Computer Engineering Commons^™

Top Level Mesh, Matt Jasaitis, Tristen Islam

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This paper will cover our report on the Top Level Mesh. We have built a web-based system for mesh network management. This system allows network utilities to be used from a web-based interface to monitor and manage the transfer of data. The system runs primarily on Raspberry Pis using Raspbian Linux. Users can access the system through web browsers to both configure the system and interact with the data on the network. We discuss our motivation for the project, design decisions made, technologies used and more throughout this report. We conclude with some lessons learned and future work to be …

Galápaguide, Neel Sampemane, Stephen Pacwa, Mason Bruce, Paul Ahrens

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In collaboration with the the Ministry of Tourism of Ecuador, the Association of Guides on the Galápagos, and Santa Clara University’s Frugal Innovation Hub, we developed a mobile application and administrative website connected through a REST API to a backend database as tools to assist naturalist guides on the Galápagos archipelago in conservation efforts. The goal of this system is to enable the naturalist guides and administrators to report issues with greater efficiency and view the data in a more useful way. This report outlines our design for this project and the reasoning behind our design decisions.

Virtual Reality Physics Scenarios, Patric Zhang, Thomas King

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Many students taking physics early on in their education find that it may be difficult to associate the theory they learn in class with how physics works in real world scenarios. Through various experiments in class, students are able to see examples of physics phenomena, but those experiments are limited by equipment, and do not offer precise data. To combat this, we are creating a virtual reality application for students to use to help learn physics. This report details the requirements the system will meet, as well as the use cases and subsequent activity diagrams for all users. We have …

The Trust-Based Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, Richard S. Seymour

Theses and Dissertations

Cooperative agent and robot systems are designed so that each is working toward the same common good. The problem is that the software systems are extremely complex and can be subverted by an adversary to either break the system or potentially worse, create sneaky agents who are willing to cooperate when the stakes are low and take selfish, greedy actions when the rewards rise. This research focuses on the ability of a group of agents to reason about the trustworthiness of each other and make decisions about whether to cooperate. A trust-based interactive partially observable Markov decision process (TI-POMDP) is …

Scheduling And Prefetching In Hadoop With Block Access Pattern Awareness And Global Memory Sharing With Load Balancing Scheme, Sai Suman

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Although several scheduling and prefetching algorithms have been proposed to improve data locality in Hadoop, there has not been much research to increase cluster performance by targeting the issue of data locality while considering the 1) cluster memory, 2) data access patterns and 3) real-time scheduling issues together.

Firstly, considering the data access patterns is crucial because the computation might access some portion of the data in the cluster only once while the rest could be accessed multiple times. Blindly retaining data in memory might eventually lead to inefficient memory utilization.

Secondly, several studies found that the cluster memory goes …

H.E.A.R.T., Jacob Day, Yutong Li, Samuel Rietz, Brendan Watamura

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Healthy parenting and family resilience in early childhood has been shown to be an important factor in building emotional resilience for the children: it illustrates that when parents have higher emotional resilience, their children tend to have higher emotional resilience as well. However, the tools that available in the market right now only teach people what emotional resilience rather than how to practice it in daily life.

This report describes our project to create a virtual reality tool that can not only teach the importance of emotional resilience, but also help the parents develop personal resilience. The system is based …

Bronco Books: Textbook E-Commerce Platform, Vineet Joshi, Terry Shih, David Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College students purchase textbooks for the classes they take every quarter, but current solutions for selling back those textbooks are insufficient, requiring that the student pay to utilize the selling platforms or that the student build rapport within a given community. Our project, Bronco Books, offers a solution by being a native mobile application open to only SCU students. Bronco Books will be free to access and will act as an e-commerce platform where students go to sell their textbooks. We were motivated to create Bronco Books primarily because we wanted to help alleviate the financial burden that comes with …

Mindmusic: Brain-Controlled Musical Improvisation, Rachel Goldstein, Andy Vainauskas

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

MindMusic explores a new form of creative expression through brain controlled musical improvisation. Using EEG technology and a musical improviser system, Impro-Visor (Keller, 2018), MindMusic engages users in musical improvisation sessions controlled with their brainwaves. Brain-controlled musical improvisation offers a unique blend of mindfulness meditation, EEG biofeedback, and real-time music generation, and stands to assist with stress reduction and widen access to musical creativity.

