Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Hardware Platform For Wireless Beehive Monitoring, Erik Wrysinski, Jonathan Stock, Collin Paiz, Daniel Blanc

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Traditional beehive monitoring systems suffer from many challenges. These monitoring devices are expensive to set up, difficult to implement, and lack cross compatibility with each other. Preexisting beehive monitoring solutions face all of these shortcomings. Our beehive monitoring platform aims to overcome these issues by using inexpensive, off-theshelf, open-source hardware paired with a computer vision machine learning model to accurately monitor the ingress and egress of bees into and out of the hive. This data is presented to the beekeeper in a simple GUI which allows them to track hive activity over time, and by extension, the overall health of …

A Study Of Processing Beehive Monitoring Data In Edge And Cloud, Yen-Jung Lu, Jason Fong, Cheng Zhang, Chan Nam Tieu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Bees are vital pollinators for numerous crops and plants, playing an essential role in maintaining the world’s ecosystem and food security. Without bees, the global food supply would be threatened, potentially leading to food shortages and increased food prices. Current beehive monitoring solutions in the market are often prohibitively expensive, some commercial beehive monitoring solutions can cost upwards of thousands of dollars. This makes them inaccessible to many small-scale beekeepers. To help protect bee health and ensure the survival of thousands of plant species worldwide, this project aims to create an accessible solution for individuals to monitor the health and …

Automated Retail Checkout By Computer Vision: Arc-Ai, Griffin Ellis

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

There is some opportunity to apply AI and computer vision techniques to the problems in the retail industry. This paper presents a possible solution to the problem of accurate automated check-out in a retail store setting, a difficult problem due to the possibility of occlusion of hand-held products by the customer and the possible similarity of different products. This solution will identify objects being purchased frame-by-frame, propose tracks that follow individual objects across multiple frames, then determine when and where the object was brought over the region of interest, which will be determined at the start of the task. At …

Flowview: A Web Application For Hydrologic Predictions, Marcus Chavez, Sean Leininger, Joseph Pham Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Santa Clara Valley Water District, or Valley Water, provides water management resources to the two million residents in Santa Clara County. A few of their services include supplying safe water, ownership of streams, and flood protection. However, given the evolving conditions of the climate throughout the state of California, Valley Water seeks to include machine learning analytics as part of its water management services. Additionally, the increased access to the Internet has expanded the use of web applications, which provide a flexible platform to integrate the

predictions of machine learning models. In this paper, we design and implement a …

Warn: Wi-Fi Attack Recognizer And Notifier, Sudhish Sewpaul, Roshan Sevalia, Jaden Ngo, Tate Musante

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The Wi-Fi Attack Recognizer and Notifier (WARN) aims to establish a wireless network monitoring system for detection of attacks on Wi-Fi IoT devices. Millions of homes use smart home devices, and many of these are for security. However, these devices are vulnerable to attacks that can disable them or compromise their data confidentiality. WARN is capable of detecting two of these attacks: deauthentication and key reinstallation (KRACK). Deauthentication attacks hoax devices into disconnecting themselves from a network, and KRACK manipulates the authentication protocol of Wi-Fi devices to see unencrypted data. WARN uses Raspberry Pis equipped with long range Wi-Fi antennas …

Avalanche Predictions Based On Ml, William Olson, Matthew Davenport, Ben Airola

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Our Avalanche Prediction Model utilizes machine learning to analyze weather and climate data in order to provide users in the Northern California back-country with accurate probabilities of avalanche occurrences. Snow forecasts only provide information relating to how much snow will fall. Current avalanche danger ratings only provide the potential level for injury there is if an avalanche will occur. Our system, Avy Safe ML, let’s users survey geographic terrain and see direct probability indicators for precise geo-locations of mountain faces and ranges. These indicators are represented as variably-shaded geo-polygons that indicate avalanche risk classifications. Our data visualization allows access to …

Twigeenglish, Brian Burnett, Jillian Coveney, Kristin Tong, Nanki Sekhon

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

TwigeEnglish is an educational platform aimed to teach English in a fun and interactive way. It comprises a mobile application for students and a web application for pre-determined administrators. The mobile application offers three key features which include: a pictionary-like game, a dictionary flash card game, and a user-friendly interface for uploading photos to be used in both games. The web application will primarily focus on providing administrators with an interface to manage the student-photo database. With moderation powers, administrators can seamlessly review and make decisions to approve or deny the inclusion of photos in the active pictionary and dictionary …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Donation Pick-Up And Tracking App For Columbian Food Bank, Alex Fang, Arren Leung, Adrian Ramirez Lopez, Rodrigo Mejia

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Banco de Alimentos Cali is responsible for picking up food donations from local businesses, organizing by perishable dates, and distributing them to the communities in need. When donations are picked up from the donor, the bank is responsible for sending their donors a certificate with the donation's information, including the dollar equivalent of their donation. This certificate is sent out only if the donor requests it for tax deduction purposes. While this plan may seem simple in theory, the food bank often struggles to get the necessary information from their drivers in regards to the donation, which ultimately delays the …