Computer Engineering Commons^™

Improved Portable Back Pain Relief Device With User Interface, Zachary Bobango, Samuel J. Dauterman, Benjamin Bowman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The objective of this project is to design and create a massage system that is user interactive, portable, safe, efficient, and comfortable. The system should allow for user feedback from an outside peripheral such as a phone to be able to modify the system. Some challenges facing the implementation of such a system include: ensuring the product can withstand substantial force without breaking or malfunctioning while simultaneously being light enough for a consumer to carry without difficulty, engineering the massage heads to be able to move in multiple different motion types, creating the software that can control the device, and …

Autonomous Basketball Court Creation Robot, Bryce Haldeman, Tyler Gray, Dalon Vura

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Autonomous Basketball Court Outlining System presents a comprehensive solution for precision court marking. Powered by a 24V lithium-ion battery and driven by a single ST microcontroller, the system autonomously marks the outline of a half basketball court using predefined algorithms. User-friendly features include easy loading of marking material, actuated by gravity or a small servo motor depending on material of choice, ensuring intuitive operation. Safety is prioritized, with the servo motor eliminating high-pressure concerns, and the system maintains a controlled speed accounting for user well-being. Two step and direction servo motors enable accurate linear displacement, facilitating straight lines, and …

Unity Two Dimensional C# Game, Nick Zajac

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My project is a 2-dimensional game that is being developed in the unity engine. This project includes animating objects, having them interact with each other, and having a goal the player will want to complete in the game. It will be a game that involves the player character moving around, attacking enemies, and dodging enemies. There will also be some challenges that involve maneuvering between platforms and enemies to progress in the game. At the end of the level, the player will encounter a stronger boss character. This character will have movement and attack patterns similar to the other minor …

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Pos Tagging For Filipino, Jimson Paulo Layacan, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Katrina Bernice M. Tan, Ma. Regina Justina Estuar, Jann Railey E. Montalan, Marlene M. De Leon

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Supervised learning approaches in NLP, exemplified by POS tagging, rely heavily on the presence of large amounts of annotated data. However, acquiring such data often requires significant amount of resources and incurs high costs. In this work, we explore zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning to address data scarcity issues in Filipino POS tagging, particularly focusing on optimizing source language selection. Our zero-shot approach demonstrates superior performance compared to previous studies, with top-performing fine-tuned PLMs achieving F1 scores as high as 79.10%. The analysis reveals moderate correlations between cross-lingual transfer performance and specific linguistic distances–featural, inventory, and syntactic–suggesting that source languages with …

Evaluation Of A Blockchain-Based Prescription System And Data Source For National Research And Development, Sean Chan, Aedin Clay, Lance Tan, Christian E. Pulmano

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

In the Philippines, healthcare providers, government agencies, and research institutions use data from patient prescriptions to generate reports for health planning and decision-making. However, current e-prescription systems have vulnerabilities, including erroneous information, hacking attempts, a single point of failure, and medical fraud. In addition to affecting the quality of data reporting, these issues violate a patient's rights to data privacy. One promising solution is a blockchain-based prescription system. Blockchain's immutable ledger accurately traces medical fraud and erroneous information, while its decentralized nature reduces the impact of failures. Performance is an important consideration, as healthcare systems need to be scalable and …

The Impact Of Modern Buildings On Traditional Urban Environments And Urban Identity, Ann S. Ibrahim

Al-Esraa University College Journal for Engineering Sciences

Contemporary cities face significant challenges in integrating modern buildings into traditional urban environments while preserving urban identity. This study focuses on the relationship between modern architecture and urban heritage. The research problem revolves around how modern buildings affect urban identity in traditional areas, and whether they can interact positively with the urban context without distorting its traditional character.

