Computer and Systems Architecture Commons^™

Creating An Updated Risc-V Platform With Hypervisor Support, Carter A. Glatt

Masters Theses

Virtualization has become an important methodology for implementing security and efficiency in embedded systems design. Virtualized environments provide flexibility and scalability of user-space environments, as hardware capabilities allow for multiple environments to run concurrently using the same hardware without impacting system performance or cost metrics. The ability to implement virtualized environments is fundamentally based on the instruction set architecture (ISA), which implements the necessary commands to facilitate the interface between physical hardware and virtual components.

RISC-V is an open-source ISA that can be used to generate platforms that support virtualization through the use of the H-Extension ISA. Previous research into …

Wake-On-Anomaly Federated Architecture For Privacy-Preserving Poultry Health Early Warning, Mahmoud Aziz Louati

Masters Theses

Highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks, respiratory disease, heat stress, and silent equipment failures share one operational reality: they are detected too late because today’s poultry-health workflow is reactive, manual, and dependent on producers volunteering commercially sensitive data. This thesis presents a wake-on-anomaly federated architecture that addresses both the detection-latency problem and the privacy–adoption deadlock that has so far prevented cross-farm collaboration. The architecture is organized in two tiers. Tier 1 is a lightweight LSTM autoencoder that continuously screens four routine telemetry channels (water, feed, house temperature, activity proxy) and emits a per-window reconstruction-error score. A debounced k-of-m trigger with cooldown …

Improving Human Visual Search: Enhancing Lung Cancer Nodule Detection In Medical Images, Christopher Khajira

Masters Theses

Human visual search involves the identification of relevant signals within information-rich environments, which is a fundamental problem in visual perception. While detection accuracy and response time are commonly used to evaluate performance in visual search, these measures do not reveal the underlying cognitive and computational structure that produces observable behavior. A key challenge lies in distinguishing between competing processing architectures, particularly in complex visual domains where different models can produce similar behavioral outcomes. This study addresses this challenge by developing a computational experimental framework for analyzing visual search behavior using System Factorial Technology (SFT). The experimental framework integrates naturalistic medical …

A Modular Llm Approach To Argument Extraction In Philosophical Texts, Nate Miller

Masters Theses

Engaging with philosophical works is a rewarding but demanding task that challenges both human readers and computational systems designed to extract arguments from dense philosophical reasoning, and although large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in argument extraction, the most advanced models are often costly to run. As a result, there is growing interest in determining if multi-agent pipelines that divide a task into smaller stages can reduce cost while maintaining or improving performance.

This study investigates a modular multi-agent approach for extracting arguments from philosophical texts using LLMs, and compares its performance, cost, and runtime to both single-agent …

Sel4 On Risc-V - Developing High Assurance Platforms With Modular Open-Source Architectures, Michael A. Doran Jr

Masters Theses

Virtualization is now becoming an industry standard for modern embedded systems. Modern embedded systems can now support multiple applications on a single hardware platform while meeting power and cost requirements. Virtualization on an embedded system is achieved through the design of the hardware-software interface. Instruction set architecture, ISA, defines the hardware-software interface for an embedded system. At the hardware level the ISA, provides extensions to support virtualization.

In addition to an ISA that supports hypervisor extensions it is equally important to provide a hypervisor completely capable of exploiting the benefits of virtualization for securing modern embedded systems. Currently there does …

Infrastructure-As-Code: Automating The Deployment On Aws Using Terraform, Srikar Pratap

Masters Projects

In my master’s project, I used Terraform to create a scalable infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for my personal website. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code (IAC) tool that allows you to create, manage and provision infrastructure resources, such as virtual machines, storage accounts, networks, and more, across multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers using a declarative configuration language. A scalable infrastructure is important because it enables a system or application to handle increasing amounts of traffic or workload without experiencing performance issues or downtime. It ensures that the system remains responsive, available, and reliable as an organization grows …

Hybrid Life Cycles In Software Development, Eric Vincent Schoenborn

Masters Projects

This project applied software specification gathering, architecture, work planning, and development to a real-world development effort for a local business. This project began with a feasibility meeting with the owner of Zeal Aerial Fitness. After feasibility was assessed the intended users, needed functionality, and expected user restrictions were identified with the stakeholders. A hybrid software lifecycle was selected to allow a focus on base functionality up front followed by an iterative development of expectations of the stakeholders. I was able to create various specification diagrams that express the end projects goals to both developers and non-tech individuals using a standard …

Optimization Study Of An Image Classification Deep Neural Network, Rose Ault

Honors Projects

Machine Learning is an important and growing field within Artificial Intelligence. It is particularly useful in situations where developing an algorithm to perform the task in a conventional way would be extremely difficult. Instead of being programmed specifically to complete a task, a program embodies a trained model that can recognize patterns present in given example data, and is able use that model to make predictions on future data. Neural networks are a prominent example of machine learning models used for this purpose. Neural networks are models that are based on how brains work, with massive numbers of connected processing …

Developing 5gl Concepts From User Interactions, David Stuckless Meyer

Masters Theses

In the fulfilling of the contracts generated in Test Driven Development, a developer could be said to act as a constraint solver, similar to those used by a 5th Generation Language(5GL). This thesis presents the hypothesis that 5GL linguistic mechanics, such as facts, rules and goals, will be emergent in the communications of developer pairs performing Test Driven Development, validating that 5GL syntax is congruent with the ways that practitioners communicate. Along the way, nomenclatures and linguistic patterns may be observed that could inform the design of future 5GL languages.

Anaglym: A Graphics Engine Providing Secure Execution Of Applications, Josh Holtrop

Masters Projects

"The Anaglym graphics engine uses the Lua programming language as the high-level language in which to interpret Anaglym applications. Applications running inside Anaglym are Lua scripts that have a particular environment exposed to them. By default, when Lua is embedded inside a C or C++ host application, no Lua functions are available to the hosted script. Lua functions must be exported by the host environment to be callable by a Lua script."

Binary Usenet Application, Alexander J. Patterson

Masters Projects

ANZBC software was written as a prototype to download small‐encoded files form Usenet servers. This software allows anything from a text document to a HD movie to be downloaded and decoded into a single file. Often this is a single file that is split into multiple small files and then compressed.

Microsoft Silverlight Photography Framework: Comparing Component Based Designs In Adobe Flex And Microsoft Silverlight, David Roossien

Masters Projects

Flex and Silverlight provide large Application Programming Interfaces (API’s). Applications can be designed using a variety of architectures. The purpose of this paper is not to perform a complete comparison between Flex and Silverlight. To do such a comparison would require massive amounts of time and research. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and implementation of the Silverlight photography framework project. Along the way this paper compares the Silverlight project to the Adobe Flex project and discusses the goals of each product. During the comparison many important similarities and differences between Silverlight and Flex technologies are …

Program Assessment System, Dyana Polderdyk

Masters Projects

Today’s world is experiencing constant and rapid change in all areas of life. Progress and technology are the catalysts for the change, and the result is a continuous turnover of knowledge. It is essential for educational institutions to keep pace with the changes in order to turn out students that meet local and national employment requirements. Educational institutions are in need of an assessment system to measure the ongoing effectiveness of disciplines, curricula, programs and courses. The assessment system will provide the tools to develop, implement, manage, maintain and evaluate the efficiencies of educational programs. The input will include past …