Computer Engineering Commons^™

Air-Writing Recognition, Gaurang Shukla

Master’s Dissertations

Air-writing is the act of tracing characters or words in free space with a fingertip, recorded by a camera, giving a touch-free input modality for smart displays, augmented and virtual reality, and assistive interfaces. It is difficult because the finger never lifts: connecting strokes join adjacent letters with no pen-up signal to mark boundaries, and the same word varies widely in scale, position, and slant across writers. The WiTA benchmark of Kim et al. provides a large, person-disjoint dataset and a baseline that treats each clip as RGB video, recognised by a spatio-temporal 3D residual network trained with a CTC …

Jalzap: An Agile Hybrid For Ai-Accelerated Software Development, Pouya Nouri

University Honors Theses

The rapid adoption of generative AI tools allows software teams to quickly code applications, but it comes at a cost: high scope volatility, technical debt, and unrealistic expectations, which break traditional Agile frameworks. This thesis introduces JALZAP, a lightweight, hybrid Agile framework designed to serve small, high-agility teams facing compressed timelines and unpredictable schedules. This framework was evaluated over 16 weeks through a Portland State University Capstone project working for a pre-seed startup sponsor, where a six-person team built Flowmind: an AI-powered iOS task management app meant to serve users with neurodevelopmental disorders like ADD/ADHD. JALZAP implements structural boundaries, including …

Semantic Directing: A Human-Ai Workflow For Interative Virtual Cinematography, Lejie Liu

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis presents AI Director, a Unity-based prototype for semantic directing in virtual cinematography. The system enables creators to describe cinematic intent in natural language, receive editable shot-strategy plans generated by a large language model, and refine specific shots through text and visual references. By separating semantic planning from deterministic camera execution, the workflow keeps user authorship centered on shot intent while making the resulting camera plans inspectable, editable, and executable in real time. This work explores semantic directing as a human-AI workflow for iterative cinematic authoring in dynamic 3D scenes.

Universal Communications Module: Converting Ieee2030.5 Xml Files To Ansi/Cta-2045, Wyatt Bilodeaux

University Honors Theses

The goal of this thesis is to discuss the method and organization of the Universal Communication module capstone project. This project was part of the Portland State University Electrical engineering degree program. While this thesis is part of the University honors curriculum. This thesis goes into detail about team structure and how a 9 person engineering capstone project was managed and organized. It looks at how we broke down the project into sections to be able to properly distribute our resources. This was one of the earliest and most important challenges that this capstone team had to tackle. This was …

Interactive Social Game Design For Sustainability Learning, Kayla Mattson, Kayla Huffman, Megha Thottam, Shreeya Koritala

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Our Roots is a community-centered, web-based social game designed to improve sustainability education by turning everyday environmental actions into shared, visible progress. While many existing tools provide information about sustainability, they often focus on individual tracking and short-term motivation, which can lead to disengagement over time. This project addresses that gap by reframing sustainability as a social practice: users log real-world sustainable behaviors, earn points, and see those actions represented as growth in both personal and community digital gardens. By combining friendly competition, peer visibility, and collective outcomes, the platform encourages users to view sustainability not as an isolated task, …

Bouillean - Ai Recipe Model, George Mouratoff, Hanol Yang, Helen Wang, Sebastian Verbinski

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

AI generated food recipes are the second most desired AI innovation, however relatively few commercial systems exist to fill this niche. This is because while the solution is highly desired, cooking shouldn’t be approached with the same method by most LLMs and standard AIs. The leading models struggle to solve the issue of generating a semantically clear recipe while maintaining memory of the recipe status between steps. This is before we can even attempt to solve the flavor problem.