The study aims to analyze this impact by examining a range of global examples using architectural indicators such as visual integration, spatial integration, material harmony, urban scale, accessibility, and environmental impact. A three-point scale (weak, partial, excellent) was applied to assess each …

Leveraging Large Language Models For Enhancing Well-Being In The Digital Age, Xiaobo Guo

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The 21st century has seen dramatic shifts in human interactions with information, peers, and the environment, primarily driven by the proliferation of online platforms and social media. These advancements offer more access to information and global connectivity, but also present challenges such as information overload, misinformation, online harms, and biased reporting that can negatively impact user well-being. This thesis examines the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) — advanced forms of artificial intelligence that understand and generate human-like text — in enhancing well-being in the digital age. The study begins by exploring the potential of LLMs to detect early signs …

Efficient Connectivity Management And Path Planning For Iot And Uav Networks, Amirahmad Chapnevis

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how to better manage resources in mobile networks, especially for enhancing the performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-supported IoT networks. We explored ways to set up a flexible communication architecture that can handle large IoT deployments by making good use of mobile core network resources like bearers and data paths. We developed strategies that meet the needs of IoT networks and enhance network performance. We also developed and tested a system that combines traffic from several mobile devices that use the same user identity and network resources within the core mobile network. We used everyday smartphones, SIM …

Shape Inverse Prediction Of Magnetic Field-Actuated Soft Robots By Neural Network Machine Learning, Lineth J. Perez Monsalve

Theses and Dissertations

Soft robotics has drawn tremendous interest in recent years because the compliance and motion of soft robotics enable biocompatibility and versatility for many applications, such as human-machine interaction, wearable and assistive devices, and health monitoring. This study introduces a novel predictive modeling approach using neural networks for shape control of magnetic soft robots. The robots are made of silicone materials embedded with hard magnetic particles, which respond to the external magnetic field provided by a ring-type of permanent magnet. These robots, free from physical connections to external devices, i.e., non-tethered actuation, hold significant potential for applications in healthcare, such as …

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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 …

Test-Time Backdoor Attack Using Universal Perturbation, Jesse Alexander Smith

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth and widespread reliance on machine learning (ML) systems across critical applications such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and cybersecurity have un- derscored their transformative potential and heightened their susceptibility to adversarial attacks and vulnerabilities. This thesis investigates vulnerabilities in ML models, focusing on backdoor attacks, including naive backdoor attack, feature collision backdoor attack, hidden trigger backdoor attack, and test-time backdoor attack using universal perturbation technique. These methodologies demonstrate how adversaries can automate and conceal malicious behaviors to achieve specific objectives, posing significant challenges to ML model integrity and trustworthiness. The research provides a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical …

Semantics-Aware Text-Guided Aerial Image Synthesis By Feature Augmented Diffusion Models, Douglas J. Townsell

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Aerial imagery provides crucial insights for various fields, including remote monitoring, environmental assessment, and autonomous navigation. However, the availability of aerial image datasets is limited due to privacy concerns and imbalanced data distribution, impeding the development of robust deep learning models. While recent text-guided generative models have shown promise in synthesizing high-quality images, they fall short in handling the unique challenges of aerial imagery, including densely packed objects, intricate spatial relationships, and the absence of paired text-aerial image datasets. To tackle these limitations, we propose STARS, a groundbreaking framework for Semantic-aware Text-guided Aerial image Refinement and Synthesis. STARS introduces a …

Graph-Centric Bot Detection: Addressing Extreme Data Imbalances, Heterophily, And Scarcity, Bradley T. Ashmore

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The digital landscape is ever-evolving. In recent years the amount of bot traffic, traffic generated by autonomous applications over the internet has increased significantly. Many bots perform useful and needed functions, however, malicious bots are known sources of both common and emerging security threats. Denial-of-Services (DoS), information theft, and credential stuffing have all been conducted by malicious software running on unknowingly infected machines. The dichotomy of useful bots operating in the same networks as malicious bots combined with novel bot attacks and an ever-increasing number of personal devices connecting to the Internet drives the need for continued advancement of malicious …

A Trusted Adversarial Ml Countermeasure Approach For Secure And Resilient Ai-Driven Hardware Trojan Detection, Mohammed G M Alkurdi

