I2S Masters/ Doctoral Theses

In recent years, the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and healthcare has paved the way for intelligent dietary assistance. NutriBot is an AI-powered chatbot developed using the Rasa framework to deliver personalized nutrition recommendations based on user preferences, diet types, and nutritional goals. This full-stack system integrates Rasa NLU, a Flask backend, the Nutritionix API for real-time food data, and a React.js + Tailwind CSS frontend for seamless interaction. The system is containerized using Docker and deployable on cloud platforms like GCP. 

The chatbot supports multi-turn conversations, slot-filling, and remembers user preferences such as dietary restrictions or nutrient focus (e.g., high protein). Evaluation of the system showed perfect intent and entity recognition accuracy, fast API response times, and user-friendly fallback handling. While NutriBot currently lacks persistent user profiles and multilingual support, it offers a highly accurate, scalable framework for future extensions such as fitness tracker integration, multilingual capabilities, and smart assistant deployment.

In the era of digital commerce, personalized recommendations are pivotal for enhancing user experience and boosting engagement. This project presents a comprehensive recommendation system integrated into an e-commerce web application, designed using Flask and powered by collaborative filtering via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The system intelligently predicts and personalizes product suggestions for users based on implicit feedback such as purchases, cart additions, and search behavior.

The foundation of the recommendation engine is built on user-item interaction data, derived from the Brazilian e-commerce Olist dataset. Ratings are simulated using weighted scores for purchases and cart additions, reflecting varying degrees of user intent. These interactions are transformed into a user-product matrix and decomposed using SVD, yielding latent user and product features. The model leverages these latent factors to predict user interest in unseen products, enabling precise and scalable recommendation generation.

To further enhance personalization, the system incorporates real-time user activity. Recent search history is stored in an SQLite database and used to prioritize recommendations that align with the user’s current interests. A diversity constraint is also applied to avoid redundancy, limiting the number of recommended products per category.

The web application supports robust user authentication, product exploration by category, cart management, and checkout simulations. It features a visually driven interface with dynamic visualizations for product insights and user interactions. The home page adapts to individual preferences, showing tailored product recommendations and enabling users to explore categories and details.

In summary, this project demonstrates the practical implementation of a hybrid recommendation strategy combining matrix factorization with contextual user behavior. It showcases the importance of latent factor modeling, data preprocessing, and user-centric design in delivering an intelligent retail experience.

Combinational and sequential locking methods are promising solutions for protecting hardware intellectual property (IP) from piracy, reverse engineering, and malicious modifications by locking the functionality of the IP based on a secret key. To improve their security, researchers are developing attack methods to extract the secret key.  

While the attacks on combinational locking are mostly inapplicable for sequential designs without access to the scan chain, the limited applicable attacks are generally evaluated against the basic random insertion of key gates. On the other hand, attacks on sequential locking techniques suffer from scalability issues and evaluation of improperly locked designs. Finally, while most attacks provide an approximately correct key, they do not indicate which specific key bits are undetermined. This thesis proposes an oracle-guided attack that applies to both combinational and sequential locking without scan chain access. The attack applies light-weight design modifications that represent the oracle using a finite state machine and applies an assertion-based query of the unlocking key. We have analyzed the effectiveness of our attack against 46 sequential designs locked with various classes of combinational locking including random, strong, logic cone-based, and anti-SAT based. We further evaluated against a sequential locking technique using 46 designs with various key sequence lengths and widths. Finally, we expand our framework to identify undetermined key bits, enabling complementary attacks on the smaller remaining key space.

UAVs have emerged as a transformative technology for various applications, including emergency services, delivery, and video streaming. Among these, video streaming services in areas with limited physical infrastructure, such as disaster-affected areas, play a crucial role in public safety. UAVs can be rapidly deployed in search and rescue operations to efficiently cover large areas and provide live video feeds, enabling quick decision-making and resource allocation strategies. However, ensuring reliable and robust UAV communication in such scenarios is challenging, particularly in unlicensed spectrum bands, where interference from other nodes is a significant concern. To address this issue, developing a distributed transmission control and video streaming is essential to maintaining a high quality of service, especially for UAV networks that rely on delay-sensitive data. 

In this MSc thesis, we study the problem of distributed transmission control and video streaming optimization for UAVs operating in unlicensed spectrum bands. We develop a cross-layer framework that jointly considers three inter-dependent factors: (i) in-band interference introduced by ground-aerial nodes at the physical layer, (ii) limited-size queues with delay-constrained packet arrival at the MAC layer, and (iii) video encoding rate at the application layer. This framework is designed to optimize the average throughput and PSNR by adjusting fading thresholds and video encoding rates for an integrated aerial-ground network in unlicensed spectrum bands. Using consensus-based distributed algorithm and coordinate descent optimization, we develop two algorithms: (i) Distributed Transmission Control (DTC) that dynamically adjusts fading thresholds to maximize the average throughput by mitigating trade-offs between low-SINR transmission errors and queue packet losses, and (ii) Joint Distributed Video Transmission and Encoder Control (JDVT-EC) that optimally balances packet loss probabilities and video distortions by jointly adjusting fading thresholds and video encoding rates. Through extensive numerical analysis, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms under various scenarios.

Timely detection of plant diseases is critical to safeguarding crop yields and ensuring global food security. This project presents a deep learning-based image classification system to identify plant diseases using the publicly available PlantVillage dataset. The core objective was to evaluate and compare the performance of a custom-built Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with two widely used transfer learning models—EfficientNetB0 and MobileNetV3Small. 

