Computer Engineering Commons^™

Landscaping Of Mcp: An Overview Of Mcp Mitigations And Tools, Arden Michel

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become the standard for enabling agentic AI systems to interact with external tools, data sources, and services. Since its debut in 2024, MCP has been adopted by companies such as Google, Apple, Meta, and IBM. While this integration greatly improves the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), it also creates a new attack surface that the security community is only beginning to understand systematically.

A key architectural challenge is MCP's fundamental reliance on implicit trust: servers often run locally with high privileges, tool descriptions are accepted without question, and external servers are presumed …

Limitations Of Signature-Based Network Intrusion Detection Under Modern Traffic Conditions, Henry Guidry

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Network Intrusion Detection Systems are tools used to monitor network traffic and alert to suspicious or harmful activity before it can cause harm. Signature-based versions of these systems are a foundation for intrusion detection, operating by finding common patterns and forming malicious signatures. However, three developments in modern network environments have greatly impacted the significance of Network Intrusion Detection Systems. These three developments are the near-complete adoption of end-to-end encryption, the use of sophisticated packet fragmentation techniques, and the processing demands of high-throughput networks. Encryption makes deep packet inspection practically infeasible by transforming inspectable payloads into ciphertext, forcing NIDS to …

Analysis Of Automatic Regulation Based On The Dynamic Indicators Of The Working Body For Cleaning Channels And Ditches, Nasiba Siraj Amirbayova

Technical science and innovation

Today, the comprehensive development of road infrastructure and agriculture directly requires the reconstruction and effective use of systems intended for irrigation and protection of road surfaces. The goal of agricultural development has made it necessary to increase attention to this area. This also reveals the correct use and operation of existing melioration irrigation systems as an important problem. This is mainly one of the issues of correct operation of road infrastructure. It is known that the majority of agricultural products are produced in areas where irrigation systems are widely developed. On the other hand, the use of collector-drainage networks, cleaning …

Escaping Isolation: An Analysis Of Virtual Machine And Container Breakout Vulnerabilities, Felix Iov

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Cloud computing providers rely on multi-tenant architectures to maximize resource efficiency. This infrastructure depends on virtualization, which provides isolation between clients. This comes primarily in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs) and Containers. However, “breakout attacks” or “escapes” are a critical threat where attackers bypass these isolation layers to gain unauthorized access to the host system and neighboring environments. This paper surveys virtualization escape threats and analyzes three case studies: a runc container escape (Leaky Vessels), a VMware ESXi VM escape (VSOCKPuppet), and an NVIDIA GPU container escape (NVIDIAScape). Each demonstrates different attack surfaces, including file descriptor misuse, kernel driver …

Proxyconnec: A Lora-Based Proactive Safety Communication System For Off-Grid Environments, Shruti Bhandari, Roza Shaimurat

ATU Scholars Symposium

Remote environments lacking cellular or satellite coverage present significant safety challenges. ProxyConnec was developed as a point-to-point communication system using ESP32 microcontrollers and REYAX RYLR998 LoRa modules to provide off-grid monitoring.

The system implements a proactive heartbeat model in which a beacon device transmits a signal every 1,000 milliseconds. A base station monitors this connection using a 5,000 millisecond watchdog timer. If communication is interrupted, the system immediately triggers audible and visual alerts. Unlike conventional tracking devices that depend on manual SOS activation, this design treats unexpected signal loss as a potential safety event.