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Semiconductor microelectronics Integrated Circuits (ICs) are increasingly integrated into critical life applications including medical, aerospace, and Internet of things. Their increasing importance as a technology gave rise to critical concerns regarding their security. This has led to the focus of the research community on hardware Trojans, which are malicious modifications to the ICs with undesirable outcomes. Their detection is becoming increasingly critical, with many researchers proposing methods to do so such as reverse engineering, logic testing, and side-channel analysis. Many of these proposals utilize machine learning methods to detect these malicious modifications with high accuracy and confidence. However, machine learning …

Enhancing Medical Chatbots With Image Diagnosis, Swatisri Chavali

Master's Projects

Medical chatbots, at the conjunction of artificial intelligence and healthcare, are the very cornerstone of a transformative force in diagnostic capabilities and communication channels for healthcare professionals. The history of this journey, from early chatbot models to sophisticated systems, is born out of a relentless pursuit of accuracy and contextual understanding. This proposal acknowledges the critical role played by NLTK in raising the interpretability and communicative capabilities of intelligent systems, meeting challenges that arise from varying writing styles and accommodating the standards of the medical field. The integration of NLTK is a linchpin, bridging the gap between sophisticated technological architectures …

Satellite Handover Optimization Using Predicted Satellite-To-Base-Station Proximity, Pranathi Kunadi

Master's Projects

Modern telecommunications heavily rely on Satellite communication networks to provide global coverage, especially in remote areas which link the whole world in a loop. Conventional handover algorithms methods rely on fixed and predefined rules and thresholds predefined statically to make a handover decision. However, these static handover algorithms may become inefficient under the changing conditions of the network. Therefore, it would be useful to measure the proximity order of satellites to the specific base station. Consequently, the assessed relative proximity helps in optimizing the handovers proactively inside related coverage areas. This results in the service quality and the delays in …

Fake Malware Generation Using Gans As Api Calls, Saieswar Reddy Vaka

Master's Projects

With malware threats on the rise, they have also grown more complicated and subtle. Consequently, incorporating cutting-edge machine learning into cybersecurity defenses has never been more crucial. Nevertheless, building resilient machine-learning models is a significant challenge due to the need for existing diversified and complete malware datasets. This project will relieve this difficulty by employing a Generative

Adversarial Network (GAN) to develop artificial malware samples featuring an Appli- cation Programming Interface (API) call series. While traditional generative modeling

has primarily been limited to image-based fields, we offer an “outside the box” domain – malware signature generation – as an API …

Ensemble Model With Meta-Learning For Ddos Attack Classification In Sdn, Ankith Indrakumar

Master's Projects

In response to the security threats posed by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, this paper presents an intrusion detection framework with a high-accuracy multi-class classification model. In addition to detecting the existence of DDoS attacks, our framework aims to identify the type of attack (e.g., protocol or message type) so that the system can select the most appropriate countermeasure against the DDoS type. We leverage a meta-learner to build an ensemble model of multiple machine learning models such as LSTM, RF, and KNN to enhance detection and classification accuracy. Tested on the CIC-DDoS 2019 dataset, the proposed model achieves …

Frame Rate Enhancement Using Gans: A Deep Learning Approach, Shanmukah Sri Harsha Anivilla

Master's Projects

Videos are sequences of frames that are displayed continuously within a time frame, which creates the illusion. FPS is defined as the number of frames per second, and is crucial to determine the smoothness of motion or scene changes in the video. To improve the appearance of the videos, we can a technique called Frame Rate Enhancement. This is an approach to augment generated frames between pairs of frames using Generative Adversarial Networks. There are a few traditional techniques using Convolution Neural Networks and Optical Flow based methods, but they create unwanted artifacts such as blurring or ghosting and might …

Multimodal Emotion Detection In Conversations And Dialogues: A Fusion Model Approach, Abhinay Jatoth

Master's Projects

Emotion recognition is gaining traction due to its wide range of potential applications across different fields. With the rise of social media, chat platforms, and voice assistants, there is a vast increase in data through which humans implicitly and explicitly carry emotional cues. With new algorithms being developed for understanding the nuances of human language and emotion, businesses can tailor more personalized and empathetic service. Sentiment analysis, expresses a positive, negative, or neutral viewpoint laid the foundation of Emotion classification. Emotion classification in conversations represents the most advanced stage of classification. It is also challenging due to the existence and …

