• Briden, M. (CSE) – Representation Learning and Generative Forecasting for Noisy and Limited Clinical Data: Applications in Wound Healing and EEG

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    The rapid integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into clinical practice has driven advances in disease classification, segmentation, and clinical decision support. However, the complexities of medical data pose a challenge to widespread adoption. The rarity of medical conditions, ethical considerations, and varying acquisition protocols leads to limited and noisy data. The time-intensive process […]

  • Bhatia, N. (CSE) – Building Adaptive Intelligence into Wireless Sensing

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    WiFi-based indoor positioning is a widely researched area focused on determining the location of devices. Accurate indoor positioning has numerous applications, including asset tracking and indoor navigation. Despite advances, their adoption in practice remains limited due to several challenges such as environmental changes that cause signal fading, multipath effects, and interference, all of which reduce […]

  • Swaby, A. (ECE) – Improving X-ray Medical Imaging using Amorphous Selenium as a Photoconductive Layer

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    The presence of coronary artery calcification is a strong predictor for future cardiovascular events where cardiac risk categories are quantified depending on calcification size. Dual-energy chest X-rays provide high contrast visualization to improve opportunistic screening for quantifying coronary artery calcifications, determining bone mineral density (i.e., osteoporosis) and characterizing lung lesions. As a dual-energy imaging modality, […]

  • Osorio, S. (AM) – Image-Based Wound Infection Classification

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    This thesis investigates the use of deep learning for classifying wound infections from photographic images, using colony-forming unit (CFU) counts as a quantitative labeling standard. Leveraging the visual information in wound photographs and the clinical relevance of bacterial burden, the study implements a multi-task U-Net architecture for both image reconstruction and binary classification in a […]

  • Asefi, N. (ECE) – Generative Lagrangian Data Assimilation for Ocean Dynamics under Extreme Sparsity

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Reconstructing ocean dynamics from observational data is fundamentally limited by the sparse, irregular, and Lagrangian nature of spatial sampling, particularly in subsurface and remote regions. This sparsity poses significant challenges for forecasting key phenomena such as eddy shedding and rogue waves. Traditional data assimilation methods and deep learning models often struggle to recover mesoscale turbulence […]

  • Mawhorter, R. (CSE) – Certified Synthesis for Interactive Media: High Assurance Metroidvania Generation

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Program verification has been applied in many contexts (including videogames), but the scale and complexity of the examples that have been analyzed fall short of the ability to analyze many existing games without massive computational costs. My research focuses on automatic analysis and design of one particular game: Super Metroid, with the goal of creating […]

  • Larsen, B. (CMPM) – Communal Narrative Play in Perennial Games

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Online communities tell stories with the games they play. As continual updates, recurring monetization, and platforms for community discussions have flourished, we have seen a rise in video games using ongoing development to tell stories, and have a community interact with those stories and build upon them. In this dissertation, I study this phenomenon, which […]

  • Basu, S. (CSE) – Decomposition Techniques for Web-Scale Networks: Bridging Theory and Practice

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Decompositions of large-scale networks are central to many applications in graph mining, network science, and algorithm design. Over several decades, a rich body of work has developed techniques to partition networks with various different objectives. However, a noticeable gap persists between methods with strong theoretical guarantees, and those that perform well in practice. Practical algorithms […]