Computer Engineering Commons^™

Cal Poly Supermileage Electronic Fuel Injection, Alexander Pink

Electrical Engineering

Cal Poly Supermileage is a student-run engineering club that builds prototype gasoline vehicles optimized maximum fuel-efficiency. To power their vehicles, the Supermileage team makes use of single-cylinder, 4-stroke, electronically fuel-injected (EFI) gasoline engines. This report details the development, iterative design & test cycles, and integration of an EFI system for the Supermileage club. This project develops an EFI system that interfaces to the most common types of sensors found in the low-power Supermileage-range of engines, including throttle-position sensors, manifold absolute pressure sensors, gear-tooth hall-effect sensors, variable-reluctance position sensors, engine coolant temperature sensors, intake air temperature sensors, and exhaust oxygen sensors. …

Rapid Android Parser For Investigating Dex Files (Rapid), Xiaolu Zhang, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Android malware is a well-known challenging problem and many researchers/vendors/practitioners have tried to address this issue through application analysis techniques. In order to analyze Android applications, tools decompress APK files and extract relevant data from the Dalvik EXecutable (DEX) files. To acquire the data, investigators either use decompiled intermediate code generated by existing tools, e.g., Baksmali or Dex2jar or write their own parsers/dissemblers. Thus, they either need additional time because of decompiling the application into an intermediate representation and then parsing text files, or they reinvent the wheel by implementing their own parsers. In this article, we present Rapid Android …

Computational Nutrition: An Algorithm To Generate A Diet Plan To Meet Specific Nutritional Requirements, Thomas Pikes, Robert Adams

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

Many methods have been proposed to generate meal plans, but most of them only consider proximates. However, the human body requires a combination of proximates and several macronutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. Furthermore, the models designed to generate these meal plans do not take into account an individual’s specific nutritional needs. These needs are often expressed as a combination of lower bound amount (LBA), ideal amount (IA), and upper bound amount (UBA) necessary for the human body to thrive. The aim of this project is to generate an algorithm to produce a list of food items that will meet specific …

Demo: Ta$Ker: Campus-Scale Mobile Crowd-Tasking Platform, Nikita Jaiman, Thivya Kandappu, Randy Tandriansyah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We design and develop TA$Ker, a real-world mobile crowd- sourcing platform to empirically study the worker responses to various task recommendation and selection strategies.

Poster: Improving Communication And Communicability With Smarter Use Of Text-Based Messages On Mobile And Wearable Devices, Kenny T. W. Choo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While smartphones have undoubtedly afforded many modern conveniences such as emails, instant messaging or web search, the notifications from smartphones conversely impact our lives through a deluge of information, or stress arising from expectations that we should turn our immediate attention to them (e.g., work emails). In my latest research, we find that the glanceability of smartwatches may provide an opportunity to reduce the perceived disruption from mobile notifications. Text is a common medium for communication in smart devices, the application of natural language processing on text, together with the physical affordances of smartwatches, present exciting opportunities for research to …

Poster: Air Quality Friendly Route Recommendation System, Savina Singla, Divya Bansal, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To model the overall personal inhalation of hazardous gases through the air (both indoor and outdoor) by an individual, provide air quality friendly route recommendations, thus raising the overall quality of urban movement and living healthy life.

A Multi-Carrier Collaborative Solution To Minimize Connectivity-Loss, Michael Wong

Master's Theses

Nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smart phone, and 19% of Americans rely on their smartphone for either accessing valuable information or staying connected with their friends and family across the globe [15]. Staying always-on and always-connected to the Internet is one of the most important and useful features of a smartphone. This connection is used by almost every single application on the device including web browsers, email clients, messaging applications, etc. Unfortunately, the cellular networks on our smartphones are not perfect and do not always have cellular signal. Our devices often lose Internet connection when users are on the …

Polyfs Visualizer, Paul Martin Fallon

Master's Theses

One of the most important operating system topics, file systems, control how we store and access data and form a key point in a computer scientists understanding of the underlying mechanisms of a computer. However, file systems, with their abstract concepts and lack of concrete learning aids, is a confusing subjects for students. Historically at Cal Poly, the CPE 453 Introduction to Operating Systems has been on of the most failed classes in the computing majors, leading to the need for better teaching and learning tools. Tools allowing students to gain concrete examples of abstract concepts could be used to …

The Bottlefly Ios Application For Wine Recommendations, Carson James Carroll

Master's Theses

The use of smartphone applications has taken over the way people interact with the world. The design of an application has become an important aspect in keeping the user engaged [22]. People are looking for applications that are easy to use and will get the job done. This thesis focuses on the design of a mobile application for iOS that recommends wine in various retail locations that match a user’s taste preferences.