Cooking represents a unique challenge for AI, since it requires minimal loss in memory alongside already high quality text generation making …

A Novel Design-For-Test Flow Using Librelane, Mohamed E. Gaber

Theses and Dissertations

Design-for-testing is a crucial element of application-specific integrated circuit design, yet, in the nascent open-source electronic design automation scene, the solutions for it are sorely limited. Design-for-test-enabled chips allow defects to be caught early on in the manufacturing process, avoiding incurring huge costs if hardware with defective chips is shipped to equipment manufacturers or, worse, end-users. Yet, the current open-source solutions rely on a brute-force utility that does not scale and negatively impacts the design by holding design-for-testing features as co-equal with the design’s regular operation, and a nominally layout-aware solution that does not holistically integrate into a larger flow. …

Ai In Precision Medicine: Redefining Blindness Treatment Via Retinal Stem Cell Differentiation, Calissa Leong, Tiffany Nguyen

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Age Macular Degeneration (AMD) is currently the leading cause of blindness, driven by the degradation of Retinal Pigment Epithelial (RPE) cells. Stem-cell based therapies, particularly those involving induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), typically consists of differentiating stem cells into RPE cells in vitro and transplanting them into the subretinal space. Our goal is to improve the accuracy of differentiation into RPE cells to better promote retinal regeneration. Traditional methods to alleviate symptoms of AMD is through therapeutic medications to slow disease progression, though stem cell therapy has emerged as a promising alternative. However, despite its potential, stem cell therapy presents …

Fisheye Camera Object Detection For Traffic Surveillance, Hugo Yang, Robert Luo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Effective traffic management is hampered by the physical limitations of traditional pinhole cameras, whose narrow fields of view create blind spots that require costly multi-camera infrastructure to overcome. Fisheye cameras offer a wide-angle alternative capable of single-camera intersection coverage, but the radial distortion inherent in their optics renders standard object detection algorithms unreliable, limiting their practical deployment in traffic surveillance.

This thesis investigates specialized object detection pipelines for fisheye traffic imagery by reproducing and building upon two top-ranked submissions from the 2025 AI City Challenge Track 4: the VNPT and SKKU-AutoLab pipelines. Both were successfully reconstructed outside their original containerized …

Ml Models For Child-Parent Speech Diarization, Kenneth Kang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This senior design thesis presents a machine learning research pipeline for child-parent and child-directed speech diarization. Speech diarization is the task of determining who spoke and when in an audio recording. Although this problem is well studied in adult meeting, broadcast, and conversational speech, child-parent audio is a more uneven setting. Children may speak in short turns, change pitch quickly, vocalize without producing clear words, interrupt adults, overlap with adult speech, cry, laugh, or code switch. These behaviors are normal in real family interaction, but they can confuse diarization systems that were mostly designed and evaluated on adult speech.

The …

Trends In Non-Profit Cybersecurity: Analyzing Three Years Of Incident Data From The Npcir, Stanley Mierzwa, Joanna Paliszkiewicz, Edyta Skarzyńska

Center for Cybersecurity

This study analyzes cyberattack trends targeting non-profit organizations using longitudinal data collected over a three-year period within the Non-Profit Cybersecurity Incident Repository (NPCIR). Developed through a National Security Agency Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (NSA CAE-CD) designated center, the NPCIR applies an open-source intelligence (OSINT) methodology to systematically document cybersecurity incidents affecting the global non-profit sector. This study examines attack types, threat actor characteristics, sectoral distribution, and cybersecurity impacts using the Confidentiality–Integrity–Availability (CIA) triad framework. The results indicate that availability-related incidents, particularly ransomware and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, constitute the most prevalent threats, while confidentiality breaches remain highly …

Implementation Of A Mixed Precision Iterative Solver On An Amd Apu, Saeyeon Kim, Henrik Evers

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Solving systems of linear equations is a core operation in high-performance computing and many scientific and engineering applications. One of the most widely used direct methods for solving such systems is LU factorization. Mixed-precision methods accelerate these solvers by using low-precision LU factorization with iterative refinement, improving performance and energy efficiency while preserving high numerical accuracy. AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), which integrate CPU and NPU resources, provide an opportunity to explore this approach on emerging heterogeneous architectures. However, effective NPU utilization remains challenging due to workload partitioning, buffer management, data-movement overhead, and software tooling limitations.

