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 …

Hyperchaotic Noise Generation For Adversarial Encryption In Privacy-Preserving Image Classification, Neeraja Beesetti

Master's Theses

Artificial intelligence systems make useful predictions by taking in data and returning a classification, recommendation, or decision. Obtaining that prediction, however, requires sharing the data first. This creates a fundamental privacy challenge in machine learning: users must expose their data to receive a valuable prediction. Machine learning systems increasingly rely on cloud-based image classification for this reason, transmitting images from edge devices to remote servers rather than running large models locally. This creates a conflict between the accuracy a classifier requires and the privacy a data owner wants. Traditional encryption destroys the image structure on which a classifier depends, while …

Developing A Rapid Urban Forest Assessment System For Sustainable City Greenification, Daniel Gonzalez

Master's Theses

This thesis presents the Rapid Urban Forest Assessment (RUFA) system, a web-based platform that integrates urban tree inventories and aerial tree detection to assess forest health across California’s census-designated places. RUFA combines inventoried tree records with coordinates detected from high-resolution multispectral imagery using convolutional neural networks, then computes a composite RUFA Score from four metrics: canopy cover percentage, trees per capita, tree diversity (TD-50), and tree evenness. The thesis addresses two engineering challenges in building the dashboard: querying and aggregating over seven million tree records in real time, and rendering spatial summaries at multiple zoom levels without recomputing cluster assignments …

A Maintainable Extensible And Performant Compiler Toolchain For The Trustguard Architecture, Ethan N. Emery

Master's Theses

TrustGuard is a hardware architecture implementing a CAVO (Containment Architecture with Verified Output) model, which provides security guarantees by bootstrapping trust of a system to a hardware component known as the Sentry. Rather than verifying an entire system, TrustGuard re-executes trusted computation on the Sentry and validates the host system's execution before allowing values to pass to the outside world, thereby containing the effects of erroneous computation. Implementing this architecture in practice without hardware modifications to a host CPU requires a compiler toolchain capable of automatically generating instrumented binaries for both the untrusted host and the trusted Sentry from C …

A Machine-Learning-Based Systematic Framework For Modeling Compression And Recompression Indices For Florida Soils, Michael Morales

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This thesis develops a machine-learning framework for estimating the compression index and the recompression index of Florida soils from routinely measured index properties, and reports two studies that build it. Consolidation settlement design requires both indices, and both are obtained from the incremental-loading oedometer test, which occupies a specimen for one to two weeks; the index tests that accompany it are complete within hours. Empirical correlations have filled that interval since the 1950s, but their coefficients are calibrated on specific soil populations and transfer poorly between regions. The first study analyzes 376 consolidation tests compiled for the Florida Department of …

Improving Urban Search And Rescue Team Coordination Through Adaptive Context Awareness, Daniel Reyes Duran

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Modern multi-agent Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) operations heavily rely on mobile geospatial Common Operating Pictures (COPs) to maintain team coordination and Situational Awareness (SA). However, the proliferation of high-frequency sensor telemetry at the tactical edge has introduced a data saturation paradox challenge: while information theoretically drives informed decision-making, unmanaged data surges induce increased operator cognitive overload and alert fatigue on mobile End-User Devices (EUDs), while downstream data-broadcasting models inherently strain edge processing and viewport environments.

To resolve these constraints, this dissertation presents a context-aware Value of Information (VoI) data-management framework integrated directly with a custom, event-driven Android Team Awareness …

System Integration And Validation Of The Cal Poly Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator Mk. Iv, Bricen S. Rigby

Master's Theses

The Cal Poly Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator (SADS) is an ongoing project that seeks to enable the simulation and validation of sensors, actuators, and control logic related to spacecraft attitude control. The SADS platform rests atop a spher- ical air-bearing device which allows for nearly frictionless rotation in all three axes. The orientation of the platform is controlled by four reaction wheels arranged in a pyramidal configuration. Over the past few years, there have been significant updates to the reaction wheel subsystem, as well as requests for a more capable central com- puter. Therefore, a new system architecture for the …

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.

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 …

Xylem: A Comparative Analysis Of Gpu Dispatch Pipelines For Large-Scale, Procedural Environments, Srinivas Sundararaman

Master's Theses

The real-time rendering of large-scale, procedural scenes presents a significant performance challenge for traditional CPU-bound rendering pipelines. The high volume of draw calls and the need for complex culling and level-of-detail management create bottlenecks that limit scene complexity and visual fidelity. This thesis investigates the evolution of GPU-driven rendering paradigms via the Xylem renderer within NVIDIA’s Donut rendering framework as a solution to these challenges.