All models were trained on augmented image data resized to 224×224 pixels, with preprocessing tailored to each architecture. The custom CNN used simple normalization, whereas EfficientNetB0 and MobileNetV3Small utilized their respective pre-processing methods to standardize the pretrained ImageNet domain inputs. To improve robustness, the training pipeline included data augmentation, class weighting, and early stopping.

Training was conducted using the Adam optimizer and categorical cross-entropy loss over 30 epochs, with performance assessed using accuracy, loss, and training time metrics. The results revealed that transfer learning models significantly outperformed the custom CNN. EfficientNetB0 achieved the highest accuracy, making it ideal for high-precision applications, while MobileNetV3Small offered a favorable balance between speed and accuracy, making it suitable for lightweight, real-time inference on edge devices.

This study validates the effectiveness of transfer learning for plant disease detection tasks and emphasizes the importance of model-specific preprocessing and training strategies. It provides a foundation for deploying intelligent plant health monitoring systems in practical agricultural environments.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific use cases, such as question answering, offers valuable insights into how their performance can be tailored to specialized information needs. In this project, we focused on the University of Kansas (KU) as our target domain. We began by scraping structured and unstructured content from official KU webpages, covering a wide array of student-facing topics including campus resources, academic policies, and support services. From this content, we generated a diverse set of question-answer pairs to form a high-quality training dataset. LLaMA 3.2 was then fine-tuned on this dataset to improve its ability to answer KU-specific queries with greater relevance and accuracy. Our evaluation revealed mixed results—while the fine-tuned model outperformed the base model on most domain-specific questions, the original model still had an edge in handling ambiguous or out-of-scope prompts. These findings highlight the strengths and limitations of domain-specific fine-tuning, and provide practical takeaways for customizing LLMs for real-world QA applications.

The pursuit of autonomy in cyber-physical systems (CPS) presents a challenging task of real-time interaction with the physical world, prompting extensive research in this domain. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the introduction of deep neural networks (DNN), have significantly improved the autonomy of CPS, notably by boosting perception capabilities.

CPS perception aims to discern, classify, and track objects of interest in the operational environment, a task that is considerably challenging for computers in a three-dimensional (3D) space. For this task, the use of LiDAR sensors and processing their readings with DNNs has become popular because of their excellent performance. However, in CPS such as self-driving cars and drones, object detection must be not only accurate but also timely, posing a challenge due to the high computational demand of LiDAR object detection DNNs. Satisfying this demand is particularly challenging for on-board computational platforms due to size, weight, and power constraints. Therefore, a trade-off between accuracy and latency must be made to ensure that both requirements are satisfied. Importantly, the required trade-off is operational environment dependent and should be weighted more on accuracy or latency dynamically at runtime. However, LiDAR object detection DNNs cannot dynamically reduce their execution time by compromising accuracy (i.e. anytime computing). Prior research aimed at anytime computing for object detection DNNs using camera images is not applicable to LiDAR-based detection due to architectural differences. This thesis addresses these challenges by proposing three novel techniques: Anytime-LiDAR, which enables early termination with reasonable accuracy; VALO (Versatile Anytime LiDAR Object Detection), which implements deadline-aware input data scheduling; and MURAL (Multi-Resolution Anytime Framework for LiDAR Object Detection), which introduces dynamic resolution scaling. Together, these innovations enable LiDAR-based object detection DNNs to make effective trade-offs between latency and accuracy under varying operational conditions, advancing the practical deployment of LiDAR object detection DNNs.

The absence of a single, comprehensive database or repository cataloging all bioinformatics databases and software creates a significant barrier for researchers aiming to construct computational workflows. These workflows, which often integrate 10–15 specialized tools for tasks such as sequence alignment, variant calling, functional annotation, and data visualization, require researchers to explore diverse scientific literature to identify relevant resources. This process demands substantial expertise to evaluate the suitability of each tool for specific biological analyses, alongside considerable time to understand their applicability, compatibility, and implementation within a cohesive pipeline. The lack of a central, updated source leads to inefficiencies and the risk of using outdated tools, which can affect research quality and reproducibility. Consequently, there is a critical need for an automated, accurate tool to identify bioinformatics databases and software mentions directly from scientific texts, streamlining workflow development and enhancing research productivity. 

The bioNerDS system, a prior effort to address this challenge, uses a rule-based named entity recognition (NER) approach, achieving an F1 score of 63% on an evaluation set of 25 articles from BMC Bioinformatics and PLoS Computational Biology. By integrating the same set of features such as context patterns, word characteristics and dictionary matches into a machine learning model, we developed an approach using an XGBoost classifier. This model, carefully tuned to address the extreme class imbalance inherent in NER tasks through synthetic oversampling and refined via systematic hyperparameter optimization to balance precision and recall, excels at capturing complex linguistic patterns and non-linear relationships, ensuring robust generalization. It achieves an F1 score of 82% on the same evaluation set, significantly surpassing the baseline. By combining rule-based precision with machine learning adaptability, this approach enhances accuracy, reduces ambiguities, and provides a robust tool for large-scale bioinformatics resource identification, facilitating efficient workflow construction. Furthermore, this methodology holds potential for extension to other technological domains, enabling similar resource identification in fields like data science, artificial intelligence, or computational engineering.