Solemate: A Music App For Runners, Arshi Jujara, Samantha Lee, Samantha Song

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Solemate is a mobile application designed to enhance the running experience through music. Our feed-forward algorithm sets the runner’s pace by playing music that varies in tempo. By encouraging the user to match their steps to the beat, our application cultivates a run that feels natural and inspires intrinsic motivation, especially for the beginner runner.

The Perils And Promises Of Artificial General Intelligence, Brian S. Haney

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

Computer Vision Machine Learning And Future-Oriented Ethics, Abagayle Lee Blank

Honors Projects

Computer Vision Machine Learning (CVML) in the application of facial recognition is currently being researched, developed, and deployed across the world. It is of interest to governments, technology companies, and consumers. However, fundamental issues remain related to human rights, error rates, and bias. These issues have the potential to create societal backlash towards the technology which could limit its benefits as well as harm people in the process. To develop facial recognition technology that will be beneficial to society in and beyond the next decade, society must put ethics at the forefront. Drawing on AI4People’s adaption of bioethics for AI, …

Creating A 3d Printed Bipedal Robot’S Ankle And Foot With Human-Like Motion, Tylise E. Fitzgerald

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Humanoid robots are being created to replace humans in dangerous situations, assist overworked humans, and improve our quality of life by completing chores. However, current bipedal robots haven’t matched the performance of humans and are still impractical for commercial use.

One of the Agile and Adaptive Robotics Lab’s goals is to create a humanoid robot whose anatomy is similar to the human body. If this can be accomplished, we can have a functioning model of the human body that we can adjust to improve both humanoid robots’ functions and the functionality of our own human bodies. This specific project looks …

Overhead Management Strategies For Internet Of Things Devices, Kavin Kamaraj

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Overhead (time and energy) management is paramount for IoT edge devices considering their typically resource-constrained nature. In this thesis we present two contributions for lowering resource consumption of IoT devices. The first contribution is minimizing the overhead of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) authentication protocol in the context of IoT networks by selecting a lightweight cipher suite configuration. TLS is the de facto authentication protocol for secure communication in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the processing and energy demands of this protocol are the two essential parameters that must be taken into account with respect to the resource-constraint nature …

Are You Experienced? - Simple Timesheets For Experiential Learning Courses, Eleanor C. Lanier, Leslie Grove

Presentations

ABA Standards require students to complete six credit hours of experiential learning. Hours must be tracked, and field placements in particular require students to keep logs of their activities to document compliance. Various web-based solutions are used, including “high-end suites like CORE ELMS, the Symplicity experiential learning module, and the basic and free Dropbox and Google Suite” as well as Canvas, and a time-tracking program called Tick. Here at the University of Georgia School of Law, we decided to add simple timesheet functionality to our Drupal-based student portal, allowing students to securely log their hours and activities, and faculty to …

Agora Teaching App, Sam Burns, Daisuke Kurita, Casey Xuereb

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Professional development of teachers normally ends after formal collegiate education. Agora desires to help educators continually train, to learn the skills of good teaching in classrooms by using various, non-traditional methodologies. By translating Agoras current platform to an app, Agora can widen their scope and serve Latin American countries outside of Peru, where they are currently based. We will simply take their current business and course platform and provide a mobile user interface for it. By expanding the reach of Agora, Latin American teachers will be well equipped to teach their classes with innovation and effectiveness.

Omni-Gravity Hydroponics System For Spacecraft, Tara M. Prevo

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Effective omni-gravity hydroponics will allow astronauts to supplement nutrition and further close the life cycle of water in orbit, lunar, and Martian conditions. This project determines the operational limits of the test cells for the Plant Water Management Hydroponics mission. A scaled 1-g channel was designed by Rihana Mungin to mimic full-scale performance in microgravity that could be tested terrestrially. This project sought to find the limits of operation of the 1-g test cells and identify failure modes that could pose a safety risk in space. The cells were filled at increments of 20% and cycled from 0.184 to 8.33 …

Material Parameter Estimation Of Thin Wafers With Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy, Kirk R. Jungles

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Terahertz Time Domain Spectroscopy(THz TDS) is a spectroscopic technique that can be implemented to perform non destructive material parameter extraction on a variety of materials. Accuracy of these material parameters is often limited by statistical variation between measurements and insufficient knowledge of the thickness of the slabs being measured.

