Computer Engineering Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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, …

Identifying Hourly Traffic Patterns With Python Deep Learning, Christopher L. Leavitt

Computer Engineering

This project was designed to explore and analyze the potential abilities and usefulness of applying machine learning models to data collected by parking sensors at a major metro shopping mall. By examining patterns in rates at which customer enter and exit parking garages on the campus of the Bellevue Collection shopping mall in Bellevue, Washington, a recurrent neural network will use data points from the previous hours will be trained to forecast future trends.

Don't Trip! A Quicker Way To Plan Your Trip, Jose Cruz Arinaga, Ryan Wong

Computer Engineering

Currently, Google Maps does not provide users with a way to find the optimal path for a user to travel given a list of points. Given a list of destinations you may want to visit, our web application will do all of the difficult planning for you and ultimately find the most optimal path for you to take to visit all of your destinations in a timely manner. The people who will benefit most from this application are tourists or people who travel often and want to explore an unfamiliar city. Even locals running their weekly errands could save time …

Vehicle Control Unit, Ayusman Saha

Computer Engineering

The Vehicle Control Unit (VCU) is the central computer for Cal Poly’s Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) formula electric race car. It is responsible for processing driver inputs, managing the electric motor, and providing a robust safety net in the case of system failure. Additional functionality of the system include a power limiting mechanism as well as a traction control system. All VCU logic had to abide by SAE International rules for the competition. This project focused solely on the firmware for the VCU.

Keylime, Joshua Michael Magera

Computer Engineering

New freshmen arrive at Cal Poly every year, experience Week of Welcome, and, if they haven’t been to Firestone Grill within the first week, they can consider themselves an anomaly. But how long until those freshmen find the amazing sandwiches and breakfast burritos served at Gus’s Grocery or hear about the free burger promo at Sylvester’s? The goal of this senior project was to create an app, KeyLime, that makes it easy for college students to find new eateries and fresh deals that are local, affordable, and tasty. KeyLime aims to target college students and create a space for restaurants …

Gr802.11 Jamming Detector, Grant A. Blake

Computer Engineering

One important component of a jamming-resistant 802.11 network is detecting the presence of a jammer during normal operation. This is required so that communications on the network can operate at full efficiency when no jammer is present, but switch to a less efficient, but more resilient protocol when the network is under attack. This paper describes a potential method for detecting some common forms of jamming, lays out a plan to test the effectiveness of the detection method, and summarizes the implementation and results of the test plan.

Raspberry Pi Enterprise Network Wifi Bridge, Dylan Halland, Riley Barrett

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to allow an IoT device, such as a Weemo Smart Plug, Amazon Echo, Gaming Console, or any other Wi-Fi enabled device to connect to a WPA_EAP Enterprise Network by using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a packet forwarding device. Extra configuration steps are required for devices connecting to an enterprise network, and many devices are not compatible at all. By using a Wi-Fi Bridge, any device can easily obtain internet access by connecting to the Pi.

The system can be implemented on either one wireless card or two separate cards depending on the …

A Database For Indexable Carbide Inserts, Andrew Yoder

Computer Engineering

The indexable inserts project is a collaborative effort to aggregate into a single database as many indexable carbide inserts from as many manufacturers as possible. Inserts are generally labeled with a part number following a specific standard determined by shapes and measurements, however specifications for certain aspects of carbide inserts—such as which materials they can cut—can vary by manufacturer. There currently is not a way to search a comprehensive database containing tools from multiple manufacturers for a handful of inserts that would satisfy some necessary parameters, making finding the correct tool in a shop a much more time-consuming process than …

Labeling Paths With Convolutional Neural Networks, Sean Wallace, Kyle Wuerch

Computer Engineering

With the increasing development of autonomous vehicles, being able to detect driveable paths in arbitrary environments has become a prevalent problem in multiple industries. This project explores a technique which utilizes a discretized output map that is used to color an image based on the confidence that each block is a driveable path. This was done using a generalized convolutional neural network that was trained on a set of 3000 images taken from the perspective of a robot along with matching masks marking which portion of the image was a driveable path. The techniques used allowed for a labeling accuracy …

Tidalsim Senior Project Report, Kent Zhang, Colin Vandervoort

Computer Engineering

Throughout the course of this project, our team helped the Cal Poly Biological Sciences department refine an intertidal zone simulator. The aim of this device is to allow any marine biologist to easily simulate a vast range of tidal zones in order to test animal behaviors within these zones. Another goal of this project is to make each simulation tank independent from the others by using a single microcontroller to handle all inputs and outputs of the system as well as logging all relevant data. The current system is set up so that a separate microcontroller handles dissolved oxygen and …

Simulation Of Human Balance Control Using An Inverted Pendulum Model, Joshua E. Caneer

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

The nervous system that human beings use to control balance is remarkably adaptable to a wide variety of environments and conditions. This neural system is likely a combination of many inputs and feedback control loops working together. The ability to emulate this system of balance could be of great value in understanding and developing solutions to proprioceptive disorders and other diseases that affect the human balance control system. Additionally, the process of emulating the human balance system may also have widespread applications to the locomotion capabilities of many types of robots, in both bipedal and non-bipedal configurations.

The goal of …

Robot Navigation In Cluttered Environments With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ryan Weideman

Master's Theses

The application of robotics in cluttered and dynamic environments provides a wealth of challenges. This thesis proposes a deep reinforcement learning based system that determines collision free navigation robot velocities directly from a sequence of depth images and a desired direction of travel. The system is designed such that a real robot could be placed in an unmapped, cluttered environment and be able to navigate in a desired direction with no prior knowledge. Deep Q-learning, coupled with the innovations of double Q-learning and dueling Q-networks, is applied. Two modifications of this architecture are presented to incorporate direction heading information that …

Smart Dc Wall Outlet Design With Improved Load Voltage Detection, Patrick Donovon Granieri

Master's Theses

A standard home in the United States has access to the 120V AC power grid for use with home appliances. Many electronics used at home are powered by a DC power supply, which loses energy in the conversion from AC power. The DC House project avoids any conversion between AC and DC by storing energy in batteries as DC power and supplying it directly to DC appliances. While AC systems feature a standardized output voltage, no such standard exists for DC systems. The Smart DC Wall Outlet solves this by automatically adjusting its output voltage to meet any required DC …