NutrimindAI

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Mayra Coronilla Computer Science Sujit Bhandari Computer Science Samiksha Gupta Computer Science Michelle Jimenez Computer Science Kim Nguyen Computer Science Keilah Scott Computer Science Nibesh Yadav Computer Science
Advisor(s): Xi Fitzgerald Computer Science

As obesity continues to rise in the United States, bariatric surgery has become as increasingly common medical intervention to support significant and sustained weight loss. However, the procedure presents challenges, as patients must adopt strict dietary guidelines, develop consistent meal tracking habits, and maintain long-term lifestyle changes. Existing weight-loss applications fail to address the unique nutritional requirements of bariatric patients, which include surgery-specific restrictions, medical conditions, personal preference in food, and individualized lifestyle factors. Along with that, they lack integrated long-term monitoring tools that allow healthcare providers to effectively track patient progress and adherence after surgery. This senior design project presents a prototype mobile application developed from scratch to support patients throughout the bariatric journey. The application integrates AI-driven personalization to generate tailored daily nutritional guidance, adapt to individual health data, and provide meal tracking support. In addition, the platform centralizes patient data for healthcare providers, improving long-term monitoring, increasing tracking accuracy, and reducing manual workload. By combining personalized patient support with provider-facing analytics, this solution aims to enhance postoperative adherence and improve long-term surgical outcomes.

Brazos Safety Systems - Weather System

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Robbie Hannaford Computer Science Iyed Acheche Computer Science Oscar Arenas Computer Science Nagendra Chaudhary Computer Science Evan Eissler Computer Science Tucker Rinaldo Computer Science Sumalee Rodolph Computer Science
Advisor(s): Ed Ipser Computer Science

The Brazos Safety Systems Weather Application provides insight into weather conditions that affect aviation operations. Weather plays a critical role in flight safety, and understanding conditions during flight operations can help explain incidents or risky behavior that occur. The application integrates aviation weather data sources, including METAR reports and radar imagery, to visualize weather conditions around airports and during historical flights. Users can upload flight records and review the weather conditions associated with those flights through the application. By presenting aviation weather data in a centralized and accessible format, the application supports post-flight analysis and helps identify weather-related factors associated with flight incidents. The goal is to provide insights that assist in understanding past flight conditions and help prevent similar issues in future aviation operations.

Operational Verification of Deep Learning–Based Solar Flare Forecasts

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Son Hoang Computer Science Robin Chataut Computer Science Chetraj Pandey Computer Science
Advisor(s): Chetraj Pandey Computer Science

Solar flares are among the most significant drivers of space-weather disturbances, motivating ongoing efforts to develop reliable forecasting methods from solar observations. The Solar Dynamics Observatory continuously produces high-resolution full-disk solar imagery used for monitoring solar activity. These observations have enabled substantial progress in machine learning–based flare prediction; however, most models remain confined to research studies, with limited deployment in operational systems that support continuous forecasting and systematic performance validation. This work presents a lightweight operational framework for near-real-time solar flare forecasting built around machine learning models proposed in the literature. The system retrieves full-disk solar imagery from the Helioviewer API, performs automated preprocessing, and generates predictions using a convolutional neural network–based forecasting model. Predictions and corresponding observations are stored to enable periodic forecast verification using standard performance metrics, allowing model performance to be monitored over time and potential prediction drift to be identified. The framework is implemented as an interactive application using Streamlit, providing an integrated interface for automated data ingestion, near-real-time inference, and ongoing model evaluation. The proposed system enables continuous monitoring of solar flare forecasts while providing a practical framework for tracking model performance and detecting prediction drift in operational settings.

AI-Driven Adaptive Tutoring: A Multi-Agent System for Structured, Multimedia-Enhanced Education

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Jayapradeep Jayaraman Srinivas Computer Science Gabriella Campos Computer Science Robin chataut Computer Science Nagendra Chaudhary Computer Science Riley Phan Computer Science
Advisor(s): Robin Chataut Computer Science

We present the AI-Driven Adaptive Tutoring (AIAT) framework, a modular multi-agent system that generates structured, retrieval-grounded, and multimedia-enhanced courses. AIAT targets a common gap in AI in Education: large language models (LLMs) can produce fluent explanations, but they often lack pedagogical structure, factual grounding, and multimodal integration. To address this, AIAT uses a three-stage pipeline. First, a blueprint agent creates a course outline with learning objectives and topic dependencies using schema-validated structured outputs. Second, a chapter-expansion agent instantiates atomic topics with formative questions and summaries in JSON mode. Third, an enrichment agent generates topic-level explanations, visualization specifications, and triggers for narrated video production. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) combines a MongoDB Atlas Vector Search backend for course materials and a Pinecone pipeline for PDF-derived knowledge, grounding explanations in external content. A Next.js frontend streams responses and assembles text, diagrams, and videos into a unified learner experience.