The manufacturer rates the selected LoRa …

Deep Spiking Neural Network Autoencoders For Efficient Temporal Data Compression, Shruti Bhandari

ATU Scholars Symposium

High dimensional temporal data processing, such as that required for neuroprosthetics and remote physiological monitoring presents significant challenges for real time deployment because transmitting and storing raw signals is computationally demanding and energy intensive. Effective data compression is essential to act as a "biological zip file," reducing transmission bandwidth while preserving the critical temporal features required for accurate signal reconstruction and analysis. This study proposes a deep Spiking Neural Network (SNN) Autoencoder designed for high-fidelity data compression by utilizing the event-driven firing behavior of Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons, which ensures extreme computational efficiency compared to traditional models. The model is …

Approach To Physics Education Using Local Ai With Rag For Open Educational Materials Generation, Dmitriy Beznosko

All Things Open

The new tool that starts to enter all parts of our life is AI – and it enters education as well. There are two standing large concerns with using AI for education – the safety of students’ data and the AI missing specific knowledge about the given class. The approach of using the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) provides the user data to the locally run LLM model (using Ollama framework, a free and open-source tool that allows you to run large language models locally on your system) as a context for the generation of the OER materials. As this AI …

Multiple-Valued Quantum Automata For Robotics, Yuchen Huang

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation introduces a new type of quantum automata, their encoding and circuit realization. I concentrate on possible applications in robotics. Several methods and application of quantum automata and quantum circuit-based controllers for elementary robotic systems, with a focus on humanoid robot motion, emotion, and behavior generation are illustrated in detail. The research introduces several novel methodologies that bridge quantum computing principles with robotic control, aiming to overcome the limitations of classical deterministic and probabilistic approaches.

The dissertation first presents a quantum-circuit-based framework for generating non-repetitive and expressive (e)motions in a humanoid robot actor, using superposition and entanglement to produce …

Examining The Use And Perceived Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence Tools In Higher Education: Student Perspectives, Musa Pinar, Haydar Cukurtepe, Aysegul Yayimli, Faruk Guder

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Reducing Systemic Bias In Behavioral Targeting Using Explainable Ai: The Harmonia Complex Systems Approach, Ruchira Deokar, Preethi Nanjundan, Jossy P. George, Carlos Gershenson

Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)

Behavioral targeting is a key part of the modern advertising web's algorithmic engine. However, it is unclear whether optimization processes worsen bias, promote unchecked spread in filter bubbles or lower overall users' trust levels. This paper introduces HARMONIA (Holistic Adaptive Regulatory Model for Optimizing Non-transparent Intelligent Advertising), a comprehensive, data-driven Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework aimed at transforming behavioral targeting via transparency, interpretability, and adaptive ethical regulation. This paper conducted a comprehensive Explorative Data Analysis (EDA) on the public Criteo Display Advertising Dataset, which contains over 45 million records, to identify patterns in high-dimensional user-ad interaction space. This analysis uncovered …

Ultragps: A Low-Cost, Open-Source Ultrasonic Positioning System, Scott Roelker Murillo, Nnamdi Jesse Onwuzurike

Posters - 2026

We want to raise the bar in high school robotics. In Texas, and likely in many other states as well, high school robotics has reached a roadblock when it comes to autonomous navigation. In many competitions, the autonomous portion sees few, teams successfully completing tasks that require positioning and guidance. In modern robotics, it is no longer sufficient for a robot merely be “remote controlled.” They need to be able to navigate independently and adapt to the environment around them. To achieve this goal a positioning system is needed to develop the foundational algorithms for autonomous controls. However, these systems …

Tuning And Performance Of Pid Controlled Low Complexity Systems, Timothy Evans

Honors Theses

Proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers are used for precise position and orientation control in systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). This project supports the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) Robotics Club’s RoboSub AUV effort by developing, troubleshooting, and manually tuning PID controllers to characterize tracking performance and settling time across systems of increasing complexity. Initially, the project hypothesized that tracking performance would be reduced and settling times would increase as system complexity advanced from one degree-of-freedom (DOF) to two DOF. However, prior research was found that suggests that for small disturbances around an equilibrium state, separate PID-controlled DOFs can …

Machine Learning For Real-Time Body Movement Classification Using Eeg And Vr Technologies, Aiden H. Behler, Robin Ghosh