The goal of this project was to develop an in house procedure that would allow us to perform THz TDS on thin wafers using an up to date signal processing algorithm that would provide accurate predictions for the thickness of the wafers, reliable estimations of the wafer’s material parameters, and demonstration …

Promarc: An Online Skills And Projects Marketplace, Connor Carraher, Victor Yu

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Technical projects can vary greatly in terms of cost, complexity, and time. Project leads spend a lot of valuable time and energy making sure that their teams are organized and on-task. A major part of their responsibilities includes putting together a team with the right skills in order to maximize efficiency. Having a platform where project leads can quickly find team members with the right skills would save them a lot of stress and trouble. The goal of this project is to deliver such a platform, where users can make posts about their projects and the technical skills that they …

Using Big Data Analytics To Improve Hiv Medical Care Utilisation In South Carolina: A Study Protocol, Bankole Olatosi, Jiajia Zhang, Sharon Weissman, Jianjun Hu, Mohammad Rifat Haider, Xiaoming Li

Faculty Publications

Introduction Linkage and retention in HIV medical care remains problematic in the USA. Extensive health utilisation data collection through electronic health records (EHR) and claims data represent new opportunities for scientific discovery. Big data science (BDS) is a powerful tool for investigating HIV care utilisation patterns. The South Carolina (SC) office of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs (RFA) data warehouse captures individual-level longitudinal health utilisation data for persons living with HIV (PLWH). The data warehouse includes EHR, claims and data from private institutions, housing, prisons, mental health, Medicare, Medicaid, State Health Plan and the department of health and human services. The …

A Low-Cost Experimental Testbed For Multi-Agent System Coordination Control, Victor Fernandez-Kim

LSU Master's Theses

A multi-agent system can be defined as a coordinated network of mobile, physical agents that execute complex tasks beyond their individual capabilities. Observations of biological multi-agent systems in nature reveal that these ``super-organisms” accomplish large scale tasks by leveraging the inherent advantages of a coordinated group. With this in mind, such systems have the potential to positively impact a wide variety of engineering applications (e.g. surveillance, self-driving cars, and mobile sensor networks). The current state of research in the area of multi-agent systems is quickly evolving from the theoretical development of coordination control algorithms and their computer simulations to experimental …

Memcapacitive Reservoir Computing Architectures, Dat Tien Tran

Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis, I propose novel brain-inspired and energy-efficient computing systems. Designing such systems has been the forefront goal of neuromorphic scientists over the last few decades. The results from my research show that it is possible to design such systems with emerging nanoscale memcapacitive devices.

Technological development has advanced greatly over the years with the conventional von Neumann architecture. The current architectures and materials, however, will inevitably reach their physical limitations. While conventional computing systems have achieved great performances in general tasks, they are often not power-efficient in performing tasks with large input data, such as natural image recognition …

Keylime, Matthew Orgill

Computer Engineering

This project creates an iOS mobile app geared specifically toward the students of California Polytechnic State University. The app aims to provide the ability for users to discover new restaurants to checkout in the central coast area. These restaurants can be filtered to the user’s choosing based on the price of food, rating the restaurant has received, distance away from the user, and type of food. In addition, featured deals that local restaurants currently offer can be found on the app. Each restaurant can be favorited by the user to allow for better filtering of discovering new restaurants and to …

A Survey On Software Cost Estimation Techniques, Sai Mohan Reddy Chirra, Hassan Reza

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The ability to accurately estimate the cost needed to complete a specific project has been a challenge over the past decades. For a successful software project, accurate prediction of the cost, time and effort is a very much essential task. This paper presents a systematic review of different models used for software cost estimation which includes algorithmic methods, non-algorithmic methods and learning-oriented methods. The models considered in this review include both the traditional and the recent approaches for software cost estimation. The main objective of this paper is to provide an overview of software cost estimation models and summarize their …

Deep Learning For Recommender Systems, Travis Akira Ebesu

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The widespread adoption of the Internet has led to an explosion in the number of choices available to consumers. Users begin to expect personalized content in modern E-commerce, entertainment and social media platforms. Recommender Systems (RS) provide a critical solution to this problem by maintaining user engagement and satisfaction with personalized content.