A comprehensive benchmarking framework is developed to implement and quantitatively analyze three distinct rendering strategies for a procedurally generated, parameterizable, large-scale forest scene. The evaluated pipelines include: (1) traditional instanced rendering, (2) compute-driven indirect rendering …

Autonomous Vision-Based Litter Collection Rover, Dante Michael Benedetti, Benjamin Scott Tavares, Nathan Heil

Electrical Engineering

This report documents the design, implementation, and testing of an autonomous litter-collection rover developed as a Senior Project Design Lab (EE 460/463/464) at California Polytechnic State University. The rover integrates autonomy, computer vision, embedded real-time control, mecanum-wheel omnidirectional mobility, and a two-degree-of-freedom robotic arm to detect, approach, and collect small ground-level litter such as bottles, wrappers, and paper fragments.

The system uses a two-layer compute architecture: an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano running ROS 2 for perception, SLAM, and path planning, paired with an STM32L4A6ZG microcontroller for real-time motor control and odometry. The robot is built on a multi-level aluminum frame …

Solving Linearly Constrained Quadratic Programs Using Field Programmable Analog Arrays, Tyler Wynn, Alonzo Arroyo

Electrical Engineering

This paper presents a field-programmable analog array (FPAA) implementation for solving linearly constrained quadratic programs (LCQPs) directly in the analog domain. The solver is based on a continuous-time primal-dual control architecture with integral action, anti-windup compensation, and a piecewise-linear nonlinearity for enforcing affine inequality constraints. A switched-capacitor implementation using three AN231E04 FPAAs is developed, and coefficient scaling methods are introduced to keep internal and output signals within the voltage limits of the hardware. A global scaling factor is used to reduce internal signal excursions, while solution-space scaling is shown to modify the implemented optimization coefficients and alter the local closed-loop …

Teaching Multi-Core Architecture: Design And Implementation Of A Cache-Coherent Cpu For Undergraduate Education, Isaac R. Lake

Master's Theses

Modern computing has relied on multicore processors for high performance for nearly two decades, yet undergraduate computer engineering curricula often provide limited exposure to parallel hardware architectures and their design challenges. This thesis presents the design of CPE 433, a course that extends the pipelined and cached OTTER CPU developed in CPE 233 and CPE 333 into a multicore processor capable of running parallel workloads. The thesis documents the architectural changes required to adapt the verified single-core design into a multicore system, including MMIO-based interrupt support, a shared cache hierarchy with cache-coherence mechanisms, and clock-gated modules. It further presents a …

Evaluating Design Choices For Gpu-Accelerated Finite-Difference Time-Domain Simulation On Resource-Constrained Devices, Joel Manesh

Master's Theses

The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is a numerical technique for solving partial differential equations. It was first developed to solve Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic wave propagation and has since been extended to model other physical phenomena governed by wave propagation. Because the FDTD method is data-parallel, it is well-suited for GPU acceleration; modern FDTD-based simulations run offline on large GPU clusters. There is, however, very little research on running FDTD on resource-constrained embedded GPUs, which are increasingly popular for real-time applications.

This thesis explores a CUDA-based FDTD solver for the 3D wave equation on the Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano. This …

Concrete And Masonry Code (Beams), Michael Alexander Simas Rocha

Architectural Engineering

This report only covers the beam design of the code that was written. The end goal of this project is to write code for concrete and masonry following what was taught in the lecture classes. This project is acting as a foundation for the end goal of a program that can compete with SAP2000, ETABS, RISA, and others. One final goal is to have the print out have the look and feel of having been done by hand. While coding; several factors were recorded including time spent coding, debugging, and then to do three problems by hand vs how long …

Gps Tracking Smart Dash Cam Capstone Review, Simrah Saleem

University Honors Theses

This thesis details our design, implementation, and collaborative development of an intelligent vehicle logging system built on a Raspberry Pi 5. Unlike standard consumer dash cams that act as closed "black boxes," our system uses a dual-camera stereo vision setup integrated with centimeter-level accuracy. While we successfully built a functional Proof of Concept capable of event-triggered recording, dual-monitor visualization, and smart detection and recognition, this paper focuses on our engineering journey and the real-world challenges we faced. Using an Agile framework, we split into three specialized sub-teams to handle hardware, database, and interface design in parallel. This structure created unique …

Holistic Dram Enhancements: From Intrinsic In-Memory Operations To Robust Security Mechanisms, Ranyang Zhou

Dissertations

Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) is both the performance bottleneck and a critical security boundary of modern computing systems. Its physical properties make it an attractive substrate for near-data computation—yet those same properties expose it to disturbance-based hardware attacks. This dissertation argues that these two dimensions are not independent: the architectural choices that make DRAM efficient also reshape its threat landscape. Addressing both requires a unified approach to memory architecture and security co-design.

The first part of this dissertation attacks the memory wall through four processing-in-DRAM (PIM) frameworks. ReD-LUT and LT-PIM unify lookup-table arithmetic with charge-sharing logic, achieving up to 37.8x …

Deep Learning Approaches For Ctenophore Identification And Tracking, Anagha Bharadwaj

Theses

Ctenophores are translucent marine organisms with nearly invisible tentacles and pose significant challenges due to their transparent morphology and ambiguous structural features. This research addresses the classification and tracking of these organisms and evaluates the performance of current computer vision models under sparse-data environments.