Undergraduate Research

This project investigates the feasibility of real-time full-body movement classification using electroencephalography (EEG) integrated with virtual reality (VR) technologies. The primary objective is to develop and evaluate machine learning models for predicting human body movements using EEG data alone, with the long-term goal of reducing or eliminating reliance on wearable motion trackers. Currently, several machine learning algorithms have been tested, but classification accuracy remains modest, indicating the complexity of the task. Ongoing work focuses on optimizing preprocessing, feature selection, and model architectures to improve performance. The system architecture combines synchronized neural and motion data collected within a VR environment. EEG …

Drones Detection Via Skeletonization And Small-Object-Aware Detr, Gissell Torres, Delio Rincon

Center for Cybersecurity

Detecting drones in video streaming environments remains challenging in computer vision due to scale variation and background complexity. Building up from prior work in real-time detection and skeletonization for streaming environments, this study aims to improve small object detection through Skeletonization and a Small-Object-Aware Detection Transformer framework, which uses DETR technology as a foundational step toward reliable motion prediction in dynamic aerial scenes. A transformer-based detection model was trained on a drone dataset converted to COCO format and evaluated using standard COCO metrics, including AP, AP50, and AP_small. Initial testing revealed low-confidence predictions, suggesting limitations in backbone freezing and training …

Research Days: Case Study: Creation Of A Student-Driven Radio Talk Show To Answer Cybersecurity Questions And Concerns To Boost Power Skills, Joel Leiva, Anthony Bayate, David Abiandu, Keith Fernandez

Center for Cybersecurity

Power skills are essential in any professional career. Oftentimes, college students don’t feel prepared enough to enter the workforce. Having good power skills in a group can greatly increase production and efficiency. This case study aims to develop these power skills in a group of college students through the creation of a student-driven radio talk show answering cybersecurity questions and concerns. A qualitative approach was used via the creation of the C.Y.B.E.R. radio show. This show enhanced the participants’ power skills such as collaboration, teamwork, and communication skills. The findings from this case study prove the alternate hypothesis of boosting …

Adopting Zero Trust Security In Cloud: A Comparative Study, Landy Jimenez

Center for Cybersecurity

Adopting Zero Trust Security in Cloud: A Comparative StudyLandy Jimenez, Dr. Jiaxin LeiDepartment of Computer Science & Technology, Kean UniversityAbstract:As organizations transition to cloud-native environments, ensuring security across distributed systems has become more difficult. Modern cyberthreats like insider breaches and lateral movement attacks have shown that traditional perimeter-based security strategies, which rely on implicit trust within internal networks, are inadequate. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) addresses these challenges by requiring continuous authentication, authorization, and encryption for every access request, regardless of network location. However, cloud native Zero Trust presents concerns about scalability, latency, and resource overhead.This study evaluates Zero Trust at …

The Impact Of Ai Ethics Education On Student Engagement And Ethical Perspectives, Diana Medina

Center for Cybersecurity

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a cornerstone of technological innovation. The world has come to see the many advancements AI has to offer and the impact it has on everyday life. The benefits of AI are promising, and institutions are learning how to implement AI to further advance productivity and efficiency. However, AI-based products may produce harmful or unjust consequences, especially when ethical considerations are not deliberated during the developmental stages. This study investigates student engagement and examines the impact in infusing ethical reasoning in AI education. With five participating computer science professors and two historians, ethics modules were introduced …

Stamp-V: Steganographic Traceability For ​ Ai-Generated Images With Multimodal Verification, Xinlei Guan, David Arosema, Tejaswi Dhandu, Meng Xu, Kuan Huang, Tida Umamheswara Rao, Bingya Shen

Center for Cybersecurity

The rapid growth of generative AI has intensified challenges in content moderation and digital forensics, particularly when benign AI-generated images are paired with harmful or misleading text. This contextual misuse undermines traditional moderation systems and complicates attribution, as synthetic images typically lack persistent metadata or device signatures. We introduce STAMP-V, a steganography-enabled provenance framework that embeds cryptographically signed identifiers into images at creation time and verifies provenance through multimodal harmful content detection. Our system evaluates five watermarking methods across spatial, frequency, and wavelet domains, and integrates a CLIP-based fusion model that performs multimodal harmful-content detection as part of the provenance …