The goals of this thesis are to design an iOS application that recommends wine to consumers, improve upon the wine recommendation algorithms by acquiring more customer data, and …

Subspace Methods For Portfolio Design, Onur Yilmaz

Dissertations

Financial signal processing (FSP) is one of the emerging areas in the field of signal processing. It is comprised of mathematical finance and signal processing. Signal processing engineers consider speech, image, video, and price of a stock as signals of interest for the given application. The information that they will infer from raw data is different for each application. Financial engineers develop new solutions for financial problems using their knowledge base in signal processing. The goal of financial engineers is to process the harvested financial signal to get meaningful information for the purpose.

Designing investment portfolios have always been at …

An Investigation Into The Effectiveness Of Hedonic Features In Regression Models For Domestic Rental Prices, Peter Prunty

Dissertations

Housing is a fundamental human right. Increasing rents and rising unemployment contribute to increased rates of homelessness. Traditionally housing prices are determined by supply and demand. This project will investigate the relationship between hedonic features and domestic rental prices in California and New York, using multivariate regression models. The literature outlines a number of approaches taken to model real estate pricing using hedonic regression.

Two models were created to analyse the difference between California and New York. Features were selected using correlation analysis. Some features were derived using logarithmic and dummy feature transformations. The models themselves were evaluated by assessing …

Investigation Into The Predictive Capability Of Macro-Economic Features In Modelling Credit Risk For Small Medium Enterprises, Kevin Mctiernan

Dissertations

This research project investigates the predictive capability of macro-economic features in modelling credit risk for small medium enterprises (SME/SMEs). There have been indications that there is strong correlation between economic growth and the size of the SME sector in an economy. However, since the financial crisis and consequent policies and regulations, SMEs have been hampered in attempts to access credit. It has also been noted that while there is a substantial amount of credit risk literature, there is little research on how macro-economic factors affect credit risk. Being able to improve credit scoring by even a small amount can have …

Energetic Behavior Of Resistive Random-Access Memory Cells, Christopher M. Bisbee

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

In order to investigate the switching characteristics of Resistive Random Access Memory cells (ReRAM) in terms of their thermodynamic free energy properties, we need to build a number of models that replicate the system. This report contains the models used to investigate filament growth patterns based on different boundary conditions applied to the electrode-filament system. Using Comsol Multiphysics software, we determined that when a fixed voltage is applied to each electrode in the electrode-filament system, we should expect filament dissolution that resets our cells into the High Resistance State (HRS). If we instead fix a set amount of charge on …

Using A Knowledge Management Approach To Support Effective Succession Planning In The Civil Service, Mary O’Donohue

Dissertations

The modern workforce is highly mobile. The challenge facing organisations is how to safeguard key expertise and knowledge in the face of staff mobility and turnover. The Irish Civil Service is still recovering from the impacts of significant loss of staff, and their knowledge and expertise, as a result of cutbacks over recent years. This project will establish the potential of using a Knowledge Management approach to support effective succession planning in the Civil Service. The literature review charts the evolution of Knowledge Management from when the phrase was first coined in 1986 through to what is considered to be …

Scare Tactics, Tiago Martines, Gabriel Ortega, Karan Sahu, Lucas Pereira Vasconcelos, Henrique Silva Chaltein De Almeida

Theses

It is the purpose of this document to describe the design and development processes of Scare Tactics. The game will be discussed in further detail as it relates to several areas, such as market analysis, development process, game design, technical design, and each team members’ individual area of background research. The research areas include asymmetrical game design, level design, game engine architecture, real-time graphics, user interface design, networking and artificial intelligence.