A dataset from the NJIT Life History Lab consisting of microscopic laboratory videos and photographs of different growth stages is used to train and assess a number of convolutional neural network designs, including VGG16, ResNet, BioCLIP2, YOLO, and DeepLabCut. Additionally, a web-based interface is developed to evaluate expert-labeled ground truth with the model's performance.

The findings …

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 …

Investigating Creative Possibility Using Automated Composition, Kian Drees

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a constructive method, Johann Joseph Fux’s theory of counterpoint defines a space of musical possibility for contrapuntal composition. I developed a computational method for generating melodies to systematically investigate selected properties of this space. My program recursively generates a tree of all possible cantus firmus melodies of a specified length or all possible first species counterpoints on a given cantus firmus, starting with an empty root node and adding child nodes representing possible musical notes at each step until the specified length is reached. I then investigated several properties of the generated melodies, such as the approximate relationship between …

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 …

Exploration Of Real-Time Power Electronic Simulation On Amd Npu, Shouyu Du

All Theses

The rapid electrification of the automotive and data center sectors has created a critical demand for high-fidelity, real-time simulation of complex power electronic systems. While Hardware- in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is the current industry standard, it presents significant challenges regarding development complexity and memory limita- tions. This dissertation investigates the feasibility of utilizing Neural Processing Units (NPUs)— specifically the AMD AI Engine (AIE) XDNA2 architecture—as a novel platform for real-time, deterministic circuit simulation. This study establishes a comprehensive automated modeling framework based on graph theory and Massarini’s method to derive linear state-space representations for arbitrary circuit …

A Full System Co-Simulation Platform For Evaluating Edge Machine Learning Inference Using Compute-In-Memory, Belsen Lee

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MS) Theses

We present a full-system co-simulation platform for evaluating embedded machine learning (ML) inference using compute-in-memory (CIM). CIM architectures aim to reduce data movement overhead by performing matrix operations in memory, but end-to-end benefits depend on system-level integration costs that are difficult to assess with isolated hardware models alone. To address this gap, we develop an integrated RISC-V QEMU-SystemC co-simulation environment that allows standard embedded Linux to interact with a transaction-level CIM accelerator model via memory-mapped I/O, direct memory access (DMA), and interrupts. To evaluate performance, we benchmark an MNIST image inference workload and a synthetic fully connected neural network, comparing …

Design And Verification Of The Multi-Slit Solar Explorer Camera Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Jordan M. Johnson

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

The Multi-Slit Solar Explorer, or MUSE, is a NASA mission that will take images of the Sun to study solar flares and the solar corona. The mission will provide insight into the mechanisms behind space weather. The mission consists of two cameras: the Spectrograph (SG), and the Context Imager (CI). The Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory is providing both cameras for the mission.

This report describes a part of the design and verification process for a central component on these cameras known as the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These FPGAs are programmed to acquire, handle, and send images …

A Novel Approach To Creativity Assessment: Forced Pairwise Ranking With Large Language Models, Phillip R. Gregory Jr

Master's Theses

Assessing creativity at scale remains a persistent challenge in cognitive science, as human raters are costly, slow, and often inconsistent in their judgments. This thesis introduced a novel framework for automated scientific creativity assessment using forced pairwise ranking, in which fine-tuned large language models compared response pairs and determined which was more creative. Five empirical studies were conducted using Llama-2-7B and Llama-2-13B models adapted via LoRA fine-tuning and benchmarked against human scored responses from the Scientific Creative Thinking Test. A regression baseline achieved Pearson �� = .74 on the test set, matching the human inter-rater ceiling reported in the literature. …

Robust Hardware Trojan Detection Leveraging Dual‑Domain Features And Stacked Ensemble Learning, Sefatun-Noor Puspa

All Theses

In Cyber-physical systems rely on sensors, communication, and computing, all powered by integrated circuits (ICs). These ICs are vulnerable to malicious hardware attacks, with hardware Trojans being one of the stealthiest threats. Trojans are malicious implants in the circuitry, which are often inserted during design or fabrication stages. This stealthy addition remains dormant until triggered and might cause functional disruptions or sensitive information leakage once triggered. Traditional IC validation methods, such as functional testing and logic analysis, usually fail to capture these subtle anomalies because hardware Trojans are intentionally designed to mimic normal circuit behavior. They often remain dormant under …

Post-Vote Tampering In Nigerian Elections And The Role Of Blockchain-Enabled Electoral Systems, Ransome Chukwubuikem Enechukwu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Post-vote tampering during the collation and transmission of election results remains a persistent challenge in Nigerian elections, enabling manipulation of already-cast votes and weakening public trust in electoral outcomes. Existing technological interventions, including biometric voter accreditation and digital result transmission systems, improve voter authentication but do not adequately secure the post-vote result collation process. This thesis proposes a blockchain-enabled framework designed to protect the integrity of election results during the collation and transmission stages. Using a Design Science Research methodology, the study develops a permissioned blockchain framework based on Hyperledger Fabric that records polling-unit results as immutable ledger entries and …