hardware modification attacks. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are state-of-the-art hardware security solutions that utilize process variations of integrated circuits for device authentication, secret key generation, and microelectronics counterfeit detection. The negative impact of aging on Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Functions (SRAM PUFs) has significant consequences for microelectronics authentication, security, and reliability. This research thoroughly …

Ml-Assisted Side Channel Security Approaches For Hardware Trojan Detection And Puf Modeling Attacks, Niraj Prasad Bhatta

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Hardware components are becoming prone to threats with increasing technological advances. Malicious modifications to such components are increasing and are known as hardware Trojans. Traditional approaches rely on functional assessments and are not sufficient to detect such malicious actions of Trojans. Machine learning (ML) assisted techniques play a vital role in the overall detection and improvement of Trojan. Our novel approach using various ML models brings an improvement in hardware Trojan identification with power signal side channel analysis. This study brings a paradigm shift in the improvement of Trojan detection in integrated circuits (ICs). In addition to this, our further …

Multi-Semantic-Stage Neural Networks For Robust And Interpretable Deep Learning, Christopher J. Menart

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Deep neural networks have great representational power. However, most deep neural nets today optimize directly for performance on a single task defined only by labeled training data. This excludes potential sources of knowledge and ways of learning which could improve their performance, and address challenges, such as explainability, which are pressing to the field. We propose a framework for neural network architecture which generalizes it to a graph of many semantically-meaningful variables. We call it the Multi-Semantic-Stage Neural Network (MSSNN). An MSSNN models its domain as a web of conditional probabilities, i.e. a collection of inter-related tasks which can learn …

Pneumonia Detection With Limited And Imbalanced Data Using Energy-Based Out-Of-Distribution Technique, Jasbin Karki

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The automated detection of pneumonia through chest X-ray presents a critical challenge in medical diagnostics, particularly due to the restrictions of limited and imbalanced chest X-ray data for training AI models. Traditional methods that depend on softmax confidence scores can be overconfident even when generating erroneous outputs especially when they are processing completely new inputs, leading to unreliable diagnostic results. This research addresses challenges in AI models which aim to develop a robust pneumonia detection system using an Energy-Based Out-of-Distribution (OOD) technique that can work effectively even with limited and imbalanced data. The study focused on creating a more reliable …