As part of the team’s market analysis, other games featuring asymmetric gameplay are discussed. The games described in this section serve as inspirations for asymmetric game design. Some …

An Exploration Of The Relationship Between The Partisan-Business Cycle And Economic Inequality Within Developed Economies, Richard O'Doherty

Dissertations

Recent contributions to the study of inequality have provided strong evidence towards the presence of an established trend, over several decades, of growing economic inequality (with a particular focus on distribution within their tails; i.e. top 10%, 1%) across countries with developed economies and indications of similar trends across developing economies. While the causality and influencing factors to these trends has widely been discussed, and has range from declining domestic growth rates as economies move towards high mass consumption states to globalisation, political decision making and policy application been referred to as both contributory or an instrument for dampening such …

Light-Activated Photocurrent Degradation And Self-Healing In Perovskite Solar Cells, Wanyi Nie, Jean-Christophe Blancon, Amanda J. Neukirch, Kannatassen Appavoo, Hsinhan Tsai, Manish Chhowalla, Muhammad A. Alam, Matthew Y. Sfeir, Claudine Katan, Jacky Even, Sergei Tretiak, Jared J. Crochet, Gautam Gupta, Aditya D. Mohite

Publications and Research

Solution-processed organometallic perovskite solar cells have emerged as one of the most promising thin-film photovoltaic technology. However, a key challenge is their lack of stability over prolonged solar irradiation. Few studies have investigated the effect of light soaking on hybrid perovskites and have attributed the degradation in the optoelectronic properties to photochemical or field-assisted ion migration. Here we show that the slow photocurrent degradation in thin-film photovoltaic devices is due to the formation of light-activated meta-stable deep-level trap states. However, the devices can self-heal completely by resting them in the dark for <1 min or the degradation can be completely prevented by operating the devices at 0°C. We investigate several physical mechanisms to explain the microscopic origin for the formation of these trap states, among which the creation of small polaronic states involving localized cooperative lattice strain and molecular orientations emerges as a credible microscopic mechanism requiring further detailed studies.

A Study Of Three Paradigms For Storing Geospatial Data: Distributed-Cloud Model, Relational Database, And Indexed Flat File, Matthew A. Toups

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related applications of geospatial data were once a small software niche; today nearly all Internet and mobile users utilize some sort of mapping or location-aware software. This widespread use reaches beyond mere consumption of geodata; projects like OpenStreetMap (OSM) represent a new source of geodata production, sometimes dubbed “Volunteered Geographic Information.” The volume of geodata produced and the user demand for geodata will surely continue to grow, so the storage and query techniques for geospatial data must evolve accordingly.

This thesis compares three paradigms for systems that manage vector data. Over the past few decades …

3-D Shape Recovery From A Single Camera Image, Vijai Jayadevan, Aaron Michaux, Edward Delp, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

3-D shape recovery is an ill-posed inverse problem which must be solved by using a priori constraints. We use symmetry and planarity constraints to recover 3-D shapes from a single image. Once we assume that the object to be reconstructed is symmetric, all that is left to do is to estimate the plane of symmetry and establish the symmetry correspondence between the various parts of the object. The edge map of the image of an object serves as a good representation of its 2-D shape and establishing symmetry correspondence means identifying pairs of symmetric curves in the edge map. The …

The Utilization Of Mobile Technology For Crime Scene Investigation In The San Francisco Bay Area, Marc Logrande

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

The research presented aims to explore factors affecting the decision to adopt a mobile crime scene investigation application in police departments throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. To accomplish this goal, the mobile technology acceptance model was used in designing a survey for data collection. This model utilizes four categories to interpret the factors that influence a police officer’s decision to accept or reject mobile technologies: performance, security and reliability, management style, and cognitive acceptance. Nine police departments were sampled through a series of in-person and over-the-phone interviews to obtain data regarding factors affecting the adoption of a mobile crime …

Wireless Authentication Of Smart Doors Using Rfid, Austin A. Hentrup, Deyi Lu, Peter R. Roldan

Honors Thesis

In an increasingly interconnected world, the traditional metal lock-and-key method of securing homes and businesses is becoming more outdated and inconvenient when compared to modern solutions. Modern systems are smarter, faster, lighter, more secure and more integrated than ever before. Though the costs of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are shrinking overall, professional solutions remain prohibitively expensive. The aim of this project is to develop an inexpensive, secure, and internet-enabled RFID door authentication system. This is to transparently investigate the design limitations for these systems and help determine the ultimate feasibility of RFID growing to define the modern door-authentication standard.