This project implements a …

Broncosgo: Driving Student Event Participation Via Human-Ai Collaborative Event Curation, Katherine Carter, Ethan Sychangco

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College campuses rely heavily on email communication for event advertisement. However, due to the sheer number of emails any student may receive, the individual effectiveness of each advertisement decreases. A better alternative for event promotion was needed. How could we introduce students to events they would not usually find on their own, without continuing to fill up their email inbox? And how would information on all of those events be collected and maintained without requiring organizations to jump through extra hoops? Our project, BroncosGo, solves this issue by maintaining a database of campus events which is populated with information provided …

Club Finance Management Application, India Bell, Lydia Martin, Sola Kawahara, Zachariah Wang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

There are over 160 Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) at SCU as of 2023 [6]. There is currently no centralized system that RSO treasurers use to track and manage club finances. As a result, many organizations rely on fragmented methods such as spreadsheets, shared documents, email chains, and manual record keeping to manage budgets, reimbursements, and financial reports. These disconnected systems often lead to inconsistent organization, communication difficulties, and challenges during leadership transitions between club officers. This project proposes the development of a web-based Club Finance Management Application, Kaikei, designed specifically for Santa Clara University student organizations. The application centralizes financial …

Iajes Website Redesign, Justin Fan, Nicolas Gibson, Isabelle Hu, Anisha Malani

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The International Association of Jesuit Engineering and Science Schools (IAJES) connects more than sixty Jesuit institutions worldwide to promote collaboration and shared learning in STEM research. Santa Clara University is one of more than sixty member universities whose faculty and staff participate in conferences and task forces to address priority issues identified by the Society of Jesus. IAJES’ existing website, built on a static no-code platform, limited the organization’s ability to manage content, support member interaction, and scale with its growing global network. Users faced unclear navigation options, a basic design, and no effective tools for managing roles, resources, or …

Bilingual Math For Kindergartners (Biki), Anna Aldrin, Caroline Tapia, Lillian Le

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

For many children from bilingual households, kindergarten represents a critical, learning benchmark where the introduction of fundamental math concepts coincides with their first significant exposure to the English language. Traditional educational methods often fail to support English language learners, leading to a disconnect between their understanding of math in the home and its application in the classroom. This linguistic barrier frequently results in reduced engagement, diminished confidence, and an unstable educational foundation that can discourage students from pursuing STEM careers later in life. While existing platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo address either language acquisition or mathematical proficiency independently, they …

Bridgeide, Maya Srimal, Jeshwin Prince, Arnav Gupta, Will Zumbolo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Anyone who has done a group project knows the pattern: the first meeting burns an hour on logistics—which document to use, who has access, why the formatting broke on one laptop—before real work begins. In computer science courses that gap is worse. Students must install the right compiler, runtime, and libraries on their own machines; a four-person team on four different laptops can lose the first week to setup alone. Instructors who want to review submissions often download every zip from the learning management system and run each one locally. Existing tools solve pieces of this puzzle—real-time document editing, browser-based …

Maya Roots, Erin Schmidt, Megu Kanzawa

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project focused on the continued development of Maya Roots, a mobile and web-based platform designed for farmers in Tahcabo: a rural agricultural community located in Yucatán, Mexico. Yucatán faces unique agricultural challenges due to its karst limestone terrain and highly variable land conditions that can significantly impact farming outcomes. At the same time, traditional agricultural knowledge such as Milpa farming practices is increasingly at risk of being lost across generations. These environmental and cultural challenges highlighted the need for a portable, accessible system that could preserve agricultural knowledge, improve access to geospatial information, and strengthen communication between farmers and …

Hyperdimensional Computing For Edge And Mobile Devices, Colin Eddy Dupuis

Masters Theses

This thesis presents a set of four Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) frameworks and their Android application implementations to evaluate efficiency and feasibility on resource-constrained devices. These proposed methods target a range of application domains, including wearable health monitoring, mobile malware detection, and activity recognition utilizing both computer vision and multiple sensor streams as input. The proposed frameworks utilize HDC’s simple, lightweight arithmetic operations to convert raw data into high-dimensional representations for use in both binary and multi-class classification schemes. Each method utilizes unique encoding techniques tailored for each use case, demonstrating the flexible nature and specialization HDC offers as an emerging …