Using Ai To Predict Energy Expenditure In Lower Limb Prosthesis Users, Nelly Diaz, Siem Hadish

Posters - 2026

• Computer vision has evolved from simple image classification and object detection to analyzing human motion and biomechanics (1). • CNN’s are usually focused on image classification, but, in this case, we are not asking the model if a person is walking. • Many real-world problems require regression: Predicting a continuous number like energy expenditure of walking is a complex task. • It is essential for Prosthetists to understand energy expenditure of their prosthetic patients (2). • An amputee may use 20-30% more energy to walk. • In this project, we developed an AI model to analyze human motion and …

Active Listening And Reassurance In Text-Based Virtual Health Coaches, Ghulam Hussain

Dissertations

Conversational agents (CAs) have strong potential to support health and physical wellbeing through text-based coaching, but they remain limited in their ability to demonstrate supportive social behaviours that are important in human coaching interactions. In particular, relatively little is known about how Active Listening and Reassurance are perceived, modelled, and evaluated in text-based virtual healthcare coaching, or how such behaviours should be adapted to individual users.

This dissertation investigates how supportive interaction behaviours can enhance text based virtual health coaching, with an initial focus on Active Listening and Reassurance and a later theoretical emphasis on Active Listening. Across five unique …

Bio-Payload Senior Design Report, Connor Bishop, Oliver Goodall, Marcus Kirk, Gabby Robles, Anish Shanmuganathan

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

This project focuses on the design and development of an autonomous experimental platform capable of conducting cellular biology experiments in a well plate within a CubeSat environment. The system integrates microfluidics, robotics, and onboard sensors to remotely initiate experiments, monitor them, and collect data without human intervention. The objective is to create a platform for automated biological experimentation in microgravity, while reducing reliance on ground-based control and increasing mission efficiency and reproducibility. The team used Saccharomyces cerevisiae to assess the biocompatibility of the well plate and monitor changes in cell culture, including optical density and cell viability.

2026 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2026.

The Psychology Behind Ai-Generated Phishing And Social Engineering Attacks, A’Shya Reynolds

School of Cybersecurity Master's Level Projects and Papers

Cybercrime has evolved significantly with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), transforming traditional phishing and social engineering attacks into highly sophisticated and personalized threats. While early phishing attempts relied on generic messaging and low success rates, modern AI-driven attacks leverage advanced data analytics, natural language processing, and behavioral prediction to manipulate victims more effectively.

This research examines how cybercriminals utilize AI to enhance psychological manipulation techniques in phishing and social engineering attacks, increasing victim susceptibility. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature in cybersecurity and psychology, this study explores key psychological mechanisms, including cognitive biases, emotional triggers, and decision-making processes that influence victim …

Optimizing Auv Perception For Competitive Underwater Robotics: Analyzing Performance And Simplicity Of Machine Vision Hardware, Joseph King

Honors Theses

Underwater robotics is a growing field with many practical applications, such as pipeline and offshore structure monitoring, deep sea mining, mine reconnaissance/removal, and marine environmental monitoring. USM’s Robotics Club will participate in the international RoboSub competition, where student-led teams build autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that perform a variety of tasks within a pool requiring camera-based object detection. This project analyzes affordable hardware and software options for providing machine vision to USM’s future RoboSub AUV. The performance of an ESP32-CAM microcontroller, Raspberry Pi 5, and Jetson Orin Nano single-board computers running FOMO and YOLO object detection models was compared. These models …

Behavioral-Centric Team Evaluation Via Consistent Rewards, Clement Kudakwashe Nyanhongo