Traditional RS techniques are often linear limiting the expressivity required to model complex user-item interactions and require extensive handcrafted features from domain experts. Deep learning demonstrated significant breakthroughs in solving problems that have alluded the artificial intelligence community for many years advancing state-of-the-art results in domains such as …

Weight Controlled Electric Skateboard, Zachary Barram, Carson Bertozzi, Vishnu Dodballapur

Computer Engineering

Technology and the way that humans interact is becoming more vital and omnipresent with every passing day. However, human interface device designers suffer from the increasingly popular “designed for me or people like me” syndrome. This design philosophy inherently limits accessibility and usability of technology to those like the designer. This places severe limits of usability to those who are not fully able as well as leaves non-traditional human interface devices unexplored. This project set out to explore a previously uncharted human interface device, on an electric skateboard, and compare it send user experience with industry leading human interface devices.

Forecasting Building Energy Consumption With Deep Learning: A Sequence To Sequence Approach, Ljubisa Sehovac, Cornelius Nesen, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Energy Consumption has been continuously increasing due to the rapid expansion of high-density cities, and growth in the industrial and commercial sectors. To reduce the negative impact on the environment and improve sustainability, it is crucial to efficiently manage energy consumption. Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including widely used smart meters, have created possibilities for energy monitoring as well as for sensor based energy forecasting. Machine learning algorithms commonly used for energy forecasting such as feedforward neural networks are not well-suited for interpreting the time dimensionality of a signal. Consequently, this paper uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to capture time …

Gold Tree Solar Farm - Machine Learning To Predict Solar Power Generation, Jonathon T. Scott

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Solar energy causes a strain on the electrical grid because of the uncontrollable nature of the factors that affect power generation. Utilities are often required to balance solar generation facilities to meet consumer demand, which often includes the costly process of activating/deactivating a fossil fuel facility. Therefore, there is considerable interest in increasing the accuracy and the granularity of solar power generation predictions in order to reduce the cost of grid management. This project aims to evaluate how sky imaging technology may contribute to the accuracy of those predictions.

The Soul Annoyed Robot: A Senior Project Report, Dayton Andrew Muxlow, Christian Johansen

Computer Engineering

Our goal for this senior project was to create a competitive robot designed to com- pete in Roborodentia 2019. Our project started during the Winter 2019 quarter, and ended with the competition on May 18, 2019. During that time, we developed an accurate solenoid shooting mechanism, an elevated conveyor belt to carry poker chips, and a servo arm to scoop in stacks of poker chips. These hardware compo- nents were attached to a circular differential-drive wooden base designed to be easy to control. We also planned out our match strategy and implemented this strategy with software written in C/Wiring to …

Planr.: Planar Learning Autonomous Navigation Robot, Gabrielle S. Santamorena, Daniel Kasman, Jesus Mercado, Ben Klave, Andrew Weisman, Anthony Fortner

Computer Engineering

PLANR is a self-contained robot capable of mapping a space and generating 2D floor plans of a building while identifying objects of interest. It runs Robot Operating System (ROS) and houses four main hardware components. An Arduino Mega board handles the navigation, while an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, holds most of the processing power and runs ROS. An Orbbec Astra Pro stereoscopic camera is used for recognition of doors, windows and outlets and the RPLiDAR A3 laser scanner is able to give depth for wall detection and dimension measurements. The robot is intended to operate autonomously and without constant human monitoring …

Bpm: Blz Package Manager, Kenneth Huang

Computer Engineering

bpm (BLZ Package Manager) is a package manager for the open-source programming language BLZ, built in Java. It allows users of the BLZ programming language to create and upload their own packages, as well as downloading necessary dependency packages for their packages. To do this, the program communicates with the “cardiovascular”, a web server designed for users to upload and download BLZ packages.

The program has three primary functions. The first one, “init”, initializes a package directory for use with the package manager. Part of this initialization is creating a “heartbeat” meta file, which holds information about the package’s name, …