Jsd: Novel Methodology For Synthetic Data Evaluation, Jeffrey Lane, Scott Wang, Vincent Chang, Bojun Zhang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The proliferation of sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on dark web marketplaces has created an urgent need for robust data protection systems, especially for vulnerable populations such as minors. Traditional PII redaction often fails to identify implicit privacy risks—such as author gender indicators or non-fictional child-related context—hidden within large-scale e-commerce datasets. This paper presents JSD, a dual-stage framework for the detection and protection of sensitive text data. The Detection phase utilizes Transformer and CNN-based architectures and Human-in-the-Loop AI to surpass the "semantic ceiling" of traditional NER approaches, enabling context-aware identification of implicit PII. The Protection phase introduces GASE (Genetic Algorithm …

Hemlock, Ephraim Esson, Ambrose Vellequette, Geno Meschi

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Hemlock is a tool designed to protect musicians from having their work used to train generative AI models without their consent. It works by adding carefully crafted inaudible noise to audio files that disrupts the ability of AI models to learn from them — a technique known as adversarial perturbation. Our system targets three different types of AI model simultaneously: a Music Information Retrieval (MIR) classifier, a sequential audio generation model (Mel-LSTM), and Meta’s AudioCraft, a transformer-based music generator. Testing in twenty songs showed an average 15% reduction in the MIR model’s classification confidence, a 59% increase in Mel- LSTM …

6tisch Based Sensing Network For Smart Agriculture, Riley Heike, Griffin Jones, Justin Odo, Jalen Paige, Rosalie Wessels

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project investigates 6TiSCH (IPv6 over Time-Slotted Channel Hopping), a relatively recent IETF networking standard introduced in 2013 that combines deterministic TSCH scheduling, 6LoWPAN header compression, and RPL mesh routing to enable low-power, reliable, multi-hop wireless communication for IoT deployments. Despite its strong theoretical properties, 6TiSCH remains underexplored in practice, and real-world questions around configuration, scalability, power behavior, and end-to-end integration are not well documented. Our primary goal was to build and operate a working 6TiSCH network, characterize its performance through iterative testing, and understand what it takes to go from raw packet delivery to a complete data pipeline.

To …

Mimica, Sean Lai, Gurprasaad Hora, Stephanie Campos

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Language barriers remain a significant obstacle to natural human communication, limiting access to healthcare, business, travel, and daily social interaction for billions of people worldwide. Existing translation solutions such as smartphone applications and earpiece devices address the functional problem of converting words between languages but fail to preserve the speaker’s voice identity, require hands-on interaction, or depend on proprietary device ecosystems. These limitations disrupt the natural flow of conversation and reduce the human quality of cross-lingual communication.

Mimica is a real-time wearable translation necklace designed to address these shortcomings. Built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with an integrated microphone and speaker, …

Trim-Transfer: A Transfer Learning Approach For Cross-Trim Level Can Intrusion Detection, Baylor J. Whitehead

Master's Theses

Modern vehicles contain many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that communicate through CAN. While CAN enables efficient data communication, it lacks built in authentication and encryption, allowing adversarial actors to inject malicious CAN messages. This limitation has motivated the development of CAN intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, deploying IDS across a vehicle lineup requires collecting large labeled datasets and retraining models, increasing development cost and limiting scalability.