The design is explicitly guided by mastery learning, cognitive load theory, and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, with principles such as atomic topics, anti-fluff constraints, and visual-verbal alignment encoded in prompts and schemas. We report system-level metrics (e.g., latency by component) and operational reliability, and we outline a concrete evaluation plan, including pre/post-learning assessments, expert rubric-based accuracy checks, and subjective cognitive load measures. We also discuss the equity and accessibility implications of relying on commercial APIs and propose mitigation strategies (e.g., caching, partial use of lightweight models, and instructor-in-the-loop authoring). The contribution of this work is a reproducible architecture that connects multi-agent orchestration, RAG, and multimodal rendering to pedagogical theory, along with an evaluation roadmap that explicitly addresses the current lack of large-scale human studies.

HelioIndex: A Python Package for Reproducible Construction of Machine-Learning Datasets from Solar Observations and Event Catalogs

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Balaji Kannan Computer Science Robin Chataut Computer Science
Advisor(s): Chetraj Pandey Computer Science

Space Weather Forecasting relies on large volumes of time-stamped solar observations paired with event catalogs describing flare occurrence and intensity. While these datasets are widely available, preparing them for machine learning remains a substantial and often overlooked challenge. Researchers must convert irregular observation streams into consistent temporal samples, construct observation and prediction windows, align events with observations, manage missing data and cadence inconsistencies, and ensure that training and evaluation splits avoid temporal or regional data leakage. These preprocessing steps are typically implemented in ad-hoc scripts that are difficult to reproduce, extend, or compare across studies. We propose an open-source Python library that standardizes the construction of machine-learning-ready datasets for solar event forecasting. The library ingests user-provided observation tables (e.g., SDO image timestamps and file paths) and event catalogs (e.g., GOES flare lists) and automatically generates indexed training samples suitable for PyTorch datasets and data loaders. Users can define flexible observation windows ranging from single time points to multi-frame temporal sequences, specify prediction horizons, and configure event-labeling rules. The framework also provides mechanisms for handling missing observations, irregular cadences, and explicit representation of temporal gaps. To support rigorous experimental design, the library includes reproducible dataset partitioning strategies such as chronological and tri-monthly splits, as well as optional active-region-aware grouping based on NOAA region catalogs. These features allow researchers to build both full-disk and active-region-based forecasting datasets while minimizing common sources of information leakage. Although the initial implementation focuses on solar flare prediction, the framework is designed to be extensible to other space weather phenomena including coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar energetic particle (SEP) events. By formalizing the transformation from raw observational records and event lists into reproducible machine learning datasets, this tool reduces the overhead of data preparation and promotes more transparent, comparable, and scalable space weather forecasting research.

A Cross-Model Validation Framework for Solar Flare Forecasting Using NASA CCMC Flare Scoreboard Predictions

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Kritika Karanjit Computer Science Robin Chataut Computer Science Chetraj Pandey Computer Science
Advisor(s): Chetraj Pandey Computer Science

Solar flares are significant space weather phenomena that can impact satellites, communication systems, and many technological infrastructures, rendering accurate flare forecasting a crucial objective in heliophysics study.The NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) Flare Scoreboard collects predictions from multiple solar flare forecasting models developed by different research groups. While this resource provides a useful platform for comparing different forecasting approaches, systematic validation of these models remains challenging because predictions are reported in different formats and are not easily comparable across models. In this work, we develop an automated framework to collect and organize flare forecasts from several models available in the CCMC Flare Scoreboard and convert them into a consistent dataset that allows direct comparison between models. The processed dataset includes predictions across multiple years and forecast windows. To evaluate model performance, we compare the predicted flare probabilities with observed flare events reported in the SolarSoft (SSW) Latest Events archive. By aligning forecast windows with actual flare occurrences, we establish a consistent approach for validating model predictions. This approach facilitates a systematic comparison of forecasting behaviour among various models and assists in identifying those that exhibit superior or inferior predicted ability.The resulting pipeline provides a reproducible way to analyze solar flare forecasting systems and supports future efforts to improve the reliability of space weather prediction methods.