J-Cag: Java Comment Analysis & Generation - A Sublime Text Plugin Powered By Gpt, Linh Le

Master's Projects

Developers are notoriously disinterested in writing and maintaining comments for their code. The J-CAG plugin automates code analysis and comment generation to save developer time and improve code quality. The project utilizes the Generative Pretrained Transformer model to analyze and provide users with constructive feedback on JavaDoc comments and functions. Embedded within Sublime Text, J-CAG is designed to provide developers with useful advice. It can also generate JavaDoc comments based on the function itself, reducing the time developers spend on writing documentation. The plugin integrates seamlessly with Sublime Text, offering an intuitive interface. With positive results in comment analysis and …

Extending A Graphical User Interface For Evidential Reasoning, Vaidehi Sanjay Joshi

Master's Projects

Systems like Capri are used for large-scale graph modeling and integration and PyGrapher aims to do that in a simplified manner. This project is an extension of PyGrapher which was a tool created by previous students at the university. The enhancements include adding customizable default parameters for nodes and edges, automating JSON conversion, and enabling real-time highlighting. These features specifically aim to improve usability, streamline workflows, and provide interactive feedback for the users. The enhancement of the project also added additional and rigorous testing of the platform's compatibility and user interaction. It demonstrates significant improvements in functionality and user experience. …

Economic Profitability Of Sustainable Buildings Industry, Mohanad Ibrahim Altuma, Hanadi Abdulridha Lateef, Ayad Abdulkhaleq Al-Yousuf

Al-Esraa University College Journal for Engineering Sciences

The increasing global awareness of the Earth's deteriorating condition and the unpredictable effects of climate change has given rise to worldwide phenomena that impact several elements like the economy, agricultural security, water availability, and energy supplies. Buildings contribute significantly to the generation of greenhouse gases, as well as the disposal of pollutants and energy consumption. Therefore, they play a crucial role in addressing environmental issues.

Although sustainable buildings are widely acknowledged as a potential advancement, professionals in the property market still believe that the upfront costs of creating sustainable buildings are significantly higher than those of conventional buildings. This view …

Designing A Visual Control Framework Based On Feature Point Analysis To Guide Robots In Uncharted Areas, Isam Sadiq Rasham Al-Ghadhbawi

Al-Esraa University College Journal for Engineering Sciences

Image processing may be made more accurate and efficient with the use of optical processing technologies. In order to make better design judgments early in the package design process, visual packaging art simulation aims to swiftly develop realistic packaging effects. Conventional simulation techniques frequently yield findings that are neither realistic or detailed, and they also take a lot of time and human resources. Optical processing-based machine vision technology can fully utilize computer vision and image processing techniques to simulate package designs accurately and efficiently. This research proposes a foundation for machine vision technologies based on image optical processing. Real package …

Cross-Layer Design Of Highly Scalable And Energy-Efficient Ai Accelerator Systems Using Photonic Integrated Circuits, Sairam Sri Vatsavai

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced remarkable success in recent years, solving complex computational problems across various domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, and pattern recognition. Much of this success can be attributed to the advancements in deep learning algorithms and models, particularly Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). In recent times, deep ANNs have achieved unprecedented levels of accuracy, surpassing human capabilities in some cases. However, these deep ANN models come at a significant computational cost, with billions to trillions of parameters. Recent trends indicate that the number of parameters per ANN model will continue to grow exponentially in the foreseeable …

A Novel Processor Architecture Implementing The Stacked Error Diffusion Algorithm And Its Zynq-Based Realization, Qishi Hu

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Digital halftoning reproduces continuous-tone images using patterns of black and white dots, while multitoning extends this concept by incorporating inks with intermediate intensities. These techniques are extensively utilized in the printing industry to accommodate the limited range of inks available in printers. Stacked error diffusion is a high-quality multitoning algorithm that adheres to the blue-noise dithering standard. This thesis research studies the potential parallelism inherent in the algorithm and introduces the design of a novel processor architecture optimized for efficient execution. The architecture is realized on an FPGA development board featuring a Zynq SoC. Additionally, the hardware prototype can also …