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Across human domains ranging from sports to business and organizational settings, complex tasks are often solved by teams rather than individuals, leveraging benefits such as interaction, mutual support, complementary skills, cohesion, and task allocation. Evaluating team effectiveness, however, is inherently challenging due to the subjectivity of many existing techniques and the limitations of outcome-driven metrics that primarily focus on performance scores while overlooking the team processes that generated the scores. To address these challenges, this dissertation proposes a behavioral-centric, end-to-end framework for team evaluation grounded in reward functions that model sequential team behavior. Reward functions offer compact and interpretable representations …

Generalized Planning Using Language Models And Its Applications, Vishal Pallagani

Theses and Dissertations

Planning is a fundamental capability for intelligent systems, yet classical planners remain difcult to scale and generalize across domains due to their reliance on hand- engineered models, brittle search procedures, and limited adaptability. These limita- tions constrain real-world applications that require fexible reasoning, robust decision- making, and the ability to operate across diverse environments.

Large language models have emerged as powerful learners supported by their ar- chitectures and large-scale training data, demonstrating strong capabilities in tasks such as question answering, code generation, summarization, and reasoning. Moti- vated by their broad generalization abilities, I investigate whether language models can be systematically …

An Integrated Bayesian Network-Based Zero Trust Model To Quantify Cyber Risk In Small-Medium Businesses, Ahmed Abdelmagid

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Small-medium businesses (SMBs) play a pivotal role in the worldwide economy as they constitute the most considerable portion of businesses in developed countries like the UK and the US. As such, SMBs are likely targets of cybercrimes by malicious agents because of their vulnerable IT systems. The digital infrastructure of SMBs is more likely to be hit by cyberattacks than large businesses due to many factors that facilitate hackers’ missions. These factors include a limited financial budget devoted to cybersecurity, a lack of knowledge, an underrating of how dangerous cyber threats are, and a shortage of IT expertise. The enormous …

A Software-Defined Radio Testbed For Mimo-Ofdm Communications, Chaz G. Maschman

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, we implement a testbed for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems via GNU Radio. Specifically, we implement a configurable framework for the construction of MIMO-OFDM software-defined radio (SDR) systems as a GNU Radio module. The GNU Radio MIMO-OFDM module consists of multiple algorithmic blocks necessary for implementation of a MIMO-OFDM system. This includes a library for the generation of orthogonal or pseudo-random pilot sequences, amendments to the Schmidl-Cox protocol for MIMO synchronization, and the creation of click-and-drag GNU Radio blocks implementing the conversion of arbitrary data sent via external programs to MIMO-OFDM frames, the initial …

Study Of Output And Behavior Of Llms Using Confidence Framing In Prompt Engineering, Micah Parrilla

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

While prompt engineering is pivotal for shaping Large Language Model (LLM) outputs, the impact of confidence framing on behavioral calibration remains underexplored. This study investigates the ways in which psychological framing, utilizing techniques such as capability praise, role amplification, and doubt induction, affects linguistic tone, objective accuracy, and internal calibration. A 1,080-trial experimental matrix evaluated six diverse models across factual, logical, coding, and cyber security domains. Analysis using the Kruskal-Wallis H-test revealed highly significant behavioral shifts across all measured dimensions, providing conclusive evidence that the applied frames exert a substantial influence on model performance.

The findings identify a distinct cognitive …

Developing A Multi-Band Gnss Remote Sensing Station To Measure Precipitable Water Vapor For Flash Flood Nowcasting, Madison Gleydura

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Flash flood nowcasting in Central and Southern Appalachia is particularly challenging due to steep terrain, narrow valleys, highly localized rainfall patterns, and limited measurement coverage. Traditional remote sensing methods, such as Doppler radar and microwave radiometry, suffer from reduced resolution at long range and signal blockage by mountains. GNSS-meteorology offers an established alternative for measuring precipitable water vapor and is currently integrated into several numerical weather models. Recent research demonstrates that commercial-grade GNSS receivers can produce tropospheric products comparable to those from geodetic-grade equipment. The gaps in mountain coverage can be addressed by developing a low-cost, self-contained embedded system that …