Integrating Full-Disk and Active-Region Models for Reliable Forecasting of Solar Flares

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Duc Le Computer Science Robin Chataut Computer Science Chetraj Pandey Computer Science
Advisor(s): Chetraj Pandey Computer Science

Solar flares are major drivers of space-weather disturbances and can disrupt satellites, communication systems, and navigation infrastructure. Recent deep learning approaches have demonstrated promising performance for solar flare forecasting, yet many models operate either on full-disk solar observations or on isolated active-region patches. This separation limits their ability to combine global solar context with localized magnetic structure and can affect the reliability of predictions. In addition, full-disk models often provide limited information about which regions drive their forecasts. This study presents a two-stage deep learning framework that integrates full-disk and active-region–level analysis within a unified flare forecasting pipeline. The system first performs full-disk inference using a convolutional neural network trained on solar magnetograms to estimate the global probability of flare occurrence. Attribution-based explanations are then generated to identify regions that most strongly influence the model prediction. These regions are mapped back to the solar disk and converted into candidate active-region patches, accounting for solar rotation and spatial alignment. The resulting patches are subsequently analyzed using a dedicated active-region forecasting model trained on SDO HMI SHARP data to produce localized flare probabilities. By integrating global context with targeted active-region analysis, the proposed framework combines two complementary forecasting models into an end-to-end prediction system. The resulting pipeline provides both full-disk and region-level flare probabilities, improving interpretability while enhancing the reliability of flare forecasts through focused secondary analysis of the most relevant solar regions.

Using AlphaFold2 to Identify Novel Drug Targets Against Cryptococcus

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Francisco Lugo Gonzales Computer Science
Advisor(s): Natalia Castro Lopez Biology

Building a Unified Interface for Solar Event Data Retrieval from SWPC Archives

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Cathy Nguyen Computer Science Thu My Banh Computer Science
Advisor(s): Chetraj Pandey Computer Science

Solar event archives from NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) contain observations of solar phenomena such X-ray flares (XRA), optical flares (FLA), disappearing solar filament (DSF), radio bursts (RSP), and other solar events. However, these data are currently stored across multiple sources and incompatible formats. As a result, this makes event retrieval, cross-comparison, and large-scale analysis complicated. In this study, we introduce a computational framework to extract and standardize solar event data from SPWC archives into a unified structure. Our approach automates parsing event reports, extracts key features such as event classification and timing, and organizes them to convert records into a consistent format across datasets. By reducing differences in how event records are stored and represented, this framework can enhance the usability of the solar records. The ultimate goal is to support the development of a tool supporting easier and faster access to solar event records based on user-selected criteria such as event type or time range. This standardization aims to improve data accessibility, providing a foundation for further space weather research.

TAED: A Trust-Aware Explainable Defense for Phishing Detection Under Adversarial Manipulation

Type: Undergraduate
Author(s): Tam Nguyen Computer Science Robin Chataut Computer Science
Advisor(s): Robin Chataut Computer Science

Machine learning-based phishing detection systems increasingly rely on high-confidence predictions from deep neural models, yet confidence alone provides limited assurance of reliability in adversarial environments. Small, semantics-preserving manipulations such as homoglyph substitution and paraphrasing can induce confident misclassifications while remaining indistinguishable to human recipients, exposing a critical vulnerability in modern email security pipelines. We present TAED, a Trust-Aware Explainable Defense system that explicitly evaluates prediction trustworthiness rather than relying solely on opaque confidence scores. TAED computes a trust score by integrating model confidence with explanation fidelity, which measures alignment between model reasoning and known phishing indicators, and explanation stability, which quantifies sensitivity to minor input perturbations. We evaluate TAED alongside a diverse set of statistical and neural phishing detectors using a realistic adversarial dataset constructed through multiple evasion strategies. Our results reveal a systematic confidence–robustness paradox in which complex Transformer-based models exhibit strong clean-data performance but substantial brittleness under adversarial manipulation, while simpler feature-based models demonstrate greater resilience. By leveraging explanation-derived trust signals and selective escalation within a hybrid detection pipeline, TAED identifies unreliable high-confidence predictions and improves robustness against adversarial evasion. These findings demonstrate that explainability can be operationalized as a practical security mechanism for assessing model reliability in adversarial phishing detection systems.