This thesis investigates the use of transfer learning with LSTM-based deep neural networks to reduce retraining cost while maintaining model detection performance. A baseline LSTM model is trained using CAN data from a base …

A Study On Quantization And Hardware Cost Tradeoffs In A 5g Nr Ldpc Decoder On Fpga, Giancarlo Acosta

Master's Theses

The fixed-point implementation of a 5G New Radio LDPC decoder forces a tradeoff between precision and hardware cost, governed by the variable node word length W_L, the check node message width W_R, and the normalized min-sum correction factor α. This thesis characterizes how these three parameters affect both error correction performance and FPGA resource utilization for an LDPC decoder on an established LDPC decoder architecture. A bit-accurate MATLAB core model records bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) while a verified HDL Coder model generates synthesizable VHDL for Vivado synthesis, and both are swept …

Trustworthy Intelligence Fusion For Search And Rescue: Designing Grounded And Secure Multi-Agent Ai For Mission Decision Support, Yayun Tan

Master's Theses

Search and rescue (SAR) operations require teams to integrate uncertain information under severe time pressure. Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) can support decision-making, but they also risk producing hallucinated outputs and processing unreliable or malicious data. This thesis addresses these risks through three linked studies. First, it proposes a modular eight-agent SAR MAS architecture that reflects the structure of real SAR missions by assigning specialized roles to different agents. Second, it introduces a post-hoc probabilistic verification framework that checks LLM agent outputs against a probabilistic knowledge graph built from historical SAR incidents.  Third, the thesis examines indirect adversarial …

Integrating Sustainability Into Engineering Education, Riley R. Moller

Master's Theses

Engineering decisions shape lasting technology that affects environmental integrity, public safety, economic stability, and social equity. As global challenges such as climate change, infrastructure vulnerability, and rapid technological advancement intensify, the responsibilities placed on engineers continue to expand. Sustainability provides a framework for addressing these interconnected pressures through systems-based design and long-term thinking. Yet, sustainability education within engineering programs remains unevenly integrated, often positioned as elective or peripheral rather than as a foundational component of professional preparation.

Prior research shows that sustainability is most frequently addressed through stand-alone courses rather than embedded across required curricula, reflecting disciplinary structures that prioritize …

Reproducing And Evaluating Charger Surfing: Robustness Of Smartphone Charging-Line Side-Channels, Colby M. Watts

Master's Theses

Smartphones are frequently connected to external, untrusted charging hardware, creating opportunities for side-channel attacks that do not require malware or direct access to device data. Charger Surfing, a recently proposed charging-line power analysis side-channel attack, reported high accuracy in inferring touchscreen input from voltage measurements collected from a smartphone’s charging cable; however, the reproducibility and robustness of these results under different conditions remain unclear. This thesis presents an independent replication and evaluation of Charger Surfing, including the development of an end-to-end data collection pipeline consisting of a modified charging cable, oscilloscope-based recordings, custom Android app, automated trace processing, and convolutional …

Preserving Structural Alias Information Across The Mlir-To-Llvm Lowering Boundary, Shravan Sheth

Master's Theses

Machine learning training and inference workloads run at massive scale, where the efficiency of generated machine code directly affects throughput and energy consumption. The compilers that lower model specifications to hardware instructions rely on optimization passes that can only exploit information visible in the representations they operate on. MLIR, the intermediate representation framework underlying production machine learning compilers such as IREE and Triton, is designed so that each abstraction level can encode semantics that lower levels cannot represent. One example is memref.subview, which partitions a buffer into typed regions with explicit offsets and sizes, making structural non-overlap provable from the …

Vision-Guided Motion Planning For Autonomous Catch With A Robotic Arm, Kayla Go-Oco, Ashik K. Islam, Raegan Gritzmacher

Electrical Engineering

Modern robotic systems are often evaluated using static and highly controlled tasks, such as pick-and-place demonstrations, which do not fully represent the uncertainty and adaptability required in real-world environments. A major challenge in robotics research is enabling robotic systems to perceive, track, and respond to dynamic objects in real time while maintaining accurate and reliable motion control. This project addresses these challenges by developing an autonomous robotic platform in which an OpenMANIPULATOR-Y robotic arm detects, tracks, and attempts to catch a moving tennis ball using a vision-guided control system. The system integrates YOLO-based object detection with an Intel RealSense D455 …