A Comparison Of Algorithms And Heuristics For Solving The O 1 I N D 1 Shortest Route Problems, Steven D. Young

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Shortest-path problems have seen a huge amount of study over the course of the last 50 years. Not surprisingly, this means the original problem of finding the shortest path from some starting location to some destination location has been thoroughly studied. However a large number of slight variations on the original problem still have yet to be thoroughly examined. In this paper we examine one of those variations, namely the problem of determining the optimal route from some source location to some destination location such that at least one location in an intermediate set is included in the route. Three …

Comparative Study Of Dimension Reduction Approaches With Respect To Visualization In 3-Dimensional Space, Pooja Chenna

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

In the present big data era, there is a need to process large amounts of unlabeled data and find some patterns in the data to use it further. If data has many dimensions, it is very hard to get any insight of it. It is possible to convert high-dimensional data to low-dimensional data using different techniques, this dimension reduction is important and makes tasks such as classification, visualization, communication and storage much easier. The loss of information should be less while mapping data from high-dimensional space to low-dimensional space. Dimension reduction has been a significant problem in many fields as …

Source Separation Approach To Video Quality Prediction In Computer Networks, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

Time-varying loads introduce errors in the estimated model parameters of service-level predictors in Computer Networks. A load-adjusted modification of a traditional unadjusted service-level predictor is contributed, based on Source Separation (SS). It mitigates these errors and improves service-quality predictions for Video-on-Demand (VoD) by :6 to 2dB.

Improving The Security Of Wireless Sensor Networks, Mauricio Tellez Nava

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

With the rapid technological advancements of sensors, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become the main technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). We investigated the security of WSNs in an environmental monitoring system with the goal to improve the overall security. We implemented a Secure Temperature Monitoring System (STMS), which served as our investigational environment. Our results revealed a security flaw found in the bootstrap loader (BSL) password used to protect firmware in the MSP430 MCU chips. We demonstrated how the BSL password could be brute forced in a matter of days. Furthermore, we illustrate how an attacker can reverse …

Eliminating Data Redundancy: Our Solution For Database Discovery Using Alma/Primo, Jacob Kindle, Travis Clamon

ETSU Faculty Works

East Tennessee State University recently adopted Alma & Primo and was suprised by the lack of an A-Z database discovery module. Frustrated by having to maintain electronic resources separately on our library website and in Alma, we embarked on a goal to eliminate redundancy and use Alma/Primo exclusively. This presentation will cover our entire workflow in both Alma & Primo and the issues we encountered along the way. I'll first go over our process in Alma including MARC record creation, electronic collection setup, and the top level collection module. Next, I'll cover our workflow in Primo including normalization rules, scoping, …

Dynamic 3d Zverse Models On The Web, Alexa Ann Breeland, Ming Wong

Senior Theses

ZVerse is a 3D printing company that is responsible for converting 2D objects into 3D objects. This company specializes in generating 3D collegiate products. Whenever a customer orders a 3D model, such as an alumni brick, it is often helpful to allow customers to see what the object looks like before the purchase. Unfortunately, previewing the brick at runtime is quite a challenging task. The purpose of our project is to create a shopping website that models the existing ZVerse company website and incorporates dynamic 3D rendering of the brick model with the user­input text. The project can be divided …

Factors Affecting Big Data Technology Adoption, Nayem Rahman

Student Research Symposium

With the advancement of computer science, hardware and software engineering, and computing power, and later with the advent of the internet, social networking tools and other sources such as sensors data growth has increased significantly. These data are called big data which are mostly unstructured, generated in large volumes, data need to be captured in near real-time. To handle big data a completely new set of tools and technologies are being emerged. I have studied big data literature to identify the factors that might influence big data adoption. I was able to list quite a few factors or attributes that …

Uav As A Service: Providing On-Demand Access And On-The-Fly Retasking Of Multi-Tenant Uavs Using Cloud Services, Justin Yapp

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As commercial roles for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more well-defined and demand for the services provided by them increases, UAVs rely more on new cloud computing services and co-operative coordination to provide mission planning, control, tracking and data processing. We present UAV as a Service (UAVaaS) framework, which brings features commonly found in traditional cloud services, such as Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service, to the domain of UAVs. Our work aims to conceptualize and design UAVaaS for commercial applications. Specifically, a cloud-provided orchestration framework that allows multi-tenant UAVs to easily serve multiple heterogenous clients at once and …

Augmented Reality In The Classroom, Patrick Jb Foster, Sean Cunniff

Honors Thesis

Low vision can have an exceptionally negative impact on a student’s ability to learn, especially when subjected to the conventional education system. In this environment, students are expected to adhere to a lecture that delivers most information visually via a whiteboard or a projector screen. The goal of this project is to create a customizable application for a smartphone that implements selective processing in order to make it easier for visually impaired students to engage with and learn from lectures.

Specifically, this application is written in the Java language for the Android platform. The application uses OpenGL ES, a C-like …