School of Computing & Engineering Projects Day 2023

The overall goal of this project is to reduce flooding around the West River in New Haven by reconnecting the river to its natural floodplain in Edgewood Park. The flooding in the nearby area has affected people for years as a result of urbanization. Using ArcGIS and HECRAS we designed and evaluated a river restoration plan for the West River and Konold’s Pond in New Haven and Woodbridge.

• Student Team Members: Nikolai Bofinger, Jeremey Conboy, William Eydman, Mathew Flaim, Nicholas Tokmanian

• Adviser: Professor Kimberly Di Giovanni

• Client: Save the Sound

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The Bay Park Conveyance Project is a microtunneling project based in Nassau County on Long Island, New York. The project is a 14-mile stretch of microtunnels and shafts connecting the Bay Park Water Reclamation Facility to the Cedar Creek Water Plant. The project motivation is to increase storm protection and enhance water quality in Long Island’s Western Bays. Our team has been tasked with creating a design optimization plan for shafts BP-8 and BP-9 and the microtunnel in between. From our research and analysis, we will be able to give a recommended method of production.

• Student Team Members: Gwyneth Kehoe, Aiden Mahoney, Juliana Sabin, Sebastian Vacco, Patrick Van Wickler

• Advisers: Professor John Greenleaf, Professor Ari Perez, Professor Kimberly Di Giovanni

• Client: Brian Lakin, McMillen Jacobs Associates

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Our design project is to assess the current state of the Connolly Parkway Bridge in Hamden, Connecticut, and to evaluate repair and replacement alternatives. Connolly Parkway Bridge was built to serve as a connection from the communities on the east side of Mill River to the business and school on the west side. For this reason, it is crucial to make sure the restoration of Connolly Parkway is completed in a timely manner to reduce the overall effect on residents and businesses. Our recommendation is to repair the bridge with one lane closed, which will allow accommodation of the surrounding community that uses the bridge. The repairs include cutting down and replacing rebar, replacing deteriorated concrete, and placing gabion baskets for erosion and scour control.

• Student Team Members: Chris Gambardella, Ryan Vaughn, Jonathan Ramanand, Finton Sweeney, Zack Kershner

• Advisers: Professor Kimberly Di Giovanni, Professor Ari Perez

• Client: Stephen White, Hamden Town Engineer

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Since computing began, developers have tried to code the most ideal solutions. As we’ve progressed, research regarding how to best meet user needs by integrating the psychological areas of human-computer interaction and human factors has emerged. From this research, new terms have been developed by psychologists and engineers to better define this integration. However, within the countless areas that have been explored, front-end design principles and aspects are often ignored. Thinking about the lifecycle of a program, programmers can be held responsible for the program functionality and the foundation that the design is built upon, thus impacting usability. If we apply the design-thinking methodology used at the end stages of a program to the beginning stages of development, it can assist the design process and program design by making programs better from the start. Design thinking must come into play during program development, starting at the beginning of the process.

• Student Lead: Madison Badalamente

• Adviser: Professor Jonathan Blake

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The recent boon in the advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had major implications on technology. Many online resources now allow users to create content by giving a prompt to an AI, which then generates that idea into an image, story, game, website, video or other content. While the implications and true effects of artificial content have yet to be studied for a prolonged period, this new era of content generation may prove to be revolutionary in marketing. Marketers, businesses and employees can use these technologies to interact, engage and promote products to customers in new ways that can be more effective than ever, resulting in more purchases and conversions. This thesis explores the impact and use of Generative AI within the field of marketing, aiming to show the best practical use of such technology in regard to respecting ethics, customer privacy and other fields of concern.

• Student Lead: Max Petruzziello

• Adviser: Professor Jonathan Blake

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This paper examines the current application of the use of ethical systems within game design and development studies. In the past, several ethical frameworks such as Kantian Deontology, Mill’s Utilitarianism and Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics have been used within different aspects of game design. While major work in this subject has been completed, there is not enough focus on the application of these ethical systems in the professional field. The effect that games have is subject to debate, but virtual worlds have some degree of impact on reality. This paper intends to explain the purpose for including ethics in the design process as well as providing different possible ethical frameworks that are useful in the field. Specifically, virtue ethics could provide a less prescribed ethical approach that rivals the traditional codes of conduct.

• Student Lead: Aleksander Cylwick

• Adviser: Professor Jonathan Blake

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In the mid-20th century, user experience (UX) penetrated the technology industry. From the navigation of websites to the aesthetics of mobile applications, UX design has been studied and applied to better a product to meet the users’ needs. In defining what makes a “good” UX design, various factors such as usability and interactivity are evaluated to promote feelings of satisfaction and trust among the users. As comprehension of the product and pleasing visuals can promote user satisfaction, there is uncertainty about what factors or strategies may promote user trust. Additionally, there is a debate on how significant trust is in design and how it can be applied in the design process. The ideas to be explored in this paper are the significance of trust in the design of web applications and how to design for gaining or maintaining user trust.

• Student Lead: Christelle Flores

• Adviser: Professor Jonathan Blake

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The role of computation and data analysis is paramount to success in almost every business, including sports — and especially in baseball — because of the wealth of data generated throughout every game and season. In this paper, we provide detailed analysis about how baseball managers can use computation and data in-game to make real-time managerial decisions, specifically through the lens of a sacrifice bunting scenario in an extra-inning baseball game, and how these methods can be scaled and appropriated for many different types of data for vastly different scenarios. We argue that the employment of empirical analysis tools in-game can significantly enhance team and player performance.

• Student Lead: Kevin Conway

• Adviser: Professor Jonathan Blake

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As senior computer science students, we developed an app that will help incoming students and faculty navigate a university with ease, in this case, Quinnipiac’s three campuses: Mount Carmel, York Hill and North Haven. The current mobile application for Quinnipiac is lacking many features, so we wanted to create our own app that can be adaptable to any university. Some of the main features of our app are navigation to a building from the user’s current location and informing the user about different buildings on any selected campus. Now, in collaboration with our clients, we can cater to specific needs for our app to be used by students and faculty as well as get their ideas and feedback on the work that we have done so far. We hope to have the app distributed to the students and faculty at Quinnipiac University.

• Student Team Members: Alex Santeramo, Adam Chirico, Jakob DeBroff

• Adviser: Professor Chetan Jaiswal

• Client: Becky Spalthoff

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MindBellows is an Android app that uses Java, Android Studio, GitHub and SQL to test and improve the mental aptitude of users. The app tests users in five different categories: general IQ questions, memory, logical thinking, pattern matching and reaction time. Users can take a full-spectrum test with every category, or they can take a test in one category. Each category is based on 20 points. A full-spectrum test is based on 100 points and impacts the scoring of all five categories. Depending on how well the user does, the app gives questions on an assigned difficulty scale: novice (0-5 points), intermediate (6-10 points), advanced (11-15 points) and expert (16-20 points). A full-spectrum test will scale its difficulty based on the average of the user’s five scores. The app will also try to encourage the user to try questions that are outside their difficulty range, allowing for gradual improvement.

• Student Team Members: Michael Tambascio, Loki Simeon

• Adviser: Professor Chetan Jaiswal

• Client: Paul C. LoCasto, Ph.D., Professor & Chair, Department of Psychology

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With programming becoming an ever-growing field, the number of readily available online learning tools is skyrocketing. One popular style of application designed to teach users how to program includes the use of code-blocks – predefined code snippets contained in a high-level description that the user can interact with and assemble in various ways to achieve programmatic results. A crucial drawback of most code-block applications is that they rarely demonstrate how an assembled arrangement of blocks translates to code in any modern programming language, which drastically limits the applicability of learned knowledge. Our application prototype, Junkademy, aims to bridge this gap by translating user-assembled code-blocks into syntactically correct Java code in real-time. This principal feature will peel back a layer of abstraction found in similar educational applications to benefit users as they attempt to write code because they will be familiar with one of the most popular programming languages worldwide.

• Student Team Members: James Gonsalves, John Theall, MacArthur Mills

• Adviser: Professor Chetan Jaiswal

• Client: Professor Jonathan Blake

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The impacts of global warming and climate change are being felt all around the world. At Quinnipiac, our team strives to understand the effects of the Urban Heat Island (UHI), a major factor in climate change. Our project, Sink and Source, consists of three layers: data collection, data processing, and data display. Data collection involves the use of IoT devices that have been strategically placed in eight locations around Quinnipiac’s Mount Carmel’s campus. The results are displayed as z-values and p-values, which help identify the spatial clustering of high and low heat by comparing the temperature of an area to its neighboring area’s temperature. A publicly accessible website will display the data in a user-friendly manner with the assistance of Angular.js in the front-end. Our team will present the finalized data to Quinnipiac’s sustainability committee in an effort to assist with future infrastructure plans and create a more eco-conscious campus.

• Student Team Members: Caprice Williams, John Burns, Hephzibah Rajan

• Adviser: Professor Chetan Jaiswal

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The sports training industry is valued at $11 billion and growing, with part of that capital being exchanged through coaching and personal training. Our product aims to be an economical alternative by allowing people to train on their own with machine-learning models. Using just one camera, our product can accurately detect the movement of joints in real time. With the help of the machine-learning solution Mediapipe, we can assist people with many types of exercises and sports. We aim to provide a product that can be used in any space with a UI that is simple to use. Our product offers features that help users easily identify their movements by overlaying a motion capture “skeleton” on the subject. This drawn skeleton updates with the subject’s movements. Through this comparison, we can give users examples of how to correctly perform the exercises and sports form demonstrated by our models.

• Student Team Members: Thomas Eckert, Yadel Negash

• Adviser: Professor Chetan Jaiswal

• Client: Quinnipiac University Recreation and Wellness Center

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Our project focuses on creating an improved course planning and advising website for Quinnipiac students and faculty. Our project looks to improve the current advising and course planning website in use by the university. The current system for advising and choosing classes is half on paper and half online. Our goal is to streamline this process and make it easy for students to understand the courses they need to take and to make educated registration decisions. Our system is a client/server website using AngularJS as the front end of the website. Users can access an interactive GUI that sends information and commands to the back end of the application. Our back end is run on Java using Spring Boot and can handle the requests coming from the front end. The backend uses Hibernate to retrieve information from the database. Our database is a MySQL database running a Google Cloud Platform.

• Student Team Members: Peter Sabio, Jordan Mayo

• Adviser: Professor Chetan Jaiswal

• Client: Quinnipiac University Office of the Registrar

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Nucor produces steel rolls weighing about 5,200 pounds and is facing a material handling/inventory management issue. These rolls are compacted and completed at a midpoint in the facility. From there, a forklift is needed to bring the rolls to storage for a customer or back to the mesh plant to be reworked into mesh. The rolls that do not go to these destinations become an issue down the line when rolls are needed. The rolls placed in inventory are put somewhere outside in any area with space to accommodate them. There is no designated space for certain types of rolls. Our capstone team’s goal is to analyze the current handling system and find methods to improve flow and reduce the distance traveled by forklifts, the main driver behind material handling at Nucor.

• Student Team Members: Katie Schwartz, Justin Wilson, Daniel Philip

• Advisers: Professor Justin Kile, Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Nucor Steel

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The goal of this project at Parker Hannifin was to analyze the overall process of the dissolvable metals to find the main source of inclusions and porosity. We looked to understand how porosity and inclusions occur through testing. We also tried to find and implement new processes to decrease the scrap rate for the future

• Student Team Member: Mackenzie Vorel

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Parker Hannifin

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There are three tasks being proposed that need to be completed during the duration of this project. First, the task will be to review historical inspection data to identify a way to improve the quality throughput. Second, the task will be focused on the layout of the area to find a potential future state flow and layout of the area. Lastly, the task will be to find/create a tool that will allow the operator to know what the best sampling frequency should be.

• Student Team Members: Anthony Celestre, Patrick Juvencio

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: RBC Bearings

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The focus of this project is to enhance the physician’s communication to the patient around the time of discharge from the hospital. By communicating the patient’s known level of medical knowledge and desired amount of detail to the physician before discussing discharge protocol, physicians can shape what is said and how it is said to better fit the patient’s needs. This results in a higher level of care and a more satisfied patient.

• Student Team Member: Jon Ball

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Hartford HealthCare

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The goal of this project is to improve the production process of part number DF2631 in both safety and efficiency. Focusing on the manual conveying process that is used to transport DF2631, this project works to adapt automation in order to eliminate the manual aspect and implement a better means of transportation. This results in a decreased safety risk for the machine operator and shorter lead times for part DF2631.

• Student Team Member: Dominic Pascarelli

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Illinois Tool Works – ITW Drawform

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This project’s goal was to identify which analytics would be most effective to develop and implement for review of Parker Hannifin's production tracking system. The three key performance metrics most beneficial for statistical processing were established — production levels, scrap rates and downtimes — and multiple average cellular occurrences over a sample dataset were calculated for each. This provided the potential for actionable insight into operational efficiency and waste.

• Student Team Members:  Wade Pettingill, Jason Budhai, Zachary Chast

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Parker Hannifin (North Haven, CT)

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This Driver Research Institute project seeks to collect and analyze data regarding a driver’s response to a pedestrian intruding the path of motion. The study introduces willing driving participants to an “ordinary” driving environment, filled with pedestrians looking to intrude on the participant’s path of motion. Certain reaction factors will be studied, including lane change, speed change and time of the first brake

• Student Team Member: Richard Kretzmer

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Clients: Driver Research Institute and Quinnipiac University

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The purpose of this project is to determine the patient throughput and room utilization of the various departments at the Devine Street campus of Yale New Haven Hospital. Students will analyze given data and create simulations of the facility to achieve the goal.

• Student Team Members: Hesham Raza, Justin Pronesti

• Adviser: Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Yale New Haven Health

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The QU Baja Team had a successful first competition in Rochester, New York, this past summer. However, the off-road vehicle suffered significant front-end damage resulting from unwanted bump steer. For this project, a group of seniors was tasked to redesign and rebuild the front suspension and steering geometry to greatly reduce bump steer. The design must be durable and optimize steering and suspension performance. The work must be done in collaboration with the junior mechanical engineering students who form the current QU Baja Team.

• Student Team Members: Andre DelaCruz, Luca Mirra, Nick Buonaiuto, Jedd Gravel

• Adviser: Professor Jose Riofrio

• Client: QU Baja Team

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Nucor Steel of Connecticut produces carbon steel wire rod from larger billets via heating, forming and cooling. This takes time, and time is money. Nucor is initiating a capital project to increase the production rate of steel. The student team will design a process to increase the cooling rate of the wire rod so this goal can be achieved. Students will visit and work with Nucor personnel.

• Student Team Members: John Otto, Ben Todoroff, Mark Santangelo, Devin Mantzaris

• Advisers: Professor Grant Crawford, Professor Mary Phillips, Matthew O’Brien, Nucor Steel

• Client: Nucor Steel

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Washer Auto Loader: This project aims to speed placement of hard plastic washers into an existing fixture that guides them into a high-speed rotary grinder. It must relieve an operator of manually placing washers one part at a time, and it should support a production volume of ~1x106 parts/yr.

• Student Team Members: C.J. Delgross, Ben Donskoy, Connor McRedmond, Joe Pohl

• Adviser: Professor John Reap

• Client: HyGrade Precision Technologies, LLC

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Medtronic is a global medical device company located in North Haven, Connecticut. Students work directly with Medtronic engineers on this project. Medtronic manufactures surgical needs. One of the ways they test these needles uses a test with media (material) that needs to be cut into a donut shape to fit into the testing fixture. They currently use a manual die cutter to make these cuts. The goal of this project is to create an automated die cutter using Arduino microcontrollers (or equivalent programming platform) along with electromechanical components. The automated die cutter should be able to have interchangeable die for different media and cut the media with little to no operator dependence apart from loading and removal.

• Student Team Members: Brandon Held, Luis Soto, Lucas Summers, John Gasparrini

• Advisers: Professor Mary Phillips, Kenneth Espinal and Ashley Leung, Medtronic

• Client: Medtronic

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This project was recognized with the ‘Zone I Award for Excellence’ at the ASEE Zone I Conference.

CubeSats are small satellites belonging to a class called nanosatellites, which are determined by their standardized form factor and low weight. One CubeSat ‘unit’ is approximately 10x10x10 cm and weighs less than 2 kg. Because of their small size and relatively low cost, CubeSats are ideal academic projects. For this project, the team designed QUbeSat to test an additively manufactured frame material, collect on-orbit frame temperature data and transmit that data to a ground station. The CubeSat design meets the requirements for launch laid out in the Cal Poly and NASA handbooks. 

• Student Team Members: Rocco Fratarcangeli, Gary DeVilbiss, Anthony DiMauro, Napoleon Stardellis

• Adviser: Professor Grant Crawford

• Client: QU School of Computing and Engineering

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The goal of this project is to develop a web-based learning management system that allows Hartford HealthCare staff to create standardized procedures and share relevant medical information in a timely manner for their clients. The app allows project leads and administrators to approve client-submitted intake data, then perform needs assessment on the data, and finally, construct a curriculum based on the client’s specified needs.

• Student Team Members: Kyle Chutjian, Samantha Spinner, Isaac Crawford, Sadjell Mamon

• Adviser: Professor Ruby ElKharboutly

• Clients: Thomas Nowicki, Heather Hechter, Michael Rivera-Rios, Center for Education, Simulation and Innovation (CESI)

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The goal of this project is to develop a web-based application that will replace Parker Hannifin’s current paper-based data tracking system. The application allows Parker Hannifin employees to digitally create and track manufactured parts per cell and per operator. This information is further used to populate various data visualizations on the application dashboard. This application will increase manufacturing and data analysis efficiency at Parker Hannifin.

• Student Team Members: Kevin Couillard, Aidan Schmid, Amber Kusma, David Nguyen

• Advisers: Professor Ruby ElKharboutly, Professor Corey Kiassat

• Client: Jeffrey LaBonte, Materials Manager, Parker